Loneliness and Community

A farmer and poet who lives nearby, Stuart Osha, wrote in an essay about a sort of existential loneliness that you feel when you are not doing the work that feeds your soul. When I read his words (which I’ll post up here another time when can get my hands on a copy of his book), I came to really understand, and a great calmness swept over me. At the time it was still late summer, and I was doing all the pickling and preserving for Green Mountain Girls Farm, and in that moment, I discovered that I was truly content in what I was doing. I want to be careful with semantics here-- When I say content, I mean a true, deep, rich kind of contentment. The real thing, not what we might say when we really mean that we’re not happy, but this will do for now. No, I was the content that is better than happy, because happy is a high, but content is solid, and can be long-term. I had found something that I could do, working eleven hour days five or six days a week, mostly by myself, and not grow tired of it (unfortunately it is seasonal work). I thrived. And at that time, my existential loneliness disappeared, and I really understood how Stuart must feel about his cows.
Another concept Stuart’s writings caused me to start thinking more about (something I'd thought about before) is the different spaces of belonging, community, ownership, identity. Stuart writes about the feelings elicited by having to change out of farm clothes to go into town, because town is not the small farm community that it once way, and if you walk into the grocery store smelling of cows, you’ll be an outcast. But in sloughing off the trappings of farm life when going into town, you’re leaving a part of yourself-- a very integral part-- behind. And so you find you can feel you don’t belong even in your own community.
But what is community? Is it a group of people with a shared experience, a group of people with a shared location, or something of both? In college, I looked with some measure of desperation for community. I did end up finding it, but not where some people expected me to. Despite preconceptions that someone might have because I am queer, I never found a sense of belonging within the queer community at my university. They did not understand farms, the natural cycles of life to death (for life) that go with food. They did not have what Aldo Leopold dubbed the "land ethic." We did share a strong sense of human rights and a fire for justice, but few of them understood my strong sense of place. I felt that many of them, in their necessarily self-centered phase of freedom to discover their sexuality, demanded understanding and acceptance from the world, but were not always prepared to give it in return. I don't mean to be harsh, and I do think I’ve made it more than plain that the queer community was not my community. (In fact, I don’t believe that queerness alone is a good flag around which to build community-- I’ve never understood how who people fell in love with was possibly the most defining aspect of their personhood. But that’s a conversation for another time.) I could not count as my community a group of people who, as a whole, did not understand or value much of what I valued-- community as shared experience of queerness did not work for me. Instead, I found, community in shared core values with a group of young women who ate local foods not as a fad but as an act of belief. They understood farms and hard, dirty work. They cared about the planet and about human rights.
In most Vermont communities that I have experienced, I have found that who I am in the world-- my compassion, land ethic, skills-- matters more than anything else. That, in fact, my queerness has no bearing upon who I really am, and my being accepted. Yes, there are people who are uncomfortable on the subject of queerness, but, for the most part, if you’re a good neighbor, it will always have more weight than anything else. Because of this, I feel the beginnings of a community, a sense of belonging, in the town my wife and I moved to last month. I believe that community isn’t just about location, nor is it just about shared experience. Here, you can have people with differing political beliefs, church-goers or not, straight or queer, and still share the sense of belonging to and caring for the land, and thus, share a community.
And that, perhaps, is where the existential loneliness of not doing what your soul needs, and the normal loneliness of not feeling closeness with other people can come together for me, and be cured.