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We waft and wander
in search of community —
lighthouse for lost souls.
Community. I’d like to take a stab at clarifying and redefining how I think about this word and what it means to me, as it has come up in conversations with increasing regularity. Just as bell hooks proposed we shift our understanding of love from the viewpoint of a noun to a verb, I’d like to propose we extend this perspective to the concept of community, to approach it as a verb, or set of verbs, rather than a noun.
Within the word community itself lies the word commune. As a noun, commune means “a group of people living together and sharing possessions and responsibilities;” as a verb, it means “to share one’s intimate thoughts or feelings with (someone), especially on a spiritual level.”
The etymology of the word community comes from the Latin communis, meaning “common, public, shared by all or many.” Language is like the warp and weft of a loom, its meanings woven out of the changing landscape of the larger fabric of culture itself.
When I strip community down to its bare essentials, three threads remain: people, place, and commonality (by which I mean a shared sense of purpose, interests, values, activities, challenges, or belief systems). Too often in my conversations about community, emphasis is placed on people or…
