Last night, I texted a priest I know to ask if I could come along to one of her services, (or congregations? I’m not yet sure of the terminology at the Wild Monastery). She said I’d be welcome to join any time, and asked what I was “hoping for”. The question made me squeeze my eyebrows together and stretch my neck back to look at the air. She’d theologically stumped me with a simple question. I was impressed (& also terrified to have a priest’s eyes on my soul over WhatsApp).
I couldn’t believe that she had no idea what I was hoping for!?!??! I was (perhaps stupidly) going to her for the answers, not for the implicit question to be turned back on me. Don’t priests just somehow know these kinds of things (what we’re hoping for)? Aren’t we all hoping for the same thing, really? Or, actually, who’s even walking around here hoping for anything at all nowadays? Need I remind you of the environmental and political apocalypse we’re living ourselves through.
“You tell me, please!” I wanted to message back to the priest. But I didn’t (obviously, I gathered myself out of the abyss and composed a well thought through and also casual sounding response, which I will savour until the end of the newsletter– although tbh it’s just a cryptic version of “plz just love me and think I’m spiritually advanced, priesty”).
Anyway, the point is that I realised, when I was looking at the air in my bedroom, that I didn’t actually really know what I was hoping for. It’s bit embarrassing, and also annoying… I mean, come on, I thought the whole deal of turning to religion was not knowing what you’re looking for. You’re lost. I’m lost! Human life is fucked up weird, it’s hard and I’m lost. My Lord? R U dere?
I wasn’t going to get sobby or snarky with the priest though. Save that for the wide open arms of the bedroom air.
So, say (I did say), what if I channel my confused energy into answering her very good question?
What am I hoping for?
The first word that popped into my head was community. I wanted community, but I also thought it sounded trite and empty, and wondered why. Face it Arran, you have community, you actually do, so don’t reach consumptively past it, that’s the empty feeling. Real community may not have ended up being like what it sounded it might be, but you better believe it’s there.
I’m interested in what’s going on with that, what the buckle and wobble is around the suggestion of community? What the weird dullness is in the chorus: “Community!”; a repetition of anguish; a funny space. The word feels like it’s getting a glossy floss to it. Simultaneously easier to talk about, quicker to the tongue, and yet harder to feel genuine about. A bubbling of mixed-up-yearning-and-disappointment…like the bottom has fallen out.
Does anyone else worry that “community” is becoming a consumer product? With allotments becoming subscription services at more than 7x the price of council plots the same size (plus extra add on services available, like watering and weeding, when you go away on holiday), I do. Apparently “real community” is included in your subscription fee though. With this assurance, in the form of a pleasant infographic, the simplicity of signing up, is appealing. Or at least, it certainly seems slicker than organising and fighting for more council owned land.
This is the point where I get my rocking chair out into the front garden, pull at my hair and scream “you can’t buy community” at passers-by. Some spitting too.
The thing is, I Iove community, I want it, I have it, I want it, where is it, ugh, there it is, oh bye its slipping away, come back, what do I need to do exactly… I don’t know! All I got taught how to do was work and click! kerching! So wait, you’re saying I need to teach myself this one, hold my own process for finding out what will satisfy me as “community”. Hold my own process. Holy fuck. Religion where are yo!?
Okay priest you got me… My looking to religion is an answer to my own question: I don’t have a process to understand why I’m not fully satisfied by my “community”. Religion might mean I have to try figure that one out. Goes in. Gulps, cracks knuckles, opens substack after a year.
I know I want community, and unless you’re a miserable sack of potatoes, you probably want it and/or have it too. (Saying that, if you don’t “want community” or are a miserable sack of potatoes I’d actually love to hear from you because in not wanting it you might be able to tell me what is meant by it). AKA is what’s there what’s wanted? and why is there this slippery feeling of having and not having community, yearning and also looking past it?
The pervasive feeling that I’ve had over the past 10 years is that most people want what they call community, but have lost or are losing touch with what it is because it is being eroded by the Mechanica of whatever this culture and economy we live in is. (Is it still called Late-Stage Capitalism? I feel like I’m going to keep saying that phrase and somebody is going to have to cough and awkwardly explain to me that I’ve missed an update in the conceptualisation of our times while I’ve been in the shimmering vapours of the rural megalopolis that is Totnes).
I guess the thing is that often we feel like we live in a world where the good got gentrified and the accessible life of quality and connection and love and low rent and actually priceless objects is already gone or taken or ruined. Just as your little baby lungs screamed air and blood, the chippie closed down and now it’s a pop up events space, the working class pub went bust and now it’s an organic restaurant that you get taken to for your Christmas work dinner and you’re very lucky and its very good braised celaric, and tbh baby your part of the problem... It’s all sort of there, but gone, So get your spirit in ya, oh lord!
Okay but maybe also part of the experience (a consequence of gentrification) is that I’m not as practiced at seeing the “formation” signs of community and protecting, valuing and nurturing them in their becoming and goodening. I’ve felt a tendency in myself to value and nurture what has already been made good and becomed rather than the community that hasn’t been gazed at, the pre and proto Community with a capital C (B.C.) but before the miracles have struck (i.e. a random sack of un-tuned beings) not yet digestible or appreciable, more just dysfunctional happenings, but really the tendrils of goodness that no one will plait until someone does. Plait not as a capitalistic gathering together of relationships into a product or an asset, but instead the loose love of yeah here we do this and so what, no this is not replicatable and chargable, no this is not an opportunity.
