“Here was community, not a word but a being.”
~Randall Kenan
a visitation of spirits

The morning before I moved to Seattle in 1989, I ran into a guy I had never spoken to but had seen around probably hundreds of times. For whatever reason, he decided to strike up a conversation that day and asked me how I was doing. I said great! and that it was my last day there and I was nervous about leaving but excited to start a whole new life. I couldn’t even explain to myself why, exactly, I had chosen to move to Seattle. I had never been there, I knew nothing about it, and I liked the town I was living in well enough. Still, I knew it was the right time for a change, and I was eager to get to a place where I sensed I might feel even more at home. I remember the man wishing me well, and I also remember thinking as I left that the best thing about having lived somewhere for a long time was that even the strangers were familiar, and that I would miss that daily, casual recognition when I suddenly became the new girl in town.

Even after all these years I can’t believe how lucky I got when I arrived here. I found a job in a lovely little café where I met the most incredible people, got involved with music projects and volunteer activities, and felt my roots dive deep into this place right away. Yet it wasn’t until people I’d never met began to nod at me from across the street or until I started to recognize people who worked in places I had begun to frequent, or who rode the same bus that I did, or whose path somehow crossed my own on a regular basis, that I began to feel like I was really part of it.

Much later  – and to this day – I would experience that sense of belonging in a deeper way when I would run into someone whose baby I’d helped deliver, or whose wedding I’d performed, or whose body I had massaged, or for whom I’d cooked a meal or prepared some vile tasting tea, or listened to as they agonized over a relationship they needed to leave or a pregnancy they wanted to end, or who I had accompanied to the courthouse to request protection from an abusive partner, or who I had taken to the emergency room or stood alongside at a funeral. My work has allowed me to witness such significant moments – both difficult and triumphant – of countless thousands of people’s lives. I carry with me the stories of people whose art and music, activism and medicine, brilliance, kindness and passion I admire. I’ve been entrusted with intimate knowledge of people I might have only met once, or may now have known for nearly 27 years. And in many ways I am still a new girl in this town that’s had it’s own complicated layers of history and generations upon generations of communities long before I arrived.

Belonging to a place is not something you can achieve simply by acquiring an address or a title. It comes from involving yourself in the world you live in and becoming part of its fabric through commitment and loyalty and active participation. Community is not something you’re entitled to; it’s something you earn.

Recently I experienced a full-on panic attack during an event where I ran into a whole lot of people I hadn’t seen since my early days in Seattle. It was a beautiful and also a very sad occasion; celebratory and somber and fierce all at the same time. It reminded me of who I was when I arrived, what I believed and hoped was possible, and how I became who I am. It made me realize for the millionth time that I can really only do what I do because I’ve been here for so long, and because I have so many different families here. I lost my breath in a sudden rush of terror because I was thinking how fragile all of that is – how easy it would be to find myself pushed out of this place I have called home for way more than half of my life now – and how impossible it would be to start all over again someplace new.  All I really have to show for everything I’ve done since the day I arrived here are the relationships I’ve formed and the people I know.  And I feel so lucky – because isn’t this really the most important thing we have in life?

But the shattering of this – the loss of community and belonging and home – is happening all the time, everywhere – in places like this where soulless development and the spiraling cost of living is fracturing neighborhoods and families and individual lives in a completely immoral fashion, as well as in places all around the world where disaster and war are decimating entire regions and driving millions of people to risk their lives just to survive.

I think we’re all living in a state of panic in one way or another as we realize – if we didn’t already know – that perhaps the most important thing humans create is the safety net and the sense of belonging that community provides, and how easily that can be torn apart by things that feel completely out of our control.

We need each other – and we need to take care of one another.  We need to look up from our addictive little devices and look each other in the eyes again. We need to recognize the strangers we pass every day and know they each have a story that’s just as important and unique as our own. We all need to know that we are welcome, that we belong, that we are safe and that we have a place that feels like home – as well as an actual home that we don’t have to constantly worry will be taken from us. We need to look beyond what is familiar to us and not let fear or willful ignorance become what rules our every thought and action. And most of all, we need to be kinder to one another, listen to one another, and find the courage and grace and steadfast dedication to make the world a more just and humane place.

We’ve asked Karyn Schwartz, owner of the Sugarpill apothecary on E Pine, to contribute to CHS about health and Hill living on a semi-regular basis. If you’re an expert and want to share with the community in a recurring CHS column, we’d like to hear from you.