When I was growing up, my family moved every summer. September found us always in a new town, starting at a new school, learning our way around a new community. Community: What I stepped in and out of. Community: The people who were there before I came, and stayed after I left. Community: “Them”. Never “Us.”

I came to Diana’s Grove for leadership training. When people talked about the Grove “community” as if it were a living, breathing thing, when they talked about how much they loved that community – well, I didn’t understand.

I understood about loving individual people. I didn’t understand how you could love a group. Particularly a group that flowed like water – every year new faces arriving, old faces leaving. Even within the community of the year, some faces very brightly-lit, some in shadows, some never seen at all – distant supportive presences of email and energy.

How do you love a group without loving every individual member of that group? Without even knowing some of them? It seemed very abstract to me. And, ultimately, I told myself it didn’t matter. I could learn about leadership without loving the community. I could learn to serve the group from a place that was ethical, engaged, intentional, committed… love didn’t have to be a part of the picture.

So I learned. And years passed. And I came to really value community as a structure. I came to see how having a stated intention for the work we were doing together, and agreements about the behavior and types of interaction that would support that intention, created a space in which that work could really happen. I saw how intentional community made a space in which I could be, ironically, more fully myself – a unique individual – not in rebellion against group standards but in service to them.

I saw how doing personal work within a community was the best, and maybe the only, way to see the fruits of that work. To test its sincerity. It was easy enough to live my values all alone, and in theory. It was much more challenging to learn about and refine my commitment to my beliefs – my integrity – in anger, in frustration, in respectful disagreement, in the midst of hurt feelings. When my edges rub up against someone else’s, those edges are both smoothed and defined.

"I realized that they had faith in me, and I in them, simply because we’d agreed to have that faith.

To see and uphold each other’s potential, to help each other believe the promises we’d made to ourselves."

I came to see community as a valuable tool. A mirror and support to my work on myself and my desire to serve others. I often thought it was beautiful – the sounds of the community singing together in ritual, faces lit around the fire, moments of brave sharing or compassionate support. I would find myself watching and thinking “Look at them. Look at what they make together. They’re beautiful.” But still. Always “Them.” Never “Us.”

Formal leadership training, at the Grove, builds to a “Rites of Passage” year – a year of intensive, mentored service and support to the community in the company of a small team of colleagues. The year itself culminates in a ritual, created by the community, to honor the work of the Rites team. That event is open to the public and, while most of the people who attend are members of the Mystery School community or are there specifically because of their personal connection with one of the team members, there are always a few people who step into the community for the first, and sometimes the last, time that weekend.

I think I may have finally understood community, that living, breathing thing that is bigger than the sum of its parts, when I walked into the ritual they created for my team. Walking into a space transformed by their hands into a fairy forest full of roses, I realized that people I did not even know had worked this hard, for me. Some knew me well, and cared about me personally, by many others had done this work for me, and my teammates, simply because we were members of the community they had chosen, if only for one weekend, to be a part of.

I realized that they had faith in me, and I in them, simply because we’d agreed to have that faith. To see and uphold each other’s potential, to help each other believe the promises we’d made to ourselves.

And so, last November, I found myself sitting outside in the cold dark, watching through the windows as the Great Room was transformed by the magic of candlelight, readied for the last ritual of the year. I saw shapes – I didn’t need to see faces – moving gently through the growing glow. And I fell in love. “Look at what we make together,” I thought. “We’re beautiful.”

“Look at Us.”