A recent gathering of visitors and villagers under the full moon. Photo by Christina.

This week we started the first visitor session of the 2023 season. As an extrovert, I really love having visitors here. There are more people for parties, more players for capture the flag, and more general buzz around the village. But my favorite part of having visitors here is answering questions about life here at DR.

In our new visitor program, we are starting with an intensive weekend for people who can’t take a week or more off from their regular lives, and then we are moving into the regular visitor program after that. This means that on Sunday night, we had a bonus Q & A session. The Q & A is my favorite part of the program because answering questions gives me a chance to reaffirm why I’m here and why I love this life.

This Sunday, rather than the usual open question session, the Rabbits in the room went around and talked a bit about why we’re here and why we stay. When it was my turn, I talked about how I have been looking for community my whole life.

Christina here, writing about my attempts and failures at finding community throughout my life.

I first read Walden Two, the utopian novel by B.F. Skinner when I was 12 years old. I’m pretty sure that most of the book was over my head at that age, but I do remember an image of people working and living together in a small community that was built and designed for maximum happiness and equality.

About 12 years later, I found myself in graduate school living in couples’ housing, and I remember seeing the family housing around my building—the buildings with shared backyards, the paths connecting the houses, the car-free neighborhoods—and thinking, yes, this is what I want!  I envisioned picnics and parties and get-togethers with my new neighbors. But that’s not what happened. In fact, I think I met one other person in our building.  

Every time we moved to a new town or neighborhood after that, I kept thinking that we’d finally found the community that I was desiring—only to find that the people around us would become acquaintances or friends, but it never really felt like what I was looking for—it wasn’t real community.

Our last move before coming to DR was to a small town in New Hampshire. On one of our first nights in the new town, we were at a summer event at the local library. I remember thinking: next year, I’ll be friends with all these people. But by two and even three years later I only really had one friend in the town.

I guess I sort of gave up on that dream for a while, but when the midlife crisis started hitting hard and I realized I was getting burned out on my job, I hit the internet. I knew that I wanted something different, but I hadn’t quite found the language for what it was that I was missing. I knew I wanted a radical change but I wasn’t sure what that meant yet.  

Watching videos about people building yurts or tiny houses was fun, and I knew that I wanted to spend more time outside, but just getting a different house wasn’t going to get me what I wanted. I tried searching for “co-housing” because it was the only term I knew. But everything in our area had a waitlist of years or studio basement apartments starting at $300,000. I kept looking and eventually I found Dancing Rabbit. On a whim, I decided to come visit during the summer of 2015. 

I knew that I was ready to move here within 48 hours of my stay. I loved the idea of composting human waste and sharing vehicles, but what really got me was finding the community I had been searching for all those years.

So why do I have so many failed attempts throughout my life? Why were there so many times when I thought I would find a supportive group of friends and neighbors only to realize that the people around me were acquaintances at best?

I think the main reason is that we all worked full-time jobs and were busy in so many other ways. Scheduling a dinner together took about 15 texts and usually happened one or two months out. Once we had kids, we were dealing with birthday parties, weekend events, and spending the rest of the weekend cleaning, grocery shopping, and getting ready to do it all over again. I just don’t think we can have a functional community when everyone in it is working (or going to school) for 40, 50, 60 or more hours per week.

I think another reason is that there is something to be said for the “intentional” part of an intentional community. In other words, maybe community is something that really needs to be created and nurtured. We can’t really just assume because someone lives next door that we’ll become best friends naturally and without any effort. Everyone who lives here came to live here—they made the choice. They left behind their lives somewhere else to come live in rural Missouri and try to create new systems and ways of living together.

Maybe the biggest reason why I didn’t find community earlier is that real community can be challenging and feel like a lot of work. You might imagine potlucks and summer parties and kids running around together, but in order for those things to happen, you also need to deal with conflict and differing views on anything from where to plant trees, to what kind of car to buy, or whether we think someone is a good fit for the community. Then you need to spend a lot of time actually talking to people who don’t always think just like you do.

Yeah, it’s not always easy, but it really does feel like I’ve achieved the dream I had all those years.
 

Christina Lovdal-Gil has resurrected a regular, village-wide capture the flag game lately. She is DR’s unofficial activities director, and we are grateful for her organizing energy toward more fun in the village! Thanks Christina, for all that you do!