I’ve been thinking a lot about community and what it means.
In so many ways, community is romanticized. Gemeinshaft reminds us of this, a German word that brings us back to a kind of nostalgic view of what community can be - cozy, connected, intimate, simple.
I see people trying to connect to this feeling in their homesteading and urban farming Reels on IG. Rural reads simple even when it’s not. (Mind you, this feeling of the cozy simple life never truly existed. It’s the nostalgic past, our own fiction.) I see them trying to recapture something they feel is missing in the Gesellschaft, which is another German word for our more self-driven, technology-based society. The world now can feel disparate, disconnected, and full of loneliness and separation.
We are reaching for something, I feel it.
The idea of community, in its best forms, offers us an opportunity to create relationships with people who have a commonality outside of living in close geographic proximity. For instance, my cookbook group, Please Send Noodles, represents a kind of community where people dedicated to learning about cooking, deepening their knowledge of cooking and food, come together in a group to cook. We are all a little dorky about spices, ingredients, and what we put in our pantries, even the beginning cooks among us have this nerdy quality about food. It binds us.
I think about this group a lot while trying to parse out the elements of community because members old and new have become integral to my daily life. I have tried to quit this group, citing administrative duties that can sometimes feel oppressive and overwhelming. And I’ve had to face that I am, in fact, not a natural leader nor am I comfortable as one. But in the end, I wonder what my life would be without these people and I soldier on knowing I will reap more than I sow.
This is kind of a first for me. I have never plugged into the group thing, preferring one or two close friends most of my life. I used to joke that if I died, it would take two weeks for anyone to notice and they would find me by the smell, and then two people would show up at my memorial.
One or two friends was manageable back then. Communities require management, lots of moving parts, the ability to get along, to share, and you must consider other people’s views. There is always conflict and so you have to have a head for meeting and solving conflict. You have to give of yourself and also be open to receiving. It requires managing lots of relationships inside the community and that can feel insurmountable and vulnerable in ways that people can’t get their heads around. You have to cut off and excise trouble that can infect the group, but do so in a way that reflects the mores and trust of the group. In my 30s, I was too troubled and maybe too mentally ill to accept comfort and security and dysfunction from a group. It would’ve felt like way too much. And so I pined for it, my arms out stretched, towards a thing I could never touch or have.
In fact I would say that I wouldn’t have been able to attract the people in this group. So even though I was probably screaming out for companionship and camaraderie and acceptance, I couldn’t have attracted the people I needed to provide these things and I probably couldn’t have provided for them in return.
Which makes me wonder: do the people who need community most have the hardest time accessing it? How do you attract good people when you are in a bad place? How do you create community for yourself when you are in the shits and everything you touch sloughs off into dust.
We are cooking from Madhur Jaffrey’s 50th anniversary edition of An invitation to Indian Cooking. To prepare the group we went to a local Indian Market, Rani’s, where group member Natasha took everyone through the store to buy spices and discuss brands she prefers and quantities needed. Then we went to eat at a local Indian restaurant Marigold, where Natasha grilled the waiters and chefs and ordered a spread of dishes.
One of our members Noreen told me: “Please Send Noodles is a small town. You have to show up.”
She was talking about the memorial service for the daughter of one of our members, but her comment is cemented in me. I have not stopped thinking about it since she said it.
Community though is not just about who shows up, but also about who doesn’t. Who can show up? Who has the free time? The flexibility to make events, to cook for events, to pay for lunch and a $40 cookbook. We are a socio-economically diverse group and we do make plans for people to get copies of recipes or free books but this requires transparency. You have to tell me you need those things so I can make arrangements and that might be a bridge too far for lots of folks.
The thing that makes us who we are also makes our group closed off to certain other people. Are there people who wish they could join but can’t? Or feel awkward? Or worry they won’t be accepted? Has someone joined and left because we made them feel inhospitable? How do our book book choices play into who comes to the group and who doesn’t?
The Idea a of community is to create that gemeinshaft and in many ways it is to fortify ourselves against “the other”. As much as we want community to be bridge building, it is often wall making. Look at your own communities - who is in and who is out? Do you consider the homeless to be a part of your community? The mentally ill? The addicted? The Karens? What about extremely irritating people?
Sometimes we have to build walls around us, and we deserve the comfort of people who get us by shorthand. But we also have to be right with ourselves that our communities are not as open as we think. We leave people out. We circle the wagons. We call it friendship. It’s good. It can be really good and life affirming, as Please Send Noodles is for me, but a community can always do more, and be more to more people. There is room for good things to be better. This is the project.
END NOTES:
If you’d like to cook along with us, we have a Facebook group and you can do it long distance. Look for Please Send Noodles with 3 exclamation points.
Thanks as always for reading! Xo
"do the people who need community most have the hardest time accessing it? How do you attract good people when you are in a bad place? How do you create community for yourself when you are in the shits and everything you touch sloughs off into dust."
Yes. This. Exactly.
I study and practice a discipline of the Tarot called Soul Tarot and for us, the 3 of Cups represents Sacred Community and often comes up when that is potential medicine for one's struggles. Over the past few years, it's come up a lot for me, and I'm always like "I know I need it. I want it. But where? How?" So thank you for voicing this so eloquently.
Cooking isn't my thing. But your writing and insight have their own type of pleasing aroma which draws me into what you do. I do have people close to me for whom cooking IS their thing, and I'm going to tell them where they can find some noodles with three exclamation points.