Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. ― Ruth Reichl
Today, in our society, despite hearing often the word community, we observe instead battles and fragmentation. Gathering a community is a lifelong process that requires nurturing and dialogue. Everyone has a role to play in it as part of the community. A healthy community is not a perfect place, but it's a dynamic state of participation, inquiry, renewal. At its center there are practices & inquiries aimed at com-prehending (which to me means including). A community isn’t possible in the absence of dialogue.
Dialogue is about “listening, sharing, and questioning”.
A dialogue is an exchange. It requires the willingness and responsibility to gather together and explore lives, differences, dreams. The old greeks had polis, communities founded on dialogue(s). We have lost polis and created instead podiums. In the polis there was the space for many participating in the dialogue. It was a responsibility to participate in such dialogues and to practice the arts of listening, sharing and questioning. A complex ritual of the community in dialogue at the table were to encounter one another.
In the podium there is space only for one talking to others. It is a space for communication, not for dialogue. A space to inform, to seek for consensus... We all have our modern individual podiums: our social media accounts. From our podium we communicate, we seek likes (like = means the same).
Entering in a dialogue with a community isn’t the same as talking to an audience. Engaging a community and engaging an audience are not the same thing. Maybe, what I say in my personal motto "There is no way to inclusion. Inclusion is the way." is also true for communities. There is no way to a community. The community is the way. And dialogue is how we enter in community.
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