I listened to the recent podcast on permaculture thorns and purchased the unfinished book this morning and plan to read it this weekend. I had some thoughts and I wanted to get a conversation going around those thoughts, if possible, and any other thoughts. I have been having these thoughts for years and years.
We have what could be considered a large family by today’s standards. 6 kids so far, myself and my wife so 8 total. We have lived together in intentional community or some variation of that 3 times (depending on how you’d define the term). The first time was full-time RV’ing with another family. We had 3 kids at the time, had the 4th during the time and were pregnant with the 5th when the time ended. The other family had 4 kids, then a 3rd family joined with 3 kids.
The second time we lived in a house with 2 other families and eventually went down to the homeowner’s family and ours. The homeowners had 2 kids, and the 3rd family had 3 kids.
The third time we invited a single person to stay at our property we bought after we stopped traveling full time.
These experiences ran their course and ended for various reasons and were generally positive experiences except for the last one.
Due to the size of our family, I was always asking myself why the nuclear family seems to experience less strife than a collection of various people living intentionally. For a while, I was certain that it was due to the hierarchal nature of the family, structure, and the heightened level of communication inside that nuclear family unit.
I still think those things are very important, structure, some rules and lots of communication but I have shifted away from them being the primary things that make the nuclear family generally work out well when intentional communities have a high failure rate.
My current train of thought on this is in reference to culture juxtaposed against the family, in some ways. The family IS an intentional community. It must function that way for the survival of that community/unit. Our culture and institutions, along with most families in how they function, are training the community members (family) to become autonomous, independent, successful (?) members, at a future time, within our culture. This culture prizes those very things, autonomy, independence, success.
In the past, participation in the community was prized, trained, and sought after by most. An extended community of nuclear families, local economy, etc. You basically just continued what you did while you were growing up and translated that into a much larger family that is the community. Now, we are taking people, born into an intentional/necessary community, and training them to be independent and autonomous one day in the future.
This is highly contextual and nuanced. An example would be that our children are taught to cook, clean, do household chores, homestead chores, etc. from a very early age. Not from necessity as in times past but to afford them the opportunity to serve one another. My neighbor could be doing the exact same thing, but the purpose is so that his family members can one day become self-sufficient, independent and autonomous.
To keep this short, I think hierarchy, structure and communication are very important. I do think one of the main challenges is that although most of us experience community within our nuclear family, during that time and after, we are trained to seek autonomy, independence and success as defined by culture.
Where the common goal used to be the success of the community, it is now the success of the individual.
So, for whatever reason someone desires community later in life, that person has the baggage of an entire life lived being trained by the family and culture to be autonomous.
That can become very challenging to overcome no matter how much desire there is for community.