So deepen in?
I’d like you to meet one specific bastion of community that stands before me in the formed and wrecked land I live in. It’s for sure already changing from what it once was (price hikes come in the most unusual places), but at least in it I can see what it once was and begin to trace what I hope for.
I find myself saying this every few months and I’ll say it again. My favourite thing about living in Totnes is Swip Swap. Swip Swap is nothing more and nothing less than a group chat with 537 people in it where our “community” buys, sells and donates their stuff.
Whether it’s an ipod nano from 2007, a car, velvet platforms, an electric blanket, nicotine gum, a chimney pot, or a free mop (used only once). Swip Swap has it.
But, perhaps you are actually looking for a £500 Bronze Cowbell? Or this orange hat/scarf/snood combo for £5 that the mum in About A Boy probably wore, or FREE bins with holes drilled in, or a Harmonium / Pump Organ, again free, or an indoor water feature, an unopened herbal headlice treatment (well out of date but she’ll bet it’s still effective), Fresh Rosehips, 29 vegan omega three tablets, or a ceramic bambi in excellent vintage condition except the butterfly is missing. The world is your oyster.
I joked with a friend the other day that people in this town, instead of scrolling the news or Instagram, make their cup of tea of an evening and settle down to catch up on Swip Swap. I certainly do and hands down my favourite offering of the summer was a bust of August Caesar made of plaster, a replica (thank god?), for £20.
But maybe you’re not looking to buy anything, maybe your calling is picking up a request or two… maybe you are there to assist or provide: A lift, a Jane Austen Novel, earphone buds, a bike lock, an errand, a tens machine.
One day, I put two posts up together: one selling a hiking backpack for £10 and one asking to borrow a van for a couple of hours to move my wardrobe to my new home. Someone got in touch with me who wanted the backpack and would exchange it for the use of her van.
I said yes, drove over to hers and we had this unforgettable time warp moment where she handed over the keys to me and an obvious wave of uncertainty poured into her eyes. To be honest, I couldn’t really believe that she was standing there in the benign and sickly sweet daylight giving some stranger with a backpack the keys to her vehicle, showing them how to jimmy the clutch and which door to not open to stop it getting stuck, without asking for anything precious of mine as a hold. She was just going off of pure middle class Totnesian trust. I thought she was slightly mad but I wanted real community, so I wanted it to work. I moved the wardrobe, I returned her van. My friend Tammie came with me to drop it off and they knew each other, the relief on the van lender’s face, compounded with Tammie’s familiarly sent us all into a laughing fit.
That’s not the only adventure Swip Swap has offered Tammie and I. When she needed a cabinet for her room, we went to pick one up from a farmhouse on the outskirts of town. When we got out of the car, a man rounded the corner with a chainsaw, “look what I just got!” he shouted at us excitedly, waving the chainsaw in the air. We laughed nervously with him about his new toy, assuming he was another swip swapper picking up a purchase. It was only when he asked if we wanted to give it a go and fell some Laylandii on the driveway (I did) that we realised: he was who we’d come to see about the cabinet. We somehow ended up on a guided tour of the homely but also empty feeling farmhouse and it’s land while he gave us the hard & wholesome sell on renting a room there. More than an hour later, we fitted the cabinet in my tiny egg of a car (just) and drove away, fairly nonplussed, enjoying another post swip swap giggle. The relief of leaving a strange man’s company with our lives had never been so hilarious.
That was a strange day, and there have been stranger happenings. Tammie once put out a request for a physio elastic band and one turned up in an envelope with her name on at her mum’s house in South Brent, a town 8 or 9 miles away. From who? We’ll never know. She has not solved or attempted to solve this mystery because it is too perfect a Swip Swap tale, as it is.
& it was inevitable that this last one would happen at some point: I ended up trying to buy a pair of staple guns off of someone I’d matched with on hinge. We both knew. We both said nothing.
I want to clarify that the people on this group don’t know eachother, or at least they don’t know that they know eachother. It’s not a social group, and yet, it’s Totnes, so Swip Swap makes it feel like we are all going to the same uni.
It’s such an accurate a representation of something about this town. Visibilising the number of people letting go of their crystals, sheep skins and linens. Countless pairs of vevo barefoots grace the chat. It’s cringy and also makes me sigh in the way I’d sigh at my parents. As long as everyone remembers to DM their replies, we are one big happy Swip Swap family, everything else is beneath the surface.
So, I’ve got my community dear priest. It turns out I’m seeking something more. How to hold myself in it. How to not just transact, how to protect. When you have community whispering all around you and late stage capitalism, or something else, also grinding at your front door, you have to actually learn how to reimbue what you touch with value and values, so that it doesn’t get eaten up into the world of subscription services. I can choose to do this with Swip Swap or not, I can see it as a place to get stuff and make some cash off my stuff, or I can see it as a place for redistribution, remembering often enough to give some things away for free or for a donation to a charity. To pick up a request even though I’m busy. To engage with it with my values rather than let the defaults of dominant culture seep in.
Thank you for reading. Please write back xx
p.s.
I think I just I want to understand what Christianity is in the context of modern life and current ecology and culture. It would be nice to have a place to go to to pray or meditate with people or be in nature in a spiritual way or hear teachings, and it would be nice to have something to read to learn more about how to hold myself well and kindly and actively in the world. I don’t really know what I’m hoping for but I want to get out of the trap of being busy and distracted most of the time and make more choices about how to be in the world in a spiritually connected way.