The Long Journey Home:
Why Belonging is Sought, Not Found
Community.
The word makes us think of unity, togetherness, common ground. It brings to mind shared cultures, shared features, shared language, shared interests — a thread that ties together a specific group of people for a specific reason. A united front. A united country.
Community.
The word is also overused. It’s difficult to define. With the United States ranking as one of the most divided countries in the world, the idea of “community” almost rings hollow. Do you know your neighbor’s name? Who owns the bookstore down the block? Who makes your morning latte? Where do you buy your groceries from?
What are their stories?
Many of us don’t know. Some of us would be interested in finding out, but we’re moving too fast to find the time. Besides, it’s easier to connect over social media, to shoot off a DM and leave it at that.
But is this community? Or are we depriving ourselves of the vital support system humans were intended to live within?
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Ferdinand Tönnies was a German sociologist who is credited with defining two types of social organizations: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.
The Gemeinschaft, often associated with rurality and tradition, is characterized by a communal society in which personal relationships are formed face-to-face and generally arise from an emotional or sentimental need. Life moves slower.
The Gesellschaft, on the other hand, encompasses the cosmopolitan societal structure, including identifying factors such as industrial entities and governmental bureaucracies. In the Gesellschaft, relationships are more impersonal, and interactions are formed on a mutual basis of self-interest. Efficiency is king.
Essentially, one society is founded on people, while the other runs on money. Some argue people and money are inseparable. Some argue that a money-less world is the future. But whether you believe in capitalism, or socialism, or outright anarchism, it’s undeniable: People need people.
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For most of our young lives, our family is the community we’re most familiar with. It’s when we grow up and move out that we’re tasked with searching for new connections, but for a lot of us, that’s deceptively difficult. Forming relationships as an adult is hard, and weaving a web of these relationships is arguably even harder.
“I don’t want to use the word community,” said Jake Lewis, a program director at Camp Glen Brook — a 250-acre campus of farm and forest in New Hampshire. They offer programs for children, families, and gap year students year-round, promising to instill in campers a stronger connection with nature and each other. The faculty members also live on Glen Brook property, each contributing to the greater goals of the operation. “I would define us as a small, interdependent network of people working towards something in common.”
Glen Brook embraces concepts of communal living—the Geimenschaft—but the operation is still a community on display, which is both a pro and a con. At first glance, Glen Brook seems like a self-sustaining entity. They offer a glimpse into what it’s like living within a harmonious, small, interconnected group of people, sowing your own seeds while watching the cows graze over on the next hill.
But there’s a catch: “If people stopped coming to experience it,” Lewis explained, “we couldn’t keep it going . . . There’s a part of [Glen Brook] that exists because people don’t live this way.”
Revenue isn’t generated from the farm, or the animals, or the fresh-baked bread served with dinner. Glen Brook isn’t selling a product, but they’re still selling something.
That’s telling, in a way. Are we desperate enough for a sense of community that we’re willing to pay for it? Is it no longer possible to find belonging—to find home—without sacrifice?
“People don’t have any mythic ground to stand on,” Lewis suggested. “You know, if you’re not Odysseus, then there’s nothing for you in the Odyssey. But these stories exist — and continue to exist — in order to help us look at our own weird, modern, little twenty-first-century lives and wonder, ‘Okay, what’s my long journey home?’”
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Community is embedded in our history. Dr. Jennifer Birch, an anthropology professor at the University of Georgia, studies small-scale agricultural-based societies in prehistoric eastern North America, focusing most of her research on the northern Iroquoian people, a group that lived in what is now New York and southern Ontario.
“In these societies, communal living really is the mode of production,” she said. “It’s not like in the Western world, where we work for wages and live in these nuclear family households.”
The Iroquoians Birch studies engaged in communal living on a grand scale, with as many as 100 people living in one longhouse. And yet, while most of us would shudder to think about living with 100 roommates, this system of living was carefully built upon ideals of balance and democracy.
In fact, around the 1500s, the Iroquoians were preyed upon by their neighbors, which forced them into even larger villages. “Rather than turning into a chiefdom,” Birch explained, “or implementing a government that involved a lot of authority, they very intentionally created power structures based on counsels and divided up the power. They were careful about not allowing power to accumulate.”
Again, the idea of interdependence resurfaced. In these Iroquoian societies, no one in the group went hungry unless everyone went hungry. Compared to a political system that appears to benefit only a small percentage of our population, these measures of fairness and equality — notably, measures that already existed hundreds of years before European settlers ever stepped foot on this land — feel like an impossible dream.
