Short story long:
My group of friends that I affectionately call the Hippy commune is a collection of relatively like-minded people. Some of us lived in a house together in college and have managed to remain each others support system through travels abroad, marriages and children and miscarriages, through changes is work and spirituality. We have hurt each other plenty and are helping to raise each others kids and are still learning how to value each other in our differences.
For a while there, we were actively looking for a way that we could live out our desire to be part of each others lives on a day-to-day basis. We started working on a book designed for people starting intensional communities, formally met to work towards this every two weeks, formed work-groups, looked at land and legal procedures and beat each other up trying to articulate our "common vision" that would be the centerpiece of our lives together.
We soon discovered that our live vision, whether individual, or as a family, or as a group were very hard to talk about. It turns out that even after some 7-10 years of being good friends, our vision and desires and expectations are so intimate, so close to our hearts that they were hard to speak and hard to have critiqued. But we knew it was supposed to be hard, so we kept right on going. Round after round, we kept looking for new ways to see ourselves and our troubles and to try to make our visions compatible. We made charts and drew pictures and had one-on-ones and cried and called each other out on our bull shit (I got a lot of this, by the way).
In the end, it fell apart. In a whirlwind of exhaustion and eagerness and longing, we stopped our formal meetings. Over the next couple of months, we had a lot of "what you said was hurtful" and "what did we do wrong" and "so what does this mean now" conversations. In retrospect, one of the things that happened is that the formal process high-jacket our friendships. We were so invested in what we were trying to do together, put so much energy into getting somewhere, that we lost each other and we lost the time and energy to care for each other and to accept each other. Thankfully, by the time we tried this formal process, we had years of love and affection and working-through-stuff built up in the reserves, so the hurts of this mess we made were not insurmountable.
The happy ending to this story is that our relationships survived. And some small changes have been made in our living situations, and we are healing from that process (and gone through some others since) and that whatever it is that keeps us needing each other is still true. I'm grateful for this.
My group of friends that I affectionately call the Hippy commune is a collection of relatively like-minded people. Some of us lived in a house together in college and have managed to remain each others support system through travels abroad, marriages and children and miscarriages, through changes is work and spirituality. We have hurt each other plenty and are helping to raise each others kids and are still learning how to value each other in our differences.
For a while there, we were actively looking for a way that we could live out our desire to be part of each others lives on a day-to-day basis. We started working on a book designed for people starting intensional communities, formally met to work towards this every two weeks, formed work-groups, looked at land and legal procedures and beat each other up trying to articulate our "common vision" that would be the centerpiece of our lives together.
We soon discovered that our live vision, whether individual, or as a family, or as a group were very hard to talk about. It turns out that even after some 7-10 years of being good friends, our vision and desires and expectations are so intimate, so close to our hearts that they were hard to speak and hard to have critiqued. But we knew it was supposed to be hard, so we kept right on going. Round after round, we kept looking for new ways to see ourselves and our troubles and to try to make our visions compatible. We made charts and drew pictures and had one-on-ones and cried and called each other out on our bull shit (I got a lot of this, by the way).
In the end, it fell apart. In a whirlwind of exhaustion and eagerness and longing, we stopped our formal meetings. Over the next couple of months, we had a lot of "what you said was hurtful" and "what did we do wrong" and "so what does this mean now" conversations. In retrospect, one of the things that happened is that the formal process high-jacket our friendships. We were so invested in what we were trying to do together, put so much energy into getting somewhere, that we lost each other and we lost the time and energy to care for each other and to accept each other. Thankfully, by the time we tried this formal process, we had years of love and affection and working-through-stuff built up in the reserves, so the hurts of this mess we made were not insurmountable.
The happy ending to this story is that our relationships survived. And some small changes have been made in our living situations, and we are healing from that process (and gone through some others since) and that whatever it is that keeps us needing each other is still true. I'm grateful for this.
