Community, Homecoming, and the Commitment to Silliness

I wrote this back in October and it's been sitting on my computer unedited.  Thought I would go through it one more time and toss it out there for the world to see.

 

Last weekend I attended my Homecoming at William and Mary.  Homecoming has been part of my Fall Break almost every year since I graduated, and this year was the big Fifth Year Reunion.  I missed the official Fifth Year Reunion activities because my friends and I created our own reunion activities, and they were open to all classes, not just the stellar Class of 2006.  Most of the activities involved walking around and eating and some improv comedy as my soul will always me a member of the College’s Improvisational Theatre.  It’s a time to catch up with close friends, maybe see people that have completely dropped off the face of the earth, and create new relationships thought unimaginable as an undergraduate.

As a seasonal employee, I usually don’t work for most of the months of October and November.  Having that chunk of time without any responsibilities allows me to get back to Virginia for Homecoming.  I love Homecoming, as the Northern Rockies can be lonely place on the alumni front (that is changing as CB and RP now live in Montana), so Homecoming is not only a time to see friends, but also an opportunity to recharge my batteries on a culture that’s nonexistent in my corner of the Intermountain West.  We had two cars driving back from brunch on Sunday.  At a stoplight, CH, in the car in front of us, starts waving at us in the car behind.  AS waves back.  I wave at CH.  Light turns green.  We all continue waving as we’re driving down the road.  BK and MW, the other passengers, stick their hands out waving.  Two cars, five hands waving.  We drove the four miles back to the house parade waving and giggling like idiots the whole time.  We received more double takes than return waves.  I miss the effort that goes into fairly frivolous things like the crazy adventure/Capture-the-Flag/Live-Action-Role-Playing/scavenger-hunt/outdoor-theater productions from Random People Camping Trips and now a livelihood for two friends as The AVAdventure.  There is a commitment to silliness that I don’t find to be as strong with my social circles here in the West.  I’m not saying I don’t love my friends out here; they’re just different.  I’m different.  I’ve always felt trapped between two worlds in the West.  On the East Coast, I feel like some woodsman emerging into a modern world.  In the mountains, I feel like a stodgy academic.  Of course my social circles would be different in both places.

The Commitment to Silliness community is something I miss, but it’s too early in the narrative to refer to them that way.  On the Friday of Homecoming, I was taking in the campus, quietly, by myself.  I had carpooled down with AS who had official business to attend to, while I just wandered.  At one point, I even wandered into Swem Library and worked on transcribing some notes from my Wilderness First Responder class.  Yeah, who goes to the Library to do some work during Homecoming?  Not just any Homecoming either, but Fifth Year Reunion Homecoming.  The solo wandering got me thinking about community.  The sense of community I shared at William and Mary is unlike any other community.  I couldn’t walk more than a hundred yards without seeing someone I knew, and here I was, back on campus, surrounded by total strangers.  I hope they know my sense of community on campus, but in their own context, amongst their own friends, but my community has all graduated, all eight classes I had spent at least one year with on campus.  Community is the people! hit me while I sat alone on the UC Terrace, a campus location WW and I had ruled with a benevolent iron fist when we should have been working on our thesisses (thesisi?).  Community is the people.  The community isn’t the place, it’s the people.  Community is the way those individual people make you feel, and the way you feel just being amongst those people as a group.  The College of William and Mary in Virginia was just the original location our community inhabited.  The campus I stood on in 2011 is still home to a vibrant community of young and the young at heart, but that geographic space is a husk my community left after graduation.  Homecoming is not coming home to this place, but it’s coming home to these people.  Homecoming is returning to that collective spark we created years ago.  We have taken that glow with us every place we have been since then.  Not to say that my friends from college have no commitment to serious things or that my Intermountain West friends have no silliness, but that’s what I miss, and return to, is the community Commitment to Silliness.

But what about love of place and how that fits into community? took me aback.  Love of Place is a concept I have been spreading through my work as an Instructor with the Yellowstone Association Institute.  How Love of Place is necessary to saving and preserving not just wilderness and green spaces, but communities and historic places.  But earlier I was smacked with how community is just the people.  Community is a group of people with a commonality tethering them together.  In many communities, that tether is a place.  My William and Mary community is tethered to that campus.  What amazing work to be a part of the Office of Admissions as that group is hand-picking members of wonderful new communities every year.  My Yellowstone community is tethered to Yellowstone National Park.  Love of Place can be included in creating community.  Community is how a group of people makes you feel, how you feel amongst those people, the connection between people.  All of that can be applied to a place; how a place makes you feel, how you feel in a place, your connection with a place.  Community and to commune have the same root.  To commune is to be in intimate communication or rapport and that can be absolutely true of place.  The passion to protect a place emerges from including places into our sense of community.  Enlarging “the boundaries of the community to the soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land,” is what Aldo Leopold referred to as the Land Ethic.  When a place attains the same position of people, we fight to protect them.  Transferring that into the political arena, we start to give places and environments and ecosystems the same rights as people.  If a corporation can have the same rights as a person, then why not an ecosystem?

The true beauty of community is transcendence of the tether.  Most of my William and Mary community is no longer on campus.  My Yellowstone community hops all over the world like a bunch of Mexican jumping beans (that feels racist, but the beans are seed pods with a moth larva inside and the jumping is the larva trying to get the pod into the shade, they’re found in Mexico).   The ability of a community to transcend the tether is directly related to the strength of the community.  All communities should get to the point where they can transcend the tether, so the community is no longer tied to a place, but to each other independent of anything else.