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Sparks + Embers Episode No. 019: Community as a Flowing Gift & Civic Duty
35 Plays17 days ago
We've reduced civic duty to voting, but community emerges from deliberate cultivation of beliefs, attitudes, and rituals practiced between solitude and collective life.
Community isn't manufactured through programs or proximity. It emerges when we practice civic arts we've abandoned: endurance, gratitude, and fierce presence.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sparks and Embers
00:00:05
Speaker
There's something about a campfire. We gather around it, stare into the flames, and find ourselves in conversations we never planned to have. I'm Tiffany. And I'm Tyler. And this is Sparks and Embers, 10 minutes of what sticks when we step back from the fire.
Superficial Connections in Modern Relationships
00:00:21
Speaker
Each week, we distill insights from our Kindling newsletter, sharing the questions that won't let go and the connections that surprised us. We hope this creates space for whatever wants to emerge around your own fires.
Isolation in Intense Life Moments
00:00:34
Speaker
Many of us feel something difficult to name, a longing for a connection that goes beyond networking events and social media likes. Relationships sometimes feel transactional and gatherings serve purposes, but provide little nourishment.
00:00:51
Speaker
The intensities of life, like grief, joy, uncertainty, celebration, these get managed in isolation rather than shared.
Institutional Failures in Human Connection
00:01:00
Speaker
The problems we discussed in the previous article and episode of Sparks and Embers, that one about the problem definition, they're not contentions.
00:01:09
Speaker
We may disagree on how to solve them. However, we are unified in our understanding of the situation and the complications these problems present. They are, at least right now, our ground zero for agreement.
00:01:24
Speaker
We could seek to avoid the problems or rationalize a positivity to explain away our hunger for something more. Yet we cannot escape that this hunger isn't imagined.
00:01:36
Speaker
It is real. What we see emerging around us reveals how far we've drifted from ourselves and each other.
Reviving Civic Arts and Rituals
00:01:45
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Our institutions, like our schools, hospitals, workplaces, government, increasingly fail to reflect our actual yearnings for connection.
00:01:55
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And the gap between what these structures produce and what we long for tells us something that we've stopped practicing, the civic arts that make collective life possible.
00:02:08
Speaker
I think we find little disagreement about this experience. But we have to remember that civic duty once meant something bigger, something larger. It involved asking the question, how do we deliberately cultivate the beliefs, attitudes, and rituals that sustain communities across generations, as well as in the current short term?
00:02:34
Speaker
Community is not something we find somewhere out there. It emerges as a byproduct. as a way of being in the world.
Community Through Solitude and Collective Experience
00:02:45
Speaker
When we practice specific capacities in the movement between our own solitude and the collective experience, that's when community finds us.
00:02:56
Speaker
That's the opening to our next article today. on this series of community. And in it, we break it up into two parts. The first part focuses on the things that we need in order to cultivate community.
00:03:10
Speaker
We have to cultivate a capacity for community, a musculature for actually getting it done. And oftentimes I think when we reflect on some of our interactions with those people that have been on this earth much longer than we have is is that we all have those stories of, you you know, when I was your age and some story coming out.
00:03:30
Speaker
And really what we're pointing out is, is that that kind of mentality represents the stuckness of unexplored and unintegrated experience. We must learn how to explore. We must learn how to integrate experience both in our individuality as well as together.
Generational Comparison Issues
00:03:48
Speaker
Those who use this phrase oftentimes are stuck in in a comparative model that frames challenge as a bludgeon for shame and dominance instead of challenge being a question to ourselves and to us collectively of what experiences have cultivated within us.
00:04:08
Speaker
It's that classic of when you had to walk uphill both ways to school, how did that actually bring you closer to wholeness rather than using it as a bully pulpit to compare to either younger generations or those who came after who in our mind had it easier.
Building Authentic Connections
00:04:25
Speaker
Our conversation within community is calling us to wholeness. the challenges of our past, the experiences that we've had that have been differential to each other. This scarce mentality of comparison across generations or just expecting that our experience because it was different or what what we viewed as harder oftentimes puts us into position of using our own experience to shame others who we view have had it easier. And all we're really doing is creating more separation within ourselves and from other people by differentially saying, oh, I must have had it easier and harder.
00:04:59
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And that's a natural propensity of of that invitation of comparison that we highlight in the first part to discuss how we do that in numerous ways and why it's just so antithetical to the thing that we long most as was brought forward in that introduction.
00:05:16
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We actually want a connection. And yet we need to build the capacity for actually seeking it and setting aside the desires or the calls to create more separation and differentiation between ourselves.
Shared Intensity and Community Beyond Transactions
00:05:29
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So with that as something that we're wanting to cultivate, that connection, that sense of authenticity, that that sense of the genuine, we turn in part two to how we do that.
00:05:39
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And it's through a phrase that we will use extensively, not only in this series, but have used previously in other series and across all of Good Pain, is this shared intensity.
00:05:50
Speaker
Life is intense. Shared intensity requires maturity, but maturity is just not delivered by experience itself. We have to cultivate it. And we use the Four Hills of Life movement in a conversation around a gift culture.
00:06:06
Speaker
And that when we create community, rather than making it transactional, we must consider how we create a collective
Cultivating Practices for Connection
00:06:14
Speaker
abundance. And while that word may have a very specific meaning for you, we go to some lengths to start creating a common understanding of what we mean through this lens of flow and avoiding stagnation and that life is about movement.
00:06:30
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And how do we do that in a way that starts to create the conditions under which community will emerge? So with this article, we set the table for the different practices and the different attitudes and beliefs that we need to cultivate intentionally, deliberately in order to help promote that connection that we so long for.
Join the Community Conversation
00:06:51
Speaker
Instead of finding it somewhere out there that's going to rescue us, we really start to talk about what is needed for us to step into the endurance, the long suffering of community building and then finding that home is what wraps around us in this community that emerges.
00:07:14
Speaker
Thanks for sitting around the fire with us. If these conversations sparked something, subscribe to Sparks Numbers and all our shows on Apple and Spotify. And if you're moved to, please leave us a review or share this episode with your friends.
00:07:26
Speaker
Both help us build this community. For the longer material that feeds these episodes, subscribe to the Kindling newsletter at goodpayingco.com backslash kindling. That's goodpainco.com backslash kindling.
00:07:40
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We release it weekly with the kind of content that keeps these unexpected conversations going. We provide the kindling, you bring the fire. Until next time, keep the questions burning.