On Community

Once, many many years ago, when I was young and isolated inside my own skull, I sat on a hillside above the ocean and felt miserable and bereft because I was so alone. I couldn't imagine a community in which I would fit -- couldn't fathom how I would ever find anyone who would like me.

That day, in my imagination, a large silver serpent came to me. She was huge, sensuous in her undulations, a cobra and deadly. I was afraid she would bite me. I thought I knew how that fantasy would go: death and eventual rebirth in some new, less anxious form. Instead she indicated that I should follow her.

She led me down the hillside through the tall grass. We sinuated through a stand of oak trees, across a scree slope, down a cliff face, to a beach teaming with people. On the beach she disappeared. I was left among the people, none of whom took any notice of me at all.

A little perplexed, I looked around. It took me a minute to see what I was meant to understand. Standing there on the sand I was suddenly aware that everyone was breathing in and breathing out at exactly the same time. Everyone, including me, was breathing in and breathing out in unison.

It had never occurred to me before that other people probably often felt just like me. We all, I realized, have our places of insecurity and isolation. Amazed, I followed the thought to its natural conclusion: meeting people there was something I could do, something natural to me. If everybody was like me, why, then, I could speak to them. We could have a relationship. People need to be reached in their tender places, I realized. They need to be touched and acknowledged, welcomed.

Coming back to ordinary time there on the hillside, I was relaxed and at peace. I began to enjoy my surroundings. A tiny cool breeze carried the smell of fish and seaweed along with the distant rhythm of surf from the ocean below. Light played through murmuring leaves above me, ran in waves across the pale grasses and danced off the scattering of bright orange poppies among them. A meadowlark shouted his distinctive hail.

After awhile I picked myself up and began the walk back to my car. No one was on the trail with me. I followed it's dusty length in a reverie, beginning to doubt my insight a little. Suddenly something moved almost right under my feet. A huge brown and gold snake had been sunbathing on the path. This was no imaginal beast; she was entirely, solidly in the three dimensional world. Startled by our sudden arrival in one another's world, we both nearly had heart failure. She slid quickly away into the grasses. I scurried off home, totally nonplussed by the synchronicity. I had learned to take such things very seriously.

So, I took my insight more seriously than I might have otherwise. Still it took me a long time to live into it. Now, looking back on the cobra's visit, I see that the wisdom she brought me was very serious indeed. In fact, though it worked slowly and over years, it was every bit as transformative as a venomous bite. Forced to her radical understanding of community by my own anxiety and pain, I am not released from the vision as it expands in ever more broadening ripples. There are places where all of us can meet one another. There are places where we are the same. Across the boundaries of class, the barriers of race, the divides of histories, religions, cultural understandings, sexual awarenesses, bodily abilities, gender orientations, and the fences raised by any other differences between us we belong to one another. Period.

And so I am reminded to pay attention to the ripples cast by the dropping of a stone of wisdom into the pool of spiritual understanding. We Americans tend to stop too soon. We learn the "can do" aspect of a lesson, applying it to the transformation of our personal psychology and our individual lives. We forget to let it play out into the realm of implications for all of us together. The further the ripples go the more scary and dangerous are the insights. At some point they begin to demand the world of us.