Community Participation in Isolation

There are many ways to participate in community. Some involve large social gathering: a pancake breakfast, a conference, a college football game…thousands spread out on towels on a sweltering summer day at the beach.

Community participation can take a many different forms, and sometimes it’s surprising that nobody else is even around. I’m thinking of an experience I had this summer hiking along a trial and coming upon a stone pile that was constructed by thousands of hikers who had walked the trail over many years, decades even. The stone pile called to each passerby to add to it’s construction. And though my pebble was quite small and disappeared between the cracks of two larger stones, it came to rest somewhere in the interior of that monument claiming my membership to a large group effort.

I often find comfort in that image as I add content into the various streams of data I contribute too…