We can’t treat everyone with the same level of care. There isn’t enough to go around. Someone will always inevitably suffer.
With reasoning like that, it’s no wonder that our communities are crumbling.
“Both young people and older, liberal-minded people have grown frustrated with the system,” Birch said. “It’s like, ‘All right, if I can’t change the government to be more in line with my values, then I’m just going to walk away. I’m going to try to control the one little corner of my life that I can.’”
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The Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC) is a non-profit organization that’s been around for over 40 years, committed to spreading awareness and providing resources to those interested in living in conscious communities — which can take many forms.
“We define an intentional community as a group of people who live together, or share common facilities, on the basis of explicit common values,” said Cynthia Tina, the co-director of the FIC.
It’s a broad definition, but that in itself is intentional. When people think of communal living, they often imagine a group of rural nomads (i.e. hippies) growing their own food, installing solar panels on every roof, completely sectioned off from modern society. They imagine recluses, or maybe even something akin to an Amish village.
“But we have a lot of intentional communities in the city,” Tina clarified. “A lot of urban co-ops, co-living situations . . . It’s really a wide diversity, and it’s up to each community to decide how much they want to pursue being self-sufficient.”
The purpose behind many of these communities isn’t to blast us back to the past. Community doesn’t necessarily go hand-in-hand with rural labor or tradition. Community is founded upon people with common goals — and those goals can be anything, as long as they’re shared. The focus is on the people, on constructing a strong, symbiotic system, and sometimes that’s all it needs to be.
Tina herself lives in an intentional community in Vermont. Made up of eight families, most of the adults have their own jobs outside of the community. They maintain a garden together, and often gather for bonfires in the evening. Children are mostly homeschooled, encouraged to run around freely amongst the community’s ducklings and chickens. Nearly everything is decided as a collective entity, and the land is shared equally.
It’s a good life. It’s a modern life. “Peaceful,” Tina called it.
And it’s not out of reach.
***
Admittedly, when I first set out to write this article, I was primarily curious about the concept of self-sustainability. I had my own ideas of what a sustainable life looked like — squash growing in my backyard, a coop I could collect fresh eggs from, homemade bread baking in the oven. Nothing wasted. A conscious, traceable cycle.
But the lifestyle I imagined — romanticized, rather — was one in which I lived alone.
Katie Calautti, a farm-sitter in New Jersey, arguably leads a more rural, traditional life. She lives in a nineteenth-century cottage, tends to livestock, and spends her free time writing. The epitome of the Gemeinschaft.
But when asked about the self-sustainability of it all, she said, “That’s the aspect . . . that I’m least drawn to.”
She’s not particularly enthusiastic about cooking, or baking, or sewing her own clothes. Instead, she loves the larger message of “staying close to nature and patronizing small farms, independent makers, and mom-and-pop shops.”
In other words, providing support for her surrounding community.
Here in Atlanta, I volunteered my time to help out on a local, regenerative urban garden that’s run in conjunction with the city’s chain of Souper Jenny cafes. Believing that I’d had a hand in a farm-to-table loop, I asked whether the vegetables grown in this garden were used in the cafe’s menu items.
The head farmer—Farmer Jeff—adamantly shook his head. “About 1% of the ingredients actually come from the garden,” he said. “This is more of a passion project. It wouldn’t really be possible without volunteers.”
The more research I did, the more testimony I collected, the more I realized that true self-sustainability is and has always been, for lack of a better word, a lie. It’s feasible, sure, but it would be an incredibly lonely life to endure. After two years in isolation, I believe many of us have had our eyes forcibly opened to the dangerous pitfalls of seclusion.
Loneliness kills. Literally.
“The loneliness crisis is real, and has definitely been exacerbated since COVID,” Tina said. “People want to live with neighbors who they know and they trust and they feel supported by — and it’s a very natural instinct, I think, as a human, to want to feel like you belong to something bigger than yourself.”
Elaborating on that innate human instinct, Birch explained that unidirectional social evolution is a misguided theory. Humans have always experimented with unique solutions to old problems. There are even times, when we’re unsatisfied with our present situations, that we’ll look back, searching for answers in our past.
“A lot of the language that you might encounter around these topics is that we have to go back to something,” Lewis affirmed. “I think there’s a different question that needs to be asked: Knowing what we know now, how can we proceed?”
Community is always intentional. It remains necessary. It’s active. We have to seek out others—to create, build, and cherish community—because belonging won’t just happen to us. Our place in this odd world must be carved.
The journey home, I’ve learned, is also a journey forward.
