It’s spring, and that means a season of new visitors, work exchangers, and residents is upon us. I’m both excited for all the new friends and conversations and questions that I’ll find over the next few months, but also feeling a bit wary of some of those same conversations and questions.

Christina here, writing about the messiness and difficulty and joy of being with other humans.

One of the main comments that we often get with new visitor or resident applications is about how they are excited to grow all their own food and build their own house one day.

Don’t get me wrong, I think building houses and growing food is awesome. I rarely feel as happy as I do after a good session in the dirt, and there are some beautiful hand-built houses around here.

But I’ve also seen a lot of people move here who don’t actually end up accomplishing that specific dream.

The thing is, I think that in many ways, the vision that people bring to DR and places like this is a great alternative to the capitalist grind, but it’s also in many ways a dream that is dictated and prescribed by the limitations of that same capitalist grind. It’s often about self sufficiency and doing things for themselves, but the problem with DIY isn’t the doing part—it’s the doing it alone part.

In other words, what we don’t usually see in resident or visitor applications is comments about people being really excited to make group decisions, or to spend hours each week in meetings talking to people in order to figure out the best ways to work together, or about having direct conversations in which hard feedback is given and received, or about making compromises in order to share cars or kitchens or other resources.

But to me, that’s the truly radical thing that we’re doing here—the challenging and endless job of learning how to work together when it seems so much easier to just go it alone.

But this challenge has its rewards too! When you do that hard and boring work of communicating and making decisions that involve lots of compromise and talking about conflict, even when it’s awkward and uncomfortable and just yuck, you also develop deeper relationships and more real connections.

In my opinion, this is one of the best ways that we fight against capitalism, which wants us to remain separate and alone in our big houses so we can buy more things to fill the void.

But how do you communicate all that in a digestible quote on a website? And how do you maintain the energy to continue going to committee meetings and Village Council meetings and mediated conversations when it seems easier to just stop dealing with other human beings?

For me, I need constant and frequent reminders of why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s so easy to slip back into all of the bad habits that I was taught in my first 40 years of life—cutting people off when I don’t like what they say, not giving feedback because I’m afraid of getting a reaction, doing things on my own because it feels easier than trying to talk to other people about how to do them. Writing this column every few weeks is a good reminder for me, and taking time to reflect and remember why I do what I do is important.

I also get a lot of satisfaction from working with others. Garden work parties, committee work, Village Council meetings, helping out with a task—even carrying heavy, messy hay bales up a flight of stairs with friends—remind me why other humans are worth the effort.

I also get a lot of mileage from the fun stuff like sharing meals, playing games, celebrating occasions, singing and listening to music, walking on the land, and taking relaxing saunas with friends and neighbors.

Enjoying my time with people makes all that difficult human messiness a bit easier to deal with.

Christina Lovdal has gone into event planning hyperdrive this spring, creating even more social opportunities for our community, such as game playing events, taco dinner night, and a land walk; all in response to a survey she put out to the community about what types of social events we wanted added to our already full social plates. Thanks, Christina, for all of your hard work on behalf of our community, adding more fun to our lives!