Thich Nhat Hanh:
Community and time are the two ingredients of the universal medicine. If you can take that medicine every day for a number of years, then you have a chance. You become a plant, a tree, deeply rooted in soil. Happiness and love become possible. And then you can go back and help your own blood family, your own spiritual community, and your society.
I’m only beginning to understand this prescription for love and happiness, this idea of taking time and community as medicine. It’s an intriguing analogy. More and more, being in community effectively seems to be the point of all this. And Hahn reminds us here of the need to approach the job of building and maintaining good community with discipline and diligence and courage.
I see it this way: it’s as if one’s life is a wide meandering river, and our job is to build little villages along the shores of it. What will those villages produce? Who will inhabit them? What underlying structures will support them? Those are some of the questions we must address for every little village that we build… a family environment, a job environment, a friendship environment, to name a few. And there are precious few directions.
The formal mechanism of community, like everything else, is in constant flux. I grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina, the same farm on which my father was raised, the farm on which his father was raised. Around that farm, in the 70’s when I was a kid, there was a community. It was called Perry Town. Perry Town even had a community building, for herring suppers and pig pickins. It had a volunteer fire department and I remember a few street dances there in the summer, where the adults tried to be subtle about their drinking and us kids ran around getting wild-haired, chasing each other like puppies.
I don’t have or know one piece of that community that I can pass on to my kids today. It seems completely gone to me now, the formal structure of it disintegrated. For my father, though nothing had escaped time and change, the framework was still there when he raised his kids…the same families, the same farms and houses, the same stories were still being told. For me, the framework is gone.
Wendell Berry describes a concept of community that “consists of the accumulation of local knowledge in place, generation after generation, children learning the visions and failures, stories and songs, names, ways, and skills of their elders, so that the cost of individual trial-and-error learning can be lived with and repaid, and the community thus enabled to preserve both itself and its natural place and neighborhood.” It’s a beautiful concept. I don’t know if the concept has tangible existence anywhere any more, but, by its definition, the community of Perry Town did not survive.
And so those of us who grew up there, and in places like it, have a challenge: to operate without a framework, and build communities in our lives seemingly from scratch. Hahn gives us a hint as to how to go about it. We take time and place like medicine. every day. We can’t push it aside, leave it in the bottle, or pour it down the sink because it tastes bad. We must swallow it. His direction tells us to drink it in, that constant flow of time and that odd concoction of people and material that make up the place in which we find ourselves. He’s telling us not to resist or to shut it out, but to drink it and allow it to work on us, to allow it to change us. This will take courage.
I ‘m beginning to understand what Hahn means by, “you become a plant.” A plant is open. It drinks from its surroundings or it dies. Everything, its color, its shape and size, its direction of growth, depends on what it takes in. And in turn the plant impacts its place. It’s accountable for its effects. There is no hit and run in plant life. The plant stays. And not in a static way. It joins up to its place. It breaths and is breathed by.
I’ll have to revise my village building concept: the word build seems too aggressive now. A plant both builds and is built. Perhaps we don’t do the building exactly, but it happens in a more cumulative, sedimentary way. You stay, and stay open. You hold, and are held. You avoid rigidity, but maintain discipline. You remain. Accountable. Your kids grow alongside you and learn to do the same. Community happens. You drink. You become a plant.
