By Chris Roth
In the past year alone, my tiny home caught fire, my laptop computer was flooded by hot water, a family member was hospitalized, a former community-mate had a stroke, I lost (temporarily) my sole source of income, the swath of older trees nearest to me was clearcut, chronic physical conditions became more obviously chronic, my favorite childhood sport was beset by scandal, plastic straws got popular again, belligerently this time, the foundations of democracy weakened further, and statistics about climate disruption, species loss, and the prospects for a livable human future on the planet became ever more dire. My home community lost some members, and some of those who stayed saw their intimate relationships end. On top of it all, despite a few bright spots, I saw some of the best minds of my generation destroyed by civilizational madness (or at least their insights, wisdom, and compassion largely drowned out in the modern cyber-dominated fray).
After enough decades on earth, it can be easy to conclude that:
● Love is always a prelude to loss.
● Success is a temporary stage on the path to failure.
● Wholeness is followed inevitably by shattering.
The nature of that loss, that failure, that shattering can differ from instance to instance. Sometimes the pieces of what was formerly whole may need to be let lie; the brokenness is a signal to set off on a different path. Sometimes the pieces can be picked up and what is broken can be mended, perhaps even made stronger. Sometimes the reality falls somewhere in between, or may in fact depend on how we respond to the situation.
There’s another way to look at things too:
● Every love flows from loss.
● Every success is built on failure.
● Everything that’s whole emerges from brokenness.
From this perspective, loss, failure, and shattering are essential preconditions to the emergence of new beginnings. This way of experiencing the world can feel equally true, equally powerful.
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That may be no accident: human beings, primates in general, and most other mammals—in fact most life forms as they exist today—owe their flourishing to the most cataclysmic shattering ever to befall life on earth: the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that brought an end to the Cretaceous, wiping out more than 99.9999 percent of all living organisms on earth, and 75 percent of all species entirely (including the dinosaurs, who up until then had kept our mammalian ancestors in check). Without that unimaginable event of near-total destruction of life, I would not be around to read “The Day the Dinosaurs Died” in The New Yorker online (March 29, 2019), nor would Douglas Preston be around to write about it, nor would paleontologist Robert DePalma be around to decode that day’s events by exploring the KT layer at a dig in North Dakota. Nor would any of the trappings of civilization that allow us to be creating and you to be reading this magazine exist, let alone the intentional communities and other cooperative projects that are this journal’s focus.
Life obviously “picked up the pieces” after that asteroid impact, though it’s taken 66 million years for one species (ours) to achieve such an astounding level of success that we (like the dinosaurs, perhaps, before us) can be said to “rule the earth.” In fact, our success as a species is so massive that it’s starting to look a whole lot like failure. Our success is precipitating catastrophic collapse in the earth’s self-regulating mechanisms and our own life support systems, triggering the sixth great extinction and unprecedented climate chaos whose effects we are only starting to experience. Everything that we have loved is in real danger of being lost; every illusion of wholeness is in danger of being shattered. If this were happening only in our personal lives, that would be one thing. That it is happening on a species-wide, planetary scale is something else altogether.
Loss, failure, and brokenness is looking like the foundation on which we as human beings need to build whatever comes next—or perhaps, rather, the ground from which new possibility will spring, since we will likely need to be guided (by our connections to the whole) rather than to guide (by imposing preconceived notions on a world that is spiraling out of our control, out of our grasp, the more we try to dominate it).
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Contemplating a time scale of millions of years, or assuming a planet-wide perspective, can be enlightening but can also serve as an escape from dealing with the reality that is right in front of us. We can look at the “big picture” all we want, without necessarily deriving wisdom about how it applies to the practical decisions we make in our own lives—how we ourselves live and relate when our focus returns to the only scale that we can really comprehend: that of our own human lives together.
In other words: how does this all relate to life in cooperative culture?
The same patterns that affect individuals, our species as a whole, and our planet manifest themselves in groups. The experience of loss, of failure, of brokenness is not significantly different when it happens within a group than when it is confined to an individual, a few individuals, or a family—or than when it is shared with a large portion of humanity or the biosphere. And our options for response are similar as well—although we may have substantially better odds of responding effectively in concert with (or with the support of) others, compared with our chances of dealing with these setbacks alone.
