Community in the 4th Dimension

What do you think of when you think about community? Your neighbors, co-workers, friends, and maybe even people you interact with on social media. For me, a community is built through compassion, inspiration, and skill-sharing. Nature provides us with the landscape, which serves as our guide to finding safe places where we feel welcome.

I wanted to think about the term "community" broadly and narrow it down to the pieces in which it could grow. I’ve always had this feeling of being out of place within the overall constructs of society, so I found niches in which I found a sense of belonging. For me, it started with me, the individual (a dot), mapping the lines that connect us.

I first joined my community 4 years ago, looking for a greater sense of freedom. Through my initial interactions, I found new freedom in skill-sharing with others, embracing child-like play, and small tokens of art created together. From the confidence built within these experiences, I began to wander further, meeting new faces that saw me in the newer version I was. My network expanded further, always finding people who shared moments and experiences of healing and embraced my artwork. This expanded into a version of me that had an overall sense of freedom. Within my work, within my identity, and within the overall community.

Within my thesis proposal, I outlined the term ‘close-knit community.’ It is defined in the dictionary as “bound together by intimate social or cultural ties”. For me, close-knit or tight-knit refers to communities and human relationships that are strongly linked, with intimate bonds of compassion, interests, and skill-sharing. When I think of close-knit, I think of a tightly knitted sweater with no poor tension gaps or holes, which relates to a community that sticks together, leaving no opportunities for someone to "fall through the cracks."

Large community networks have fallen apart due to digitization, leaving more holes than lines to travel through. Leading to depression, loneliness, and isolation as we try to throw our ropes to the other side, hoping someone will catch it and help us across. Digitization makes us forget the one thing that unites us all on this planet: nature. We forget we are nature living within our concrete jungles and private housing. We’ve constructed a future in which we never have to go outside. Technology isolates us from people, as we look to our phones instead of at each other. Our profiles have become our masks, hiding our true selves from the rich wonders nature provides every day. We now look at it through a screen, not seeing the webs of connection that unify all things. Our connection to nature and each other is our human power. It’s finding the flow in all things, from the grass in the breeze, how mycelium helps the trees, and how water flows through all of us and our constructed societies. Products that connect things, like yarn and cables, are made of threads, which make thin lines larger. This relates to the concept of Ikigai, a Japanese term meaning “reason to live”. You become the yarn or cable bulked up by the threads that hold you together. I found that the togetherness of all things, from what I love to what I’m good at, and finding a solution for what the world needs, is my reason for living.

How could we, as a society, mend this relationship with technology? To remind us that we all breathe the same air. I want to look at it as a tool to reconnect ourselves physically within time and space. Making technology more useful than screaming our opinions, comments, and lifestyles for all to see. I want to look at technology through a new lens. Seeing how it could create community spaces that embrace our pasts, heal our present emotions, and create safer spaces for new generations to gather and make new connections. Helping people find their inner child and feed it what it needs: healing, play, and opportunity. Through this project, I hope to rebuild the confidence lost to social media and the new ways we treat and see everyone around us based on what is fed to us online. Rebuild the network of nature and nurture unified to give people higher paths within their thinking and minds by tapping into the flow and movement of growth instead of feeling stuck where we are.

I hope to inspire more movement in work and play that could unify more communities today.

Thanks for wandering with me,

Nyx