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21 -
unstone 2009 continued
By Rupert Meese (click link above to visit his blog)
I’ve just got back from a week at Unstone Grange, a large old ramshackle house in Derbyshire that was host to this year’s “Facilitating Ourselves”. Six days of community building using the model laid out by M. Scott Peck in his book “The Different Drum”. I want to answer straight away the question “what is community building (sounds a bit dull)?” The condensed answer is that community building is the attempt to create a community of people without compromising their individually. This does indeed sound a bit dull, but how you get there, and what happens when you do is absolutely crackling. It is singly the toughest most uncomfortable, most demanding and most deeply satisfying activity that I have ever been part of.
“MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES,
BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS,
CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND
RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.”
BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS,
CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND
RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.”
As the possibly apocryphal ad’ for Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition runs.
There were nineteen of us at Unstone Grange. Nineteen individuals with 189 relationships between us. Many of those relationships were already well established, many were completely new. All were forged fresh over those six days.
Our ordinary notion of a community is a group tied together by a common ideal. That the ideal bonds the community is normally key. Each individual submits to whatever the community ideal is, and, to the extent that the ideal is loose and undemanding, then the individual keeps much of their identity but is only loosely bonded with the community. If the ideal is vigorous and demanding then the community is strong but the individual must submit much of their identity in order to belong. And example of this might be a cult where there are accusations from outside of brain washing as the individuality of the cult members is subjugated to the ideals of the group’s leader. So what happens when there is no common ideal to submit to in the name of community? Chaos? Actually, yes, at first. For one thing there can’t be a leader. A leader, a benign dictator, could only create a binding ideal. The only commitment from