The Heart's Desire

Call to Live in Community

It is time to speak your truth,
To create your communities
To be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for a leader.

— Hopi Elder

The call to rediscover ourselves which we discussed earlier — the call to inner work, or mindfulness — is fraught with paradox.

Inner work inevitably returns us to the world — and to service: “Go far enough on the inner journey, [the great wisdom traditions] all tell us — go past ego toward true self — and you end up not lost in narcissism but returning to the world, bearing more gracefully the responsibilities that come with being human” (Parker Palmer).

For most, inner work requires that container we call community: Few of us can do this inner work in isolation. “We never get to the bottom of our selves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning” (Habits of the Heart).

For the Hindus as well, though a “forest dweller” (see earlier discussion) may have given up his family home and his personal business or occupation to live in retirement in the simplest possible way, it is precisely so that he may be able to participate in a non-personal manner in the affairs of the entire community. He may become part of the Council of Elders, or serve in whatever capacity his personal life has trained him for. He serves the Whole of which he sees himself a part, but without remuneration. He has given up the profit motive and (theoretically or gradually) the personal ambition motive.

In the pages which follow in this Resource Guide^© you will find information and resources about the vast variety of communities proliferating in our time.

 Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah et.al. (University of California Press, 1996)
     This seminal book traces the historic tension in American culture between individualism and community. Particularly cogent is the book's discussion of “life-style enclaves.”

 The Quickening of America: Rebuilding Our Nation, Remaking Our Lives by Frances Moore Lappe and Paul Martin Du Bois (Jossey-Bass, 1994)

 A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered by M. Scott Peck (Bantam, 1994)