searching for a sense of community

i took a little stroll into the past this morning. the bloggy past. i visited a bunch of old haunts, from char's ramblings to truth cycles to c is for capetown to the emma tree and the eleventh and beyond. all were, in some fashion, more or less dormant. we knew that about char, of course, since she died all too young back in 2011. but what happened to the rest of us? what happened to our community? some of us moved over to facebook and are still friends there. but it's arguably not the same as it was back in the blogging heyday. i used to write daily, sometimes multiple times, but now i'm only here a couple of times a month, when i want to figure out what i think about something. what changed? jobs? kids? did life accelerate somehow? was it the rise of the smart phone (who wants to type a whole blog post on that little keyboard)? or did facebook, instagram and twitter just kill our blogging vibe? but i realized that i miss that old sense of community. that's just not the same on facebook.

there is a kind of community on facebook and i have recently observed the intersection of one part of that community with actual, in-real-life community. watching it from afar has been at turns nauseating and heartwarming. i haven't really known how to feel about it. i've felt like a voyeur, since it was tangential to my own community, so it's felt like an invasion of privacy on my part to read the regular updates. but on the other hand, it was shared publicly, so i wasn't really spying. but it has felt like spying. and not only did i spy, i judged. at times harshly. there was a lot of god stuff and i have a hard time with that. but then, something softened in me. i can see people of all ages, from high school girls to grandparents, pouring out good thoughts of healing and support and honestly, it suddenly melted my heart. people demonstrably caring about other people, what's not to like? there's so much awfulness in the world right now, and i can't believe i almost missed this situation as an antidote to it. when i let myself, i can see that it's a genuine sense of community.

but at the same time, i can't bring myself to participate in it. so i sit across an ocean and voyeuristically read the posts, but don't contribute anything to the conversation. and there are a couple of reasons for that. one is the god thing - i cannot see how you can possibly praise god up and down for his mercy in the girl's recovery and not blame him that she fell ill in the first place - the logic just doesn't add up for me. the other is that i don't really know these people, tho' they are from my hometown, so i would feel like an intruder if i participated in the conversation. i have a classmate who i can see is part of the conversation and she's for all practical purposes, as far away as i am, but she feels she can contribute to the community in a way that i cannot. or will not. because i also admit that it's a choice on my part. she's just making a different choice than i am. and that's ok. it's perhaps a community i'm no longer part of, especially after my father died and with the decline of my mother and seeing how all the friends she had have fallen away as she has deteriorated. it's hard to keep a positive view of the place when it seems like it was all a facade and not real when the going gets tough.

i don't really know where it all leaves me, and i'm not done pondering it or looking for answers as to how to live this life we have landed in. a colleague recommended a russian philosopher that i had strangely not heard of before - p.d. ouspensky. i got his work from 1917 - in search of the miraculous - and i've been reading it today. perhaps it will provide me with a new way of viewing the world, even tho' the world in which he wrote was so far from our technology-flooded world today. but perhaps humans aren't all that different.