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For each of us, certain types of shattering can be particularly potent. For some in the modern world, intimate relationships hold the most joy and disappointment; they form the map, the home ground, on which happiness is measured in this time of widespread fragmentation. Communitarians may feel the same kinds of impact, the same swings between connection and disillusionment, from a broader range of relationships: within their home group; with their group as a whole; with their community land; and with certain projects and work about which they are passionate. Non-communitarians can feel those same strong attachments to certain groups, places, and vocations too—the difference is that in community, they more often come in a bundle, amplifying the potential for both wholeness and brokenness.
My own path through life has had more to do with purpose than with intimate connections. With few exceptions, my relationship with myself, the world around me, and how my own particular qualities, skills, interests, and passions can contribute to (or at least attune me to) a greater whole has been far more of a guidepost in my relative sense of fulfillment than whether I have managed to meld interpersonally with someone else. As a consequence, I am especially vulnerable to outside circumstances that can throw a wrench into my accustomed ways of fulfilling my particular purpose.
The cessation of a work role or project I am involved in (within or outside of community) can be for me not merely an inconvenience, a temporary economic setback, or a logistical hurdle to overcome, but instead a minor or major existential crisis. I am unclear on why this is, although the first times I remember feeling unexcited about life and unclear about my place in it (a generalized “blah,” at least in the moment) were coming home as a freshman in high school with nothing apparently better to do immediately after school than watch an hour of bad television. Fortunately, I soon discovered purpose and a tribe through the cross-country and track teams, and through connections with equally out-of-place-and-time fellow students immersed in academia. But this sense of purpose, connection, and fulfillment seem to have been absolutely dependent on activity and on my roles. Since then, the most difficult times in my life have happened when my accustomed work and roles have fallen away or been taken away, either by others or by circumstance.
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Enough time has passed since one such instance of loss that I seem able, finally, to write about it. In doing so, I’ve discovered that reflecting on it helps me come to grips, as well, with similar experiences of loss and change that both preceded and followed it.
“Seizing the Torch” (Communities #185) described the Fir Ridge community’s ordeal with its charismatic founder, whom most of us experienced as wielding unhealthy amounts of power before his departure. But that founder’s eviction did not mark the end of the group’s dysfunctional dynamics. 
Trying to model and educate about radically different approaches to ecological living than was mainstream at the time (or even now) came with its own set of challenges.
For one thing, we participants were all molded by mainstream culture before landing at Fir Ridge; we couldn’t escape its influence entirely even if we wanted to. Even in its less hard-core version following the visionary founder’s ejection, our way of life was so far beyond a “Recycling will save the world” mentality that it still could cause the average American consumer to run the other direction. We all had strong ideas about the way things “should” be done—almost as strong, in many cases, as the founder’s previously sacrosanct ideas—and now that our own ideas could be ascendant, they caused internal divisions in a group notoriously strong on visionary world-changing ideas and technologies but short on interpersonal and group relationship skills.
We were better at communicating the benefits of rocket stoves and hayboxes than we were at communicating among ourselves. Each of us, passionate about our own area of work, found ourselves to varying degrees siloed within our own spheres of activity.
We ran a three-month-long ecological living apprenticeship program, with separate sessions in Spring, Summer, and Fall. Apprentices typically spent half or more of their course time each week (five or six half-days) working and learning in the organic vegetable gardens, with the rest of their time divided between appropriate technology and ecoforestry. As organic garden coordinator and teacher of the gardening portion of the program, I found that my work was my life. I lived, breathed, and dreamed the garden and the gardening program. I was responsible for from six to 12 apprentices, as well as one to three garden interns, and for making sure the gardens grew all the vegetables (and much of the fruit) we consumed on site (we didn’t buy off-site produce). Understandably, everything else was secondary for me. Per my own choice, I was fully consumed by my role.
