Heroes Not Zombies

A few years ago, during a visit to friends in South Africa I saw these nests hanging from this tree. They are weaver birds. The nests they build hang like balls from the branches, and the entrances are at the bottom. How strange is that? You’d think that even if they didn’t make open nests like most birds, that they’d have an entrance in one of the side walls, a bit like the nesting boxes you can buy and fix to a post or tree in your garden, but no, these birds build this unique design of a nest with the entrance at the bottom. How they don’t all fall out remains a bit of a mystery to me, but I’m sure some ornithologist could explain it to me.

However, it wasn’t just the unique design of the nest which struck me, it was how many there were all hanging together in the one tree. I’ve found several birds nests in the garden here over the years. The great vine which used to cover the high stone wall (which has since collapsed, taking the vine with it) used to be a bit of a community hub for nests. But the mulberry tree and the buddleia bushes have only ever had single nests in them. There is a noisy flock of sparrows living in a mass of wild creepers and ivy on the wall of an old barn just along the lane a bit, but I haven’t managed to actually see their nests. However, I bet they are in there.

So, I’ve seen different densities of communities of nests and that got me wondering about the whole concept of community.

What communities do we humans live in?

I live in a pretty small village in rural South West France. I used to live in a moderately sized town in Central Scotland, and before that I lived in the great city of Edinburgh. Each of those environments enabled both different lifestyles and the opportunities to belong to very different communities.

This pandemic with all the restrictions in movement, and the months of confinement to our own homes has highlighted a couple of important things about communities, and I was thinking about them when I looked at this photo this morning.

One is that we can think of communities as the active, live, web of relationships in our lives. Whether we’ve been connecting over zoom, messenger apps, email, telephone or by letter, we’ve been more connected recently to our communities of relationships than ever before.

When we live in one place and work in another, our time, attention and energies are divided between different communities by geography. My daily commute on the train between home and work used to take over an hour and I used that time as a sort of personal time between the home/family community and the work one. Maybe there was even a kind of commuter community on the train. Certainly over the years I became familiar with a particular number of fellow travellers, but I didn’t really interact with them, so I probably can’t call them a community.

But that leads me to the second insight which the pandemic has made clear. We all share this one small planet. The virus knows no boundaries, no borders. The decisions taken in one country affect millions of people living in other countries. Scientists around the world began to co-operate more intensely and more openly than perhaps ever before. The scientific community, you could say, helped the scientists to discover new ideas, to learn lessons from each other and to problem solve together at speeds never seen before.

The truth is, that just as the “self” is in fact multiple, so in the “community”. We exist within a multilayered hyper-connected web of communities….plural. Maybe that realisation is a reasonable source of hope for the future. Because if we all retreat into separate, closed communities, we humans, are going to fail. The pandemic could be the least of our problems. If we don’t work together to deal with diversity loss, climate change and pollution, then we aren’t going to survive as any kind of community at all.

Well, in fact, I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful because I’ve seen the distributed global communities of personal and professional relationships thrive during these lockdowns. We can learn from that. Yes, maybe even home-working has started to revive some local, physical communities too, and maybe it’s starting to change the nature of larger communities in cities too, but, in particular I’m hopeful because we’ve rediscovered, or re-valued the importance of our communities of relationships and we now have the tools to enable us to grow them.

Maybe we are on the cusp of major change here…..maybe we are about to learn, or re-learn, the importance of understanding that reality is about us living together….sharing one planet, sharing one planet with all forms of life, sharing one planet with one environment.