WE BELIEVE that there is a NEED for community. We need community because it can foster our spiritual growth and commitment; our ability to work for a more just world, and our courage to grow and change in our personal life. In a community where we live, work, pray, strategize, celebrate, laugh, cry, challenge, and support each other TOGETHER, we are able to free ourselves from the crippling fear of always being alone in all our decisions, mistakes, commitments, and plans.
WE BELIEVE that as we live in community we can become more whole. We can nurture the energy, security, and great compassion that it takes to face the barriers within ourselves with enough energy left to help others do the same. There are many paths to personal growth, some of which we must take alone, but many more of which we can only pursue through our interactions with others.
WE BELIEVE that in community we can create the time and the mind space to celebrate and explore not only our own spiritual heritages and paths but the spiritual diversity that surrounds us, both in the world, and most importantly, within our community. On a daily basis, both collectively and as individuals, we can rekindle and feed the flame that allows our inner quest to make itself manifest in the world. We can discover more and more deeply the connections between our spiritual experience and our desire for social change. Like personal growth, spiritual awareness requires regular practice; we are creating community routines that set aside time to honor our spiritual needs.
WE BELIEVE that in community we can make a difference in the many ills that inflict our world. The grinding poverty that leads to hunger, homelessness, and disease; the injustices that occur because someone is not in the dominant race, religion, class, gender, or sexual orientation; the wars and the murders of entire populations; and the ecological devastation of the planet, are but some of these. While community cannot address all of these issues, it can help its members to see how each one of us (and perhaps the group as a whole) can address some of these issues in particular ways. Together we can look at questions like: In what ways are these issues interconnected? What is most needed at this place and at this time? What skills do we have with which to address that issue? Which issues touch our heart? What will enable us to keep going when the going gets hardest? How can we remember to think globally when we are caught up in acting locally? How do we apply social awareness to our daily personal interactions? How do we remember that neither the oppressed nor the oppressors are our enemies? We believe in treating each other with respect and being mindful of the diversities in our group as we grow in awareness of the breadth of human experience.
WE BELIEVE that sharing our material resources and talents allows us to live simpler and less cluttered lives. We believe that this is a model for how we will all have to live if we want economic justice in the world.
WE BELIEVE that everything that we do (and do not do) is a political/spiritual/personal act. We can use all of our actions to transform oppression of every sort, and to stop the destruction of the earth. What stops us from acting is the memory of the hurt and the fear of being hurt again. As our personal growth allows us to move through that hurt and our spiritual sharing and community support nurtures us, we become more capable of acting in ways that can create social change.
WE BELIEVE, then, that community can be a place where real security is made through our actions and shared beliefs, where we can begin to discover what our real needs are. It can be a place where individual needs are respected and supported in the context of the needs of the community and in relation to the larger groups of people in our neighborhood, city, and the world. In community we can search for that balance which will give us the energy to think so well about ourselves that we will have the ability and the desire to think well about others, too. We will not need to be afraid of giving of ourselves too much because we will be taking care of ourselves and will be able to trust the other members of our community to be looking out for our welfare as much as we look out for theirs. And it is in this context of true interdependence that we find ourselves sufficiently free to share our resources--personal, spiritual, material--with each other.
THEREFORE, we have formed a long-term, intentional community, a household of people who plan to live together well into the forseeable future. This household exists as a place to support and strategize about our work in social change and a place to explore and celebrate our spiritual directions. We begin each day with meditation, led in turn by each one of us. We also celebrate natural and historical "seasonal" events with rituals and time for sharing. We support and challenge for individual social change work and personal growth. We stimulate collective discussion of political issues and possible actions that we could take to effect them. And we are working toward the eventual sharing of all resources. We operate as a consciously functional, chosen family.
WE CHERISH our children and try to provide them with clear, fair, consistant expectations. Parenting is a shared responsibility among the adult members of our community. We meet regularly to discuss parenting issues, Our children are loved and respected; they are included in the work and decision making of the community in ways appropriate to their respective development.
WE LIVE IN A MULTI-RACIAL NEIGHBORHOOD, by choice. We would love to have our household be as multi-racial as it is multi-cultural, but it seems more important to us to be doing things that directly combat racism than to spend our time working to "recruit" people of color into our household. One direct approach to doing this is to make ourselves available to the leadership of people of color while living in a multi-racial neighborhood. In fact, it is entirely possible that through such a situation a multi-racial community might emerge in a much more organic fashion. We see our involvement at the multicultural public school some of our children attend as a major avenue for our participation in the neighborhood.
OUR COMMUNITY is part of a network of people, COMMON UNITY, who share our concerns about personal growth, spiritual diversity and social change. We are members of the Fellowship for Intentional Communities, and expect to become a member in dialogue with the Federation of Egalitarian Communities as well.
OUR HOUSEHOLD SEEKS people willing to explore making a long-term commitment to our community. We seed people who can think well about themselves, every other person in the household, and the group as a whole. We seek people who can think clearly about what we as individuals and as a group can do to transform the world into a better place; for whom liberation and healing are personal as well as political issues; who value the practice of spiritual diversity; people who are willing to engage in a process that will eventually result in a situation where we will share all income, assets, and resources.
COMMON THREADS
PO Box 441713, Somerville, MA 02144-0014
(617) 576-6878