'Diggers and Dreamers' by Pamela

These days we try to create community on computers.

I will imagine us all sitting warming our hands and cheeks around a fire on the screen. It is glowing orange and red on a cold and windy black night. We snuggle up to our mouse to ‘google search’ a wide view of a starry sky.

Sitting around a real shared fire was more my idea of community when I moved to the countryside almost twenty years ago…and we did. You know, with wood and streaming eyes from the smoke. Well, not on cold and windy black nights…in fact only on warm and balmy summer nights. Survival did not depend on whether the chocolate had melted properly around the bananas wrapped in aluminium foil (placed carefully in the glowing embers of the fire). That was after the chicken thighs had eventually been cooked in the indoor kitchen oven. It had taken the barbecue too long to either burn to a cinder or leave the centre pink and raw.

The ideals of ‘back to nature’ were always pitched against the reasons human beings had invented technology to make most things easier. I discovered that young, fit and full of energy were the main requirements to living sustainably.

Our young earnest couple who lived in a caravan in the middle of a large field had a vision of converting the world to pumpkins ( they came from Australia) They wanted to fill the field with pumpkins and make pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, pumpkin smoothies etc. to sell at festivals and eventually have their own Pumpkin Restaurant. He then tragically had a stroke, in his early thirties, becoming partly paralysed.. Pumpkin Dream Ended. So did their marriage. Like I said, young fit and full of energy is the main requirement to ‘working with nature’.

Any age, shape and fitness can sit on the computer and talk to the rest of the world. As my teenage children do…even on a warm and balmy summer evening when I would much prefer they came and ate melted chocolate on mushy hot bananas.

When they were younger, the chocolate was a strong enough pull to have them sitting out and enjoying poking a stick into the fire, or even better melting a pink marshmallow in the flames, so the outside went dark and crunchy and the inside was soft and gooey. But not now, as teenagers, addiction to face book, tweeting etc, are even stronger than addiction to sugar.

So why am I telling you this slightly cynical tale?

I guess I have become more of a realist since my dream to ‘live in the country’ began twenty or so years ago. 

My new husband and I (both in our mid thirties) researched many communities around Great Britain, from a book called ‘Diggers and Dreamers’ The title was to show that there were different kinds of people attempting to make new pioneering ways of life Those who tend to focus on the here and now practical things that need doing (diggers) and those who see the vision and hold the dream of new possibilities (dreamers). I was definitely in the dreaming section. Fortunately husband is enough of a digger for a balance.

How many times have I crashed from the idealism of how humanity might be to the pain and grief of how we actually are?

The fights over where the fire was to be built, by whom, from what and where?

Power politics and fixed opinions create just as much conflict within a community of environmentalists in rural West Wales  as well…anywhere else. It did eventually lead me to train as a mediator in my endeavour to see how we can respect and meet each others needs. It had not been my idea of idyllic ‘life in the country’ for war to be waged over where the ducks can splosh around without putting diverse wildlife at risk. 

In fact, I would say that the last twenty years of living the dream  have slowly but imperceptibly transformed this dreamer. I hope not into a cynic, but one who has developed a reality check of time, patience, endurance, and practical application required to do just about anything.  

We need each other, to overcome why the google search for ‘community sitting under a starry night’ ended up with a ‘no connection…please try again’.

Even computer communities have their problems.  

[Click here to visit the Diggers and Dreamers website if you are interested in exploring intentional communities and alterntaive living in the UK ]