Would highly recommend joining a community garden to anyone. I was a total beginner, paid 30 bucks for my yearly plot. There were always people who were willing to give advice, water the plot while I was away, or people even gifted transplants of new veggies I’d never tried. Learned so much from experienced gardeners, got free mulch and fertilizer and there was even a community barbecue. 11/10 experience.
im more the hermit with a garden who lives a 20 minute walk away from the solar punk community type.
visitors are fine, but no surprise visits. id have a panic attack. and id come to the community for trade and to hang occasionally.
i am a person who can literally go months without talking to others outside of my immediate circle. not that i hate people, i quite enjoy most people, and wish i had the energy to hang out with them like everyone else. its just that i have a shorter wick than most people.
it comes with an extreme sense of guilt from time to time, but the price of solace is almost never free. and to me its worth it so i can focus on my many hobbies.
but i wish my wife could live with me as a hermit couple. thatd be siiiiiiick. i love her. very much.
Something I struggle with is exactly this - of knowing that something greater than the sum can be built with a community, and that trusting in a community can lead to things unexpectedly greater than any single unit can make or design on their own - at the same time, I deeply value my independence and wanting to create my own expression and implementation of things outside of the input of others.
I am complex enough to hold both of those ideas at the same time, but still, I want my multi acre hermit cottage inside of a thriving community and that feels impossible.
Both a deep want to participate and contribute to the community- and to be independent and have access to solitude
I don’t know how to connect the two yet, and I don’t want to chose one while forsaking the other.
I would start with questioning if that feeling is really individuality and self-expression, or rather a fear of not being in control. All too often it is the latter, especially with artists and people of similar “individualistic” mindsets (and “nest builders”). This very common toxic mindset is also problematic inside communities when a sub-group bands together to push their specific ideas and expects others to submitt to them.
I’m like the person you’re replying to, and for me it’s very much just introversion and autism, plus a lot of complex trauma about my body and life being controlled by others.
plus a lot of complex trauma about my body and life being controlled by others.
That is often the source of the fear I mentioned. I know it is not easy to overcome, but it is worth it.
Working on it, but I’ll still be autistic and introverted. Are you assuming anyone can and should overcome the need to be alone? That would be quite ableist.
Come on, what is the purpose of lashing out like that? I said nothing of the sort, no need to insult me 🤨
And anyway, my comment was mostly about not potentially inflicting causes of your trauma on others. Because that is what usually happen when people fear not being in control… they try to control others once they have the means to do so.
Please reread my comment: I said IF that’s what you mean! I’m asking because youre explaining to other commentators how they should overcome their need for their own spaces. Also, that the need to control yourself usually leads to wanting to control others is false and a pretty mean thing to say to someone who said they feel the need to have control over themselves. Trauma does NOT make me a bad person, thank you very much. We’re people too, you know. We’re capable of empathy and of working on ourselves.
Uff, you have a lot to work through it seems. Please don’t go around projecting wild assumptions on others and twist their words into the complete opposite 🙄
I don’t think it is a fear of not being in control at all. It’s a desire to learn and develop competencies in more than a single aspect of life. This is also how you create subject matter experts that can challenge the sub-groups you mention to find and develop improvements in whatever the relevant niche is.
Subject matter experts seems like a specialisation thing? Your comment seems like it’s pulling in two opposite directions. How do you reconcile them?
In what way is it going in two directions? I’m saying if people develop competency independently they’re able to prevent some sort of clique from gaining too much control or from forming in the first place.
Do you know the T-shaped skills thing? SME is deep skill, jack-of-all-trades is broad skill. You can balance them, but one does not lead to the other necessarily.
There’s also the problem that, depending in the level of sophistication you want, it’s not really possible for one person to be good at everything. It takes a village to maintain a village, kind of thing.
T-shape is supposed to indicate expertise in one thing (the post of the T) and capability in everything else (the crossbar)
It’s popular in software build, where everyone will be specialised in analysis/design or build or test, but everyone can do simple tasks in any of those.
It ignores the fact that some people find some parts of a group’s work repulsive while others find those the best thing.
It ignores that what makes a person good at one thing makes them bad at another
Humans do well with specialisation. A jack of all trades is master of none.
