As the summer stretches into mid-July, beautiful all white and fiery, rosy-red lilies my wife planted are in full bloom. Like the other flowers, pollinators are attracted by the sweet aroma and begin the process of new life for the flowers simply by the sensually-rich act of drinking the flowers’ nectar.

The flower seeds will become the food of birds and some animals, who are nourished by the digestion and carry the seeds to other locations, expanding the range of the flowers, pollinators and themselves. In their simple daily lives, the natural communities of plants, insects, birds and animals harmoniously build a better life for their children in a joyous re-creation of life.

These natural communities are essential to the individuals and families that are part of them. From years of observing life in the woods, I have learned that without communities, no individual or family can be sustained for more than a brief time. Our natural and human communities flow together through the river of life and largely determine the paths our individual and family lives will take, now and in the future.

When I moved back to the community that had saved me during my psychosis, I began to host potlucks to support the community. I had heard that the United States had weak communities compared to other countries and hosting potlucks was an easy way to give back to the web of life that had provided me with so much. I had been an outcast and a scapegoat for the puritan-money-chaser community I grew up in, so I had known hardship and yet could see the strength communities provided.

As our potlucks grew, our neighbors and my wife and I became friends and a small, face-to-face community formed around us. As time passed, a small but important piece of natural land next to our street came up for sale and we became concerned it would be developed, harming the natural area we took for granted and damaging our neighborhood with overcrowding, noise and short-term, disruptive and drunken student renters.

Our neighbors and we discussed buying the land collectively, but the attempt stalled and my wife and I, with another neighbor, explored buying the land ourselves, though we had little spare money.

During this hard time my mother passed and we knew we would receive a small inheritance. One day, a neighbor who knew we were interested in buying the land called me with word that a developer was very close to purchasing the land. He only needed approval of a couple of documents from the city to proceed.

Our neighbors and we faced the possibility of our quiet, enjoyable homes being inundated by noise, traffic, pollution and rowdy student partiers. We would either have to sell our home and move away or find a way to stop the sale. Emailing the city code office to discover what was going on and adding more and more neighbors and friends to the emails as we added one message to another, we realized that the only option would be to buy the land as soon as possible.

Committing the yet to be gained inheritance to pay a portion of the costs, my wife and I moved forward to buy the land and, by as much good luck as anything else, managed to buy the land a few days before the developer could complete the work he needed to finalize his deal.

In retrospect, I realized that my Mom’s untimely death had led to benefit for our family and community and, in that way, had served a tragic yet necessary purpose in the flow of life into the future. It did not make my sorrow less, but it provided greater understanding of the larger purpose of the death of elders, human, animal and otherwise, in our lives.

Being saved from a hard fate by our neighbor was also a lesson to me about the importance of human communities and the value of good works in building them. Intending to support our community through potlucks and parties to bring people together, that same community was essential in helping us protect our home by providing information and support during a crisis. Without it, the natural and human communities around the land would have been destroyed by money-chasers seeking wealth without regard to the consequences for the Earth and our community.

In a very important way, this lesson of the strength of good works taught me to have more faith in the workings of the spiritual world. I can see from events like these that good works are often rewarded in small, face-to-face webs of life, giving me hope that good works may extend pass my own mortal life.

To celebrate our good fortune, my wife and I began to host celebratory potlucks for neighbors, friends and family on the land every other year. Most years there have been around a hundred people, including children, in attendance, despite the potluck being held at the height of summer’s heat. We also let the neighborhood children play on the land, giving them woods to explore and a grassy area to play in during the summer and a steep slope to sled down when it snows in the winter. It has become a natural area for the community, akin to the Commons of centuries ago.

This year, we again celebrated our good fortune with about 120 people providing food and fellowship. Many who came were young families who are friends of the parents of the newborn in our family, giving our picnic the joy of ten children three years and younger with their parents and some grandparents with them. As the older children played on a slip ‘n’ slide and doused each other with cold water set in buckets for them, the adults gathered, ate, talked and shared fellowship. Many people thanked us for our work and said it was great to have a regular community gathering.

To be able to give is a tremendous gift to receive.