“Human beings desperately need a sense of community”

Last night’s post got me thinking quite a bit more about community, and I remembered seeing something on Yvonne DiVita’s Lip-Sticking, one of my favorite online reads:

“”the true purpose of web-logging is getting lost in the rhetoric bouncing around the net.
Yes, a blog can attract new clients and prospects. Yes, a blog can add personality to a company, personality that may be lacking at the website level or within the marketing structure, if it exists to merely announce products and services, or support sales. And, yes, a blog can provide the most up-to-date information available — company information, local news, world news, business news, whathaveyou — but the most important part of blogging is in the community your blog builds with others.

Community — it’s not a foreign word. Think of it…”
Finish reading Jane Encourages Small Businesses.

There is an incredible sharing of both art and emotion in this global reaching out we do when we are brave enough to try. –So my sincere mahalo to those of you brave enough to share and post your comments in Talking Story.– Charlie does it with his photography. For me, writing has always been an art form that pulls at inner emotion too, one I try to employ in my coaching of others as much as possible. There’s this release of inner creativity that will eventually happen; If you create a habit of writing freely and honestly for your own reading, I can guarantee it. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, –a book and program I highly recommend, I’ll add it to the book list– talks about it in suggesting her “morning pages:”

“three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness ” they might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions ” it is impossible to write morning pages for any extended period of time without coming into contact with an unexpected inner power ” the pages are a pathway to a strong and clear sense of self ” they map our own interior.”

Back in November of 2002, there was an interview run in O Magazine, asking “What do you know for sure?” Since reading it, I’ve fallen in love with the question, and use it quite a bit in my coaching. The editorial staff explained,

“We think of this question as in invitation to figure out what’s important, what we value, what we know deep down to be true. So right now, this day, what do you know for sure?”

I cut out the answers they got from George C. Wolfe, writer and director of Harlem Song, actor Richard Gere, who was starring in Chicago at the time, and Aaron Brown, Anchor of NewsNight on CNN. That collage of clippings has been in a page protector on my desktop ever since. This is what Wolfe said about art, and about community:

“What do I know for sure?

I know for sure that art has the power to transform people. Not just the artists who create but the people with whom they share the art: the audience. And I know that human beings desperately need a sense of community. Without it we are lost, and we begin to think not only that our accomplishments are extraordinary but also that our failures are so insurmountable that we can’t go forward. Community is incredibly equalizing and incredibly empowering.

At the same time, I know that one frequently needs to go on excursions of self, excursions of solitude, so that one can continue to be a healthy, objective, functioning energy inside that community. Because without that, communities can become suffocating impulses.

I also know that a sense of play is astonishingly important. Too much reverence kills the spirit. Creativity and love and magic—all the wonderful things—come from a sense of play. As one gets older, regardless of what level of responsibility one takes on and regardless of what successes and failures one has, one must vigorously protect one’s right to play.”

So this weekend, go out and play. Enjoy your own community, the up close and personal one you live in.