The other night, driving by the highway that leads to our farm, we passed house after house lit up in one way or another with candles in the windows, lights around the bushes, trees wrapped in blinking bulbs.
Our farm was dark, if we didn’t know it was there, we would have easily sailed right past it. It looked dark and bleak to us. It felt cold and disconnected.
We went to the hardware store and brought some 300-Led-bulb strings and this morning, Maria hung them up. We are not conventionally religious, we mark Christmas rather than worship it, our faith is creativity and to some extent, spirituality. We are very serious about creativity, that is our shared value, among others.
I can’t speak for Maria, but something in me wanted to say we belong, we care, we are here, we matter. I wanted people to drive by our old farmhouse and smile at the lights and color.
We love the lights, we love the way the house speaks up for itself, stands out, embraces the season, offers some color and light to the dark days and long nights of the new winter.
The great philosophers all said that the first things human beings need is food and shelter, but after that and before we can live meaningful lives, we must feel safety, belonging and mattering. We must find our community.
In part, I think I moved to the country in search of community, and Maria and I both feel we have finally found the community we have sought, here in Cambridge, a small town along the Vermont border. I doubt I will leave this town alive, it feels like home to me, the place the rolling stone rolls until it can roll no farther.
The big mountains of Vermont are just a few hundred yards away.
Before, living in a dozen different cities as a journalist, I felt the loss of community, perhaps because I fought it, perhaps because I moved so much, perhaps because it was disintegrating in the great migration to the cities, where we were all strangers, and we asked and expected governments to care for us if we were in trouble.
In those other places, the towns were all rich, they had the money to take care of people, from rabid raccoons to drifting snow to plows. We don’t have much money up here, the towns are lucky if they can plow the snow off of the roads. We have to take care of one another.
I feel safe here.
What is safety? It is living in an environment where we can experiment and stretch and change and grow.
It is said people cannot be creative, they cannot innovate without these three essential elements – safety, belonging, and mattering. We cannot move forward with our lives. These elements are essential to a productive brain and our ability to work and attach ourselves to other people. The safer we feel, the more likely we are to change and take risks.
This is the driving idea behind the fellowship of community, a feeling of connection with others, the feeling that despite our differences, we belong together. The feeling that we personally matter and are contributing to a larger good. I read the works of one famous psychologist who said we humans are continuously either reinforcing or begging for safety, belonging and mattering.
In a small town in rural America, the world that was left behind, I find community is strong and enduring. I feel safe. I feel that I belong, as different as I am from so many others. I feel I matter. I can take risks and be creative.
This has nothing to do with politics, or even lifestyle. We do not all love one another.
It is because we know one another and see one another, and perhaps, because we have been left behind, we need one another. That is why we got the lights, I think. Because we are safe. Because we belong. Because we matter.
The farmhouse says we are connected.