We Were Meant to Live in Community
By Z Zoccolante
(Listen to the audio of this wonderful post in the blue box below!)

We were meant to live in community. Life tells us so. It offers tender, little lessons like a gift pushed slowly across the table in our direction.

When I was in Hawaii visiting my family, we all rode around in my brother’s magic bus. We toted our bathing suits, while the two dogs car surfed. My brother’s adorable kid insisted I sit next to him, turned his huge almost black eyes to me and said, “What do you want to talk about?”

One of my favorite times of the trip was a rainy day when we piled in the bus and decided to venture out to the tide pools. The dogs ran ahead sloshing through the high tide ravines. We put our phones in plastic baggies, carried our backpacks high on our backs, and wadded with little bootie reef walkers through the rivers. On tiptoes, the highest ice water came up to my bikini line.

The rain poured down over us, and over the water, making the surface dance as though someone were pressing piano keys in drips and drops. The dogs bounded ahead, jumping and swimming, their heads visible above the surface.

My dad and I were at the end of the pack. “It’s a bummer it’s not sunny,” he said. But I didn’t mind. I’ve always loved swimming in the rain. “No, this is awesome,” I said, “I feel like we’re on an Amazon tour, except there’s nothing to kill us.”

When we’d crossed the last river and set our things down on the lava rock, I walked around in the huge freezing tide pool. With the rain falling down around me, I stretched my arms out and tilted my head to the sky, and was overwhelmed with emotion . . . for this beautiful place, for this adventure with my family, for those I loved who weren’t with me to share this experience.

I thought of a moment in Blade Runner, fondly called the “Tears in the Rain” speech. It takes place on the top of the roof, in the pouring rain. The character turns and gives his final monologue before his death, “. . . All those moments will be lost like tears in the rain.”

Crying in the rain is like that, everything blends and bleeds together, and maybe life is like this – a blending of sorrows and joys, hope and lostness, fear and faith.

My dad tells us a story about an Eskimo community in the Artic who take their whole village with them every year, hundreds of people and kids and all, and go out to hunt the whale. They have tiny boats, spear the fish, and as a community drag it up onto the ice where it’s prayed over, skinned and chopped, and then prayed over again as the carcass is thrown into the depth of the sea. The entire community will live on the whale for the next year.

After the tide pools, we drive to a different beach in the magic bus, use the tepid indoor showers, and comb out our hair before dinner plans. My brother’s dog sits in the drivers seat like a person, staring at the bathroom, waiting for him to return. My brother says it’s great having the family together – the pack – and that I act as the mellower between.

I think about the pack, how my mom watches her grandson, how we all have togetherness and space. Things feel easier in community, safer, more supportive. There’s someone to count on. There’s someone there. You don’t feel as though you’re going through life alone. Community is like a web, and we are stronger together.

Later, I talk to a friend who had a hard day and says I’d be great to have a hug. But, we’re an ocean away. In community, we’d get that hug desire met immediately.

There’s a reason why animals is nature pair up or pack up. There’s a reason the Eskimos hunt as a complete tribe. We can do more together. Community is the way we were designed to live, with people who become our home. Because home, as someone told me recently, isn’t a place but a feeling.

Home is a feeling.

With Love,

Z :)