You need specialisation to build expertise in parts of complex systems
I’ll reflect on this more over time, but right now however the hermit want I think stems from three things:
1: sometimes I do not want to be observed - I want to be loud and dance silly and be messy or more generically just be in a state that does not match how I want to present myself, and equally I do not want my loudness, silliness, messiness, etc to impact or inconvinence others even if they’re too kind/tolerant to complain
2: I derive a lot of joy from learning and doing - be that replacing a toilet, raising chickens and eggs, creating a trail, cutting lumber and building a desk etc - and these activities are more complicated as part of a community and requires a level of communication and coordination that is hard for me
3: I want control to do things the way I think they should be done, and not have to submit to others that have power to overrule me within my dominion - I don’t mind yielding control and power in community spaces so long as I have the option to then exert that lost control within my dominion - say I’d like a koi pond, ideally I can convince the community to work together to make a koi pond, in the event the community does not wish a koi pond, I can create one within my dominion if I’m so inclined - likewise say the community does not want to maintain safe drinking water in a bid to lower community costs, I want the ability to create my own safe drinking water
Of course ideally all the members of the community, myself included, are aligned in the important things and willing to let accommodate individuality like in my examples - but when they don’t, and I think the reality is that for many things they won’t - is where the hermit cottage is valuable
I would like to live in a community where it was essentially a main street and a small urban area for the trades and business workers and surrounded by many cottages that support and contribute to those businesses and vice versa
I feel like I have a lot to offer to my community, and I have contributed in the past to my neighborhood and participate in events and meetings and projects - but still, I cannot play my music very loud, I cannot raise chickens or bees, I cannot go outside and feel alone without traveling for hours to a state forest, I cannot fix the broken street lamp outside my door on the sidewalk despite reporting it 5 months ago, etc
I’m thinking out loud - and happy for any input you have, and maybe I’m missing something you already know
I think a way to think of this is to think of many overlapping communities that you are part of, at many scales. Like, you are part of the global community, plus at least one regional community (states, bioregion, city), plus your local community (suburb, town), plus your local subculture(s), plus your broader family (maybe 2 or 3 of those), plus your immediate family or household, plus yourself, alone.
You don’t ever exist in only one of those, you always exist in all of them simultaneously (whether you like it or not). And you play a constant balancing act of responsibility to, contribution to, and benefiting from each of them. The way you weight the importance of each is somewhat up to you, and somewhat socially determined, but it can change a lot over time.
“Building a community that has a garden”, or “using a garden to build a community”?
Important distinction.
A friend who has a huge plot is struggling with this. ‘Just’ a communal garden does not build a community. He is kinda harshed by the food stamp system, because the drifters don’t need to work for food anymore, just quarter. I feel he still has a pretty feudalistic view, but he is the closest thing I know to someone trying to actually build along solarpunk lines.
I kinda see why he is not attracting a community, despite craving it so much and being a pretty okay guy. I think it’s a case where he can’t really create coziness for himself, so the place generally lacks it. This combined with people currently craving belonging more than healthy foodstuffs and working with soil leaves all this potential untapped. I’m sure in cities it would be different, but this is where I am seeing the struggle.
Feudalistically paying drifters to work on your garden sounds kinda the opposite of solar punk community building, TBH
You are totally right. The legacy of ownership, basically.
The thing is, I’d rather try coming at the problem from empathy. On one hand, it is full-on exploitation. On the other, some dude got to a place in life where he has stewardship of 40 acres in a hypercapitalistic, lonely world.
It’s kinda like the will is there, but he is blind to those characteristics that make it impossible. I always boil it down to a mental health/neurosis issue, but that’s probably more about me dealing with my own demons.
It feels the like the need is there for the people with means, we just have to kinda redefine the social contract that isn’t as spooky as straight out ‘taking everything’.
Yeah, fully. The stepping stones to communality are not obvious, and there’s a big gushing river of cutthroat capitalism right below.
I have a similar issue with a family property that I’d like to make more communal… I need to put the time in to thinking about how to do it in a way that is fair and avoids catastrophic conflict.
I don’t envy you. Are you hoping to make something that is more for the locals, or are you thinking along couchsurfing/warmshowers style community building as well? Like commune community?
Kind of neither… I have a lot of close community in cities a few hours away, I’m thinking mostly about focusing on giving that community an out-of-town place. But also I still have lots of community in the area there, and I’d like for them to feel welcome, and for my city crew to engage with them. But it’s hard, because the distance is a barrier, prevents the constant contact that I think is needed.
Both.
This hypothetical community would involve the same people who destroyed society. I prefer hermit mode.
Not if we turn them into fertilizer
Step 1 Cottagecore Step 2 grow three sisters for the food pantry… Step 3 invite people over to help with garden Step 4 Build Community Step 5 Make sure community can survive without you Step 6 Wait a long time Step 7 Solarpunk?
I think this is how it works
gardens r great!!! <3
