Nº 4 – Living in a Community

Wednesday, 8th April 2020

On 1 March, in Germany, when I was getting on the train, the first patients were being put onto ventilators. On 2 March, the morning I arrived in Lisbon, the Covid-19 new coronavirus was detected for the first time in Portugal. These events had nothing to do with me, but the virus produced one of those moments of global impact that cause us to remember where we were when it all began.

I am a writer, and most of the time I live in the Tamera community in the municipality of Odemira. I have been travelling back and forth between Germany and Portugal for almost 17 years and have recently started to enjoy making the journey more and more frequently by train and bus. Usually, when I arrive in Portugal, I have my return trip planned for two or three months later. But this time, it’s different. I’ll be staying here for a while. I’m beginning to feel that this is changing my sense of time. I am. I simply am. Here and now. I’m not planning my next lectures and trips, there are no workshops, there is no audience waiting for me, there is no longer the hustle and bustle of travelling. There is simply a Being-here. A moment suspended between the past and the future.

I’m working on things that still remain to be done, I’m helping in the garden, surfing the net, writing to friends I haven’t spoken to for a long time, going for long walks and watching the light and life around me. Clouds, trees, hills: their shapes and outlines have become clearer. And I find that this is one of the changes that the Covid-19 virus brings us: it makes things that were already here even more visible to us. Dictatorships become more totalitarian. The lives of the poor, of refugees, itinerant workers, street children and slum dwellers, become even more unbearable. The same goes for the relationships we have with the people we live with. For all the fears that we have managed to ignore. As well as for the regenerating impulses of Nature: see how Nature is catching its breath!

I am very happy to be living in a community! There are more of us confined together than in most other cases because our homes are bigger. We can easily isolate ourselves from the outside. But here too, amongst us, many of the habits we previously adopted to compensate for discontent or to avoid conflict have disappeared. In a small family, this might provoke a sense of suffocation and resentment, but here we are happy that we have each other. We talk about the current situation, we share fears and questions, enriching ourselves. Of course, we have the advantage of having learned to deal with conflicts and difficulties in a constructive way. Of course, we are also faced with the question of how we will survive this financially. But we will find a way. All together. That is how things work here.

Our global network has become closer: our friends from regions in crisis around the globe, from slums in Kenya, Brazil and the Philippines, from the Middle East and Central America, are reporting horrific situations caused by poverty, oppression, the violence of state forces and the fear of the virus. They are helping their regions with what they have learned about the creation of communities, about conflict resolution, about energy and food self-sufficiency. And we are moved by what our indigenous friends have to say: Corona is the voice of the Earth asking humanity for restraint.

It is about our experiences in these areas that I intend to write during the coming weeks: fear and trust; community life and conflict resolution; our place in a global system that’s falling apart; cohesion and the voice of the Earth.