Other staff members, too, were focused on their individual departments, but because they had the apprentices an average of one day a week rather than three, they also had more time and energy to spare. At the end of most days, I went for a walk alone and then retreated to my cabin. Fundamentally an introvert, I needed to recharge after full days of engagement and extroversion-for-a-cause (education and food-growing). I knew I was giving the role my all and never questioned my place there. Others, however, tended to gather for dinner and socialize afterwards, as well as on free weekends when I also often kept to myself and might still be found in the gardens. On one weekend outing involving a staff member and some of the apprentices, the conversation turned to the somewhat single-focused garden manager and his particular eccentricities, and some jokes, including deprecating ones, were made at his expense. Since other staff members rarely if ever stepped into the gardens or witnessed the educational program there, the story that emerged from that conversation seemed to hold particular sway as being representative of how the program participants felt.
The apprentices making those jokes later apologized for the fallout, which included my dismissal as garden manager by a staff group organized by the group’s de facto leader (who had, in essence, replaced the ejected founder). This individual believed that I was too out of step with others to continue to be a viable garden manager, and reported to me that the apprentices had given me “bad grades.” This staff group had met in private without informing me of the concerns or allowing me to respond. Ironically, they handed me the news after they’d distributed a questionnaire to the apprentices asking for their feedback on our educational programs, but before they’d received the apprentices’ responses.
I could not believe what I was hearing, as I was engaging every day with all of these apprentices, working tirelessly to teach them as much as I could about gardening and to maintain a thriving garden for the community as a whole. I felt I had a positive personal connection with every one and that, despite my gardening mania, I did not place undo work expectations on them, but accepted what each could contribute; my worst offense may have been taking them on multi-stop field trips that were so full of experiences that not much of the day was left when we returned. All I knew was that I was giving my all; it was a shock to have it seemingly taken away from me.
The staff assured me that I could stay around, continue to live at Fir Ridge, write, edit the group’s newsletter, etc. From my perspective, this reflected such a lack of understanding of my passions in life that I finally recognized that this leadership group could not possibly be my “tribe.” The process behind my discontinuation as garden manager exemplified such a different way of making decisions, communicating, and treating one another than that which I valued and wanted in my own life, that I knew immediately I needed to leave, not stay around as they’d invited me to.
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It was simultaneously reassuring and further maddening to read the results of the apprentices’ actual assessments of our educational program when they came in a few days later. Organic gardening earned an overall satisfaction rating of (as I recall) 3.7 on a scale of 0 to 5; ecoforestry received a grade of 3.9; appropriate technology, 4.2. Many positive comments were made on the evaluation forms about all three courses. The fact that up to a dozen apprentices could spend more than half of their week working and learning in the garden, in inherently demanding physical conditions, and still rate their satisfaction so close to that for the less physically demanding, more focused and time-limited classes in areas where one day’s work is not subject to being undone by the next day’s weather or pests, seems in retrospect a minor miracle.
News of my dismissal was met with a semi-rebellion on the part of some of the apprentices, a few of whom apparently issued scathing critiques of the process to other staff upon their departure. While the de facto leader remained firm in his opinion, some other staff members seemed to start to consider that a mistake may have been made, and expressed regret to me. But for me the betrayal of trust, and my apparent invisibility to some of my peers, had a feeling of finality to it. Moreover, the decision had already been made, and one of the garden interns was already set to replace me.
I went through a number of days of feeling mostly devastated; unable to talk at times, physically shaking as I deconstructed the cabin I’d been living in (as mandated by the County, who’d been cracking down on unpermitted structures—a different story, and another facet of this challenge-filled place). Fortunately, I already had a fall-back plan, which I’d considered a couple times before. I would move to Maple Creek, where a culture of transparency, honesty, connection, commitment to true community seemed to hold sway—inoculating it, in my estimation, from the kind of imbalanced workaholism and silo-ing in individual departments that was a way of life at Fir Ridge.
