I will leave it to the pundits, and the surrogates of the left and the right to talk about this election, for me, I think, it is more personal, I am not much interested in the machinations or strategies of the big political parties. I will happily led the angry surrogates fight about it.

None of them are fighting about me.

The polarized legions of the wealth and the angry have dominated and shaped our politics, we have lost the very thing we need and cherish most – our sense of common purpose, our community, even as I discover that community is all around me, and is strong and full of love.

In our politics, we seem to have lost one another. The people who create our systems of life and money and health and governance need very much to keep us divided and at one another’s throats, otherwise we might awaken and turn on them. Instead we are given the illusion of choice, in the end tearing one another to bits over none of the things that matter.

Miraculously to me, my life is the opposite of this. In my world, we seem to have found one another.

Perhaps that is the lesson of this election season for me, in the age of empowerment, I am empowered to search for community, defend it and celebrate it, photograph it and write about it,  to build it every day. I live in complete contrast to what I see, I cannot fix it or even comprehend it, I can only not be it.

I suppose that is inspiring, in it’s own way, although I am often slow to see it.

A woman came up to me at the Round House Cafe Sunday and threw her arms around me and gave me the warmest hug. Startled, I asked her if we knew one another. “No, not at all,” she said, “I just needed to make some contact with another human being today.”

Yes, I thought, of course. The election.

She was seeking community, one of the most powerful drives in the human spirit. How can we have lost it so completely in the outer world? It is so very much alive if you look for it.

Mother Teresa said she could not change the world, but she could cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples. No man is an island, wrote John Donne, we are all a piece of the continent, a part of the main. This is what the “left” an the “right” have done to us, you can’t be a citizen if you can no longer think for  yourself.

And then we wonder why so many people dance so bitterly  to the wicked and ancient siren song of the demagogue.

When a society is angry when people use drugs, and learn to hate, when the poor are derided and left hopeless, when our commonwealth is sometimes overwhelmed by the alignment of political power with wealth,  when we separate ourselves into rigid labels, and stop listening to anyone else, when our sense of being known to one another is crippled, our local institutions of household, and neighborhood falter.

Our idea of community, the thing that holds us together,  fails.

If the turbulent and wrenching awakening of my past decade of my life has taught me anything, it is the power and necessity of community.

I know what it is to be lost, I need to be found. I need to find others.  I am alive and still on my farm today because I am part of a community upon which I depend, which has never failed me, and without which I would have long ago retreated from my life, or even died from it. Whenever I am in need, angels of all kinds, good and bad, rich and poor, nice and mean, appear to help me and keep me afloat.

They ask of me nothing other than to accept their need and wish to help.

My community began small – with Maria. We became a community, and as communities do, we began looking for others.

Day by day we have expanded our community – it encompasses people we know well, and many people we have never seen and will never see. They send us messages, gifts, visit our Open Houses, help us and others when we ask.

Without quite knowing it, we have been building community ever since we met. Farmers, artists, nurses, doctors, factory workers, musicians,  immigrants.

“In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else’s mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one’s own place and economy,” writes author Wendell Berry.

It is so easy to become angry and jaded, to give up on this idea of community.

But it is possible to build our own smaller society. That is what I think when I try to follow the ugly news. I think they don’t know. They have forgotten what it is to see people.

When I am in trouble, farmers come to help me. When they are in trouble, I go to help them.

Red and I do our therapy work every week, we touch so many people, so many people touch us.  Every day, I meet with someone or talk with someone who wants to be more than they have been taught to believe they can be.

When I am hugged by an 82 year-old-woman who has not had a visitor in a year, and she cries on my shoulder and thanks God for me and Red, and for the almost pathetically little we do for her,  I am found. When I see a dying man in his room, and hold his head, or encourage or inspire a writer to write, a woman to find her voice, or tell her story,  a photographer to take a photo, a painter to show her work, a poet to share her poems, then I am living the very opposite life that I am seeing on screens every day and for months.

This is what community has done for me, this is what I can do for community. That is what community is.

That is my life, that is my society, it is not, alas,  my commonwealth. The people I see in the news are angry and disconnected and hateful because they have lost each other. They have dehumanized the Other. When you dehumanize the other, and no longer see it as part of the moral community of the world, then any kind of evil and cruelty is possible.

Every day, people show me that I am not lost, and that people are not lost to me.

So that is the message I take from this season of rage and disconnection. We need to stop being dominated by the minds of other people, stop letting other people think for us, and remember what it means to be human. What community is. This is something I imagine we all know, that is embedded in all of our genes and souls,  however buried and damaged the impulse must find one another again.

I am happy to say I know it can be done, because Maria and I are doing it, and will commit ourselves to doing it anew. We cannot change the world, but we can create many ripples, some so small and frail they can barely be seen, some big enough to send frogs and fish scurrying for their lives.

H.L. Mencken, a brilliant if cynical man, defined democratic society as a conflict between the superior man or women and the mob. I am no genius observer, but for once, I disagree with the great thinker. I am no superior man, and I detest any mob.

I define our democratic society as a conflict between  community and the people who fear community and tear it down because it threatens their power and wealth, or their shallow labels and ideologies. In my community, we are all kinds of people, almost shockingly  different or disparate in our politics and beliefs, we almost always come to a way to find one another,  to talk to one another, because being a human being before being anything else is what a true community is about.