What Is “Living in Community”?

And how do you do it?

I first heard this term from a friend named R.

I lost touch with R. once I was evicted from The Abode of the Message, in June of 2018. We were never super-close but I liked him and considered him a friend and comrade.

R. was a leftist and a Christian. I knew him from Ridgewood, Queens, where we were both members of a leftist community space called Woodbine. He was one of a handful of people that moved up to New Lebanon from Ridgewood in 2018.

R. lived down the street from me, on Chair Factory Road, named so because the Shakers manufactured their “Shaker chairs” along that road in the 1800’s, when there were 800 Shakers living in the Mt. Lebanon Valley.

Picking potatoes in the same fields the Shakers once farmed.

If you are a fan of the Shakers I highly recommend these essays from a group called Atlas Urbium. The essays are essentially case studies about how the Shakers created their own human-powered industrial economy in New England in the 1800’s, and provided a community for outcasts of all sorts.

As I said, I liked R. We were friendly, but we never hung out one-on-one. I did invite him to have lunch 2-3 times but it never materialized. There was also a short period of time where a friend and I were working with him to put on a queer dance party at the church he worked at in Pittsfield, MA. That fell through because the church board was scared of having queer people dancing in their church.

R. and I did spend a fair amount of time together in the context of the Abode Community: numerous shared meals every week, working on the farm together, Wednesday sauna nights with the “Sauna Elders”, four old Sufi men who were great storytellers and real characters, let me tell ya.

There was mutual appreciation between the young-ish leftist/farmer tribe and the Sauna Elders. I don’t think I missed a Wednesday Sauna night the whole time I lived at the Abode. I could probably write a whole post about the sauna at the Abode, and how it was a great place to get to know the other people in the Abode community.

One thing I always appreciated about R., was his thoughtfulness and gentleness. While other members of the NYC-to-New Lebanon tribe were more anxious, edgy, brash, and so on, R. was always a level-headed presence in our small mountain valley community.

I don’t think we ever said a cross word to each other, and he was always down to stop and chat.

I would also say that R. was an intellectual. And I say this in a positive sense.

I felt like there was always a chasm between me and the rest of the leftist-anarchists, because I really didn’t give a shit about theory. I like to read, but many of the anarchists went to The New School and were very serious about theory. They published anonymous writing in places like Inhabit and Invisible Committee that was grand and sometimes, I felt, too abstract.

I think what they were doing and writing had value, but the theory/writing polemics part was never my thing.

Anyway, I felt like R. always treated me as an equal, even though I didn’t care about theory. I liked talking about books, ideas, and building community with him.

R. put me on to Nanni Balestrini, who wrote some incredible novels about Italian leftists living in urban Italy and fighting the state in the 70’s. If this sounds interesting, I recommend The Unseen. And if this sounds cool but you’re more of a film person, the films of Lina Wertmüller scratch the same itch.

Living in Community

R. also gave me a short Christian text titled, “Living in Community”. I may be editorializing a bit here, but I want to say R. gave me this booklet, because we were talking about the small, rural community we were living in, and what might be done to build a stronger community there.

From the description of the book on GoodReads:

"Every Christian should read this provocative book! Christine thoroughly delineates the interlocking relationships and dangerous deformities of practices that could deepen our communities but often destroy them. This volume is pertinent to our families, churches, even places of work."

- Marva J. Dawn
author of Truly the Community

I am not a Christian, but I remember the book resonated with me on some level. Especially the part about “the interlocking relationships and dangerous deformities of practices that could deepen our communities but often destroy them”.

In hindsight looking back to my time there, I can say I saw that happen in the Abode community.

For instance, there was often drama in the anarchist-farmer camp at the end of the road. Not bad drama, but just people arguing and hurting each other’s feelings and sometimes moving away.

There was a group of six houses at the end of a dirt road cul-de-sac, that backed up to a squishy pasture, and the base of Mt. Lebanon. This area was called West Family. There was often drama at West Family.

There was also always drama at The Abode, due to a crooked administration run by an out-of-touch board of directors. The Executive Director, a used-car salesman of a guy named Albert Bellenchia was possibly the single-most dishonest person I have ever met. I don’t know that he could speak the truth if wanted to–it was that bad.

I had to deal with Al on numerous occasions. Eventually, he got tired of me and others standing up to him. That began the process of the Abode administration evicting the 25 or so residents over the next two years, many of them seniors, some very old. I was eviction #2 or #3.

Now, The Abode is closed and no one lives there.

So these were the problems R. and I were sensing into, and talked about when we ran into each other at The Abode.

Obviously, I remember very little from the book, but the term stuck with me: living in community.

I’ve used the term a lot in Things That Should Exist, but I’ve never defined it.

It seems straightforward enough, no? But also it can encompass so much.

For instance, in my current field of work, crypto/Web3, community is used to describe the people who participate and fund certain crypto projects. Many of these are ponzi schemes. Just look up Bored Ape Yacht Club.

There’s also “the reddit community”, “gamer communities”, etc. I do think online communities can produce real and lasting human bonds. Dr. Alok Kanojia’s(aka healthygamergg on Youtube) work shines a light on gamer and Twitch-streaming communities where people do forge deep connections and friendships.

But I also think that “living in community” is an entirely different animal than developing relationships online.

I can put my phone on silent, I can log off, I can shut my laptop.

But if you knock on my door while I’m home, or you call me and you need my help to move a piece of furniture, or you invite me to physically go somewhere to spend time with you, say a party or a dinner, that is living in community, to me.

I’m Going to Re-Read the Book, and I’m Gonna Write Here About It

I’m going to read the Living in Community book again, and I’m going to keep writing about it here.

At Things That Should Exist, I’ve been writing about homesteading, community building, and the niche problems of how you start a homestead with your friends, or how you join one.

I want to use this hundred-day writing challenge to go back to first principles, and to get a deeper understanding of what it means to live in community.

Despite it being my stated goal, there’s a possibility that I may never live in a homestead, and I may never find out to join.

Pondering and exploring what it means to live in community seems like a richer and more interesting vein to mine, than, “how do I homestead?”, although I am still writing about that too at TTSE.

I’ve been a fan of adrienne marie brown’s writing for a long time, and share her fascination with the work of Octavia Butler, and Butler’s fictional religion, Earthseed.

Doing a deeper dive on the what, how, and why, of community also dovetails with my list of 12 favorite problems, from my recent TTSE post, “What Do You Want to Know About Going Off-Grid”.