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Within a few weeks, I had left my home of the past three-and-a-quarter years (and, all told, of half of the previous 11, including several previous residency stints there), and moved to my new home, where I swore to start over—to never again become so associated with my work role that the prospect of losing it would so profoundly undermine my sense of well-being and purpose. I was determined not to be the sole garden manager in my new location, to hold back from taking on too much responsibility. 
I wanted to develop the other parts of myself as a human being that I’d neglected or deliberately held back in the interests of mere survival at Fir Ridge, where our culture made little room for vulnerability, the honest sharing of emotion, or attention to communication processes. At Fir Ridge, the standard for interpersonal connection, the best we dared to hope for (as enunciated by the de facto leader at the time), was, “If we don’t kill each other, if we can tolerate each other, we’re doing OK.” And in fact, this (murder or the threat of it) was our actual line in the sand: the two people who were required to leave during my final couple years there had each threatened to kill another person in the group. (I was on the receiving end of one of these threats, for bringing attention to violations of our smoking policy—not imagining that my chances of dying through secondhand smoke might be eliminated in one fell swoop by a maul-wielding smoker, if he had his way. This episode created its own tobacco-related residue in my inner world—again, a separate story.)
By the time of the events I’ve described, Fir Ridge was no longer describing itself to the outside world as an intentional community, but rather as an ecological-living research and education center, although this didn’t change the fact that we were living and working together as a community. By contrast, Maple Creek consciously and deliberately embraced its identity as an intentional community, while also being just as active as an educational and conference center. Whereas Fir Ridge distinguished itself by a laser-focus on matters of physical sustainability, Maple Creek took a much broader approach, with personal, interpersonal, and social sustainability in the mix of our focus as well. Spiritual retreats, personal growth workshops, well-being meetings, group songs before meals, “calling in the spirits” before meetings, and multi-generational community that welcomed families and children—these were all unheard-of at Fir Ridge, but core parts of the culture at Maple Creek.
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Given my experiences at Fir Ridge, even I had started to conclude that, after 10 three-month rounds of apprentices and a couple previous years being the main gardener/garden educator at Fir Ridge, my days of teaching organic gardening and coordinating community vegetable gardens might be over. I initially wanted to dissociate myself from being a gardening maniac; I felt that this “must not be who I was,” for me to get such shocking feedback and such an unanticipated result from my previous efforts.
Yet, despite my initial expectations when I joined my new community, I ended up coordinating gardens at Maple Creek for the following dozen years, dwarfing the time I put in at Fir Ridge. For the majority of those years, usually in conjunction with other staff members and/or interns, I taught similar-sized groups of apprentices—but this time, they were with us almost every day, not just for half the week. For all but one of those dozen years I was working with one, two, or three garden interns, even in those last several years when we’d stopped offering garden apprenticeships in favor of higher-priced, more academically-focused programs.
Ultimately, both for me and for Maple Creek, this position and this program ran its course. After much membership turnover at Maple Creek, through which work was one of my only constants, I again became siloed in that gardening role, found myself less connected to other community members, encountered physical challenges resulting partly from overwork, and ultimately concluded I needed a major change (even as the community was recasting how it wanted to hold its gardens—de-emphasizing education in favor of simple food production). I finally decided to leave not only the Maple Creek gardens, but Maple Creek itself, for reasons extending far beyond my increasing need for a new work role (again, see “Seizing the Torch,” Communities #185).
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This transition, a dozen years after my departure from the Fir Ridge gardens, was another shattering of sorts (though a slower one), and I have never since returned to a role of being garden coordinator and garden teacher. However, despite the earlier apparent move to retire me as a gardener but keep me in a community, I had spent many additional years engaged in work that I felt passionate about until very near the end of it—buoyed by a much healthier community support system and culture.
In a further irony, my replacement at Fir Ridge reportedly fell into similar siloed patterns to the ones I’d experienced there, as did most subsequent garden managers—and was subject to similar derogatory behind-the-back talk by other staff members (though this time I heard some of it directly). The problems there seemed systemic, not personal to those of us who took on high-responsibility jobs—except in the sense that our particular ardor to change the world through our chosen passion and role opened us up to investing so totally in an ultimately uncertain enterprise that a crash was inevitable for each of us.
And when our time in each of these places came to an end, we each needed to pick up the pieces in our individual lives, rediscovering or molding an identity separate from the gardens and the work with which we’d become so enmeshed. Those of us who left our community as well in this transition (because of job burnout or because of other conflicts or changes in us or the group) had even more pieces to pick up.
For those of us who identify so strongly with the work we do and the communities and movements we participate in—who don’t feel “ourselves” unless we are in roles that align with our senses of purpose and passion—this loss or change of role can feel almost like death. As every gardener knows, death and material transformation within the living world are the basis of all new life, but this does not necessarily make the processes of displacement and loss any easier when a cherished activity, role, and specific purpose fall away.
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The trials and tribulations described above seem in some ways as real as yesterday, still carrying some emotional importance as I finally revisit them through this writing decades later. Simultaneously, they seem so cosmically insignificant as to be comical.
Why are human beings so consumed and pained by questions of purpose? Why are we plagued by senses of failure, loss, and brokenness—often struggling to avoid them at all costs? What is so important that its shattering leaves us so devastated, and picking up the pieces so essential and/or challenging? And conversely, what keeps us persisting, not giving up, when confronted by adversity? What allows a new day to dawn for us after a dark night of the soul?
As I contemplated stories I might share on the theme of this issue, I was struck by how many I might tell—not just in the context of community, but in life in general. Nearly every major change in my life seems to have involved picking up the pieces after one loss or another, one shattered dream or another, one uninvited or unanticipated transition or another, even if I have resisted feeling the full weight or gravity of what has been lost (often involving a much wider sphere than just my own life). In some cases—the most difficult cases—something has been lost beyond recovery, whether that is a person I have loved, a place that has been desecrated, a way of life that will never be fully reconstructed, a physical capacity or sense that I had hitherto taken for granted and that has proven incapable of being healed or restored, an innocence or trust that everything will work out OK.
Many of our activities and our efforts are clearly going to result in ultimate “failure.” Yet the successes on the path to failure still seem to hold lasting value to us, even if we spend more time being incapable than being capable. The Satchel Paiges of the world notwithstanding, most professional ballplayers retire before the age of 40. Most organic garden coordinators I knew in positions similar to mine (combining full-time hands-on manual garden work with managing and teaching apprentices) seemed to retire even earlier, finding more lucrative and less physically punishing lines of work, usually by their mid-30s. Through the grace of community, I continued another dozen years in that kind of role, hopefully with more positive than negative results. When I was ready to let those particular pieces rest, rather than picking them up again, other pieces were waiting for me to pick up. Some of them came to me only in the emptiness of being without familiar purpose and without familiar roles.
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Why am I driven to write thousands of words about a personal “asteroid crash” that created the conditions for what was to follow in my own life, but which only a few dozen people experienced directly and personally—while allocating fewer than 200 words in this article to a cataclysmic event that affected all life on the planet, forever? A good question…to which I can only say:
My understanding of life may come only in bite-sized pieces. The “asteroid crash” for me at Fir Ridge, which seemed like a tragedy at the time, actually led me to a life in which I was much happier, often in unanticipated ways. Among other things, it provided Maple Creek with adequate qualified staffing to publish a community- and eco-focused journal with which I took on a role that prepared me to edit another, longer-lived magazine—itself not immune to “asteroid crashes,” as I was to discover. I’ve learned the value of trying to pick up the pieces, even if ultimately, all things must pass, including our major and minor personal dramas and (though we may prefer not to think about it) every person, place, or thing we hold familiar, at least in their current forms. There may be no permanent solution or salvation from the losses ahead for each of us individually and for us collectively, on the small or large scale.
And at the same time, for some strange reason, all does not seem pointless to me, at least as long as we’re able to share our stories with one another, discover new ways of looking at life, find connections where we didn’t know they existed, find joy in the midst of challenge and pain. It continues to be true: something is happening here, and we don’t know what it is.
Chris Roth edits Communities.
Excerpted from the Spring 2020 edition of Communities (#186), “Picking Up the Pieces: New Beginnings.”