The Power of Community
a curated new moon list
Welcome to The Practice of Life — a place to slow down, befriend yourself, and connect with the world from kindness and awareness. If you’re arriving for the first time, learn more about me through this introduction.
A community is not merely a condition of physical proximity, no matter how admirable the layout of the shopping center and the streets, no matter if we demolish the horizontal slums and replace them with vertical ones. A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
-Wendell Berry
New Moon / February 17, 2026
First — let’s take a moment to marvel at the convergence of spiritual and cultural holidays going on right now: Mahashivaratri, an important Hindu festival honoring Lord Shiva, has been in motion since last week; Tuesday (the new moon) is the Lunar New Year (the Fire Horse!) as well as the beginning of Ramadan, and Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday; and Lent starts on Wednesday. Truly auspicious.
For January’s new moon, I offered 3 Spiritual and Practical Keys to Make it Through End Times Fascism. The post seemed to hit a nerve with a lot of folks, so today is a follow-up: ways to put community into practice, how to navigate differences that may seem impossible to bridge, and how to strengthen your inner Healer. Let’s go!
1. Turning ‘community’ from a good idea into reality
“Community” is a word that gets tossed around a lot. It’s easy to talk about it, but what does it mean to truly nurture a community? How do we move beyond community as a good idea and put it into action?
First, it’s important to understand it takes time. That’s the very definition of community, to me: people with whom we have established a history of mutual support and trust. But there are ways to kick the process into motion and accelerate it.
Our friends in Minneapolis offer a case study on the power of community ties. Many of them have lived and worked alongside each other for years, and in many cases those ties go back generations of families. Over the last few months, we’ve witnessed how those ties have made possible a unified and powerful wave of community care and resistance to oppression.
Teri Leigh 💜 is a Substack writer who lives in Minnesota, and she’s gifted us with an on-the-ground view of what it feels like there right now. She’s also been generous in sharing her observations on community. I want to share this excerpt from her January 31 Note on Substack. It’s chock full of great ideas and tangible things you can do to grow and strengthen community right in your neighborhood:
A lot of people keep asking, “What can we do from far away?”
The short answer is COMMUNITY.
Community gets built on random Tuesdays, in parking lots, in church basements, at the bus stop, in the checkout lines, and during Girl Scout cookie sales.
The “big heroic things” everyone notices… are made possible by a thousand small relationships that already existed.
Here’s my guide on “how to love like a Minnesotan”
· Host a neighbor dinner. Pick a date. Make it simple. Soup + bread. Tell people, “Bring a bowl.” Learn names. Learn pets’ names. Ask, “If you needed help fast, who would you call?” Build the phone tree before you need it.
· Become a regular somewhere. Grocery store. Coffee shop. Hardware store. Library. Look people in the eye, and call them by first name, ask them about their grandkids and listen to the answers.
· Be “that” parent. Sit in the stands of the dance studio, karate dojo, hockey rink and force the other parents to talk to you. Volunteer to organize the fundraisers and the ticket-sales. Pay attention to the kids whose parents don’t show up, and check in on them. Notice the parents that seem not-okay, and network with others to help.
· Volunteer. Sign up for the bake-sale and the food shelf, your HOAs, the libraries, the community centers. By joining and organization, you’re joining a web, a mycelial network of mutual support.
· Stop for the person on the side of the road. Pull over. Ask what they need. Sit with them until help arrives. Being witnessed calms the nervous system. It reminds people they’re still human. I spent 10 years road-tripping for a living with a not-entirely reliable car. I’ve broken down in multiple states, and MN is the only state where people pull over to help within minutes of me pulling over.
· Practice your breath when everything is fine. Three slow breaths, a few times a day. Train your body to return to center. That way, when something wild happens, your breath shows up like muscle memory. This is so fucking important. BREATHE DAMNIT!
· Befriend your Black and Brown and LGBTQ neighbors with your whole heart. Be curious about who they are as human beings, and what they have to teach you about life. Go to their restaurants, and keep going back. Become regulars at their places of business. Let the relationship be real, mutual, and ongoing. Community becomes sturdy when everyone belongs.
· Listen to your elders like they’re a living library. Elders carry maps, and communities with maps move differently. Ask for stories, and listen even if you’ve heard them a dozen times because it takes a dozen times to really embody the lessons. Write down what they say. They’ve been through it all, and their wisdom comes in the quiet little spaces between their stories.
There’s lots more! Read Teri Leigh 💜 ‘s full Note here.
I also want to lift up the amazing work that Kelly Hayes does as a community organizer based in Chicago. Her newsletter Organizing My Thoughts is a great place to find interviews, essays, lists, and musings about how we can take political action together and create a better world.
2. Navigating difference and the shadow side of community
As anyone who has ever lived in an intentional or spiritual community knows, it’s not a walk in the park. Living and/or working in close proximity to people who apparently share the same values as you may start out feeling blissful, but inevitably you’ll soon run into the shadow side—yours and everyone else’s. This is when it gets interesting, and when a lot of us choose to bail on the “living in community” experiment. I confess to having bailed several times in my life, no community angel here!
But it is possible to practice ways to communicate and be in relationship with people who are coming from very different backgrounds and perspectives from us, even when conflict arises.
Here’s a story from my life, and two resources—one spiritual and one strategic:
a. My own experience with a neighbor who was an enthusiastic Trump and MAGA supporter:
b. Dharma teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo on embodied compassion as a way to move through a field of conflict:
“When compassion is embodied, it becomes protective. There are many stories of this. Vietnamese nuns and monks moving through war zones unharmed because they carried compassion rather than fear. Tibetan practitioners who survived years in Chinese labor camps later showed remarkable resilience and no signs of trauma. One elder Tibetan monk shared that the greatest danger he faced was not physical harm, but losing compassion for his captors. Black folks in the US who remained so creatively and wisely loving towards white supremacists that they were eventually converted to the cause of Black liberation. Or the powerful example of the monks from Fort Worth, Texas on the Walk for Peace to Washington D.C. these past 3 months, braving the extreme cold, walking 20 miles a day, hearts full of love and strength, inspiring us all to find deeper peace in our own daily lives.”
The whole essay is excellent, and includes a list of resources at the end:
c. The Spectrum of Allies
This tool comes from George Lakey of Training for Change.
Movements and campaigns are won not by overpowering one’s active opposition, but by shifting each group one notch around the spectrum (passive allies into active allies, neutrals into passive allies, and passive opponents into neutrals), thereby increasing people power in favour of change and weakening your opposition.
Here’s a detailed description of The Spectrum of Allies and how to use it.
3. Explore and strengthen your Inner Healer
The Four Ways of Engagement is a framework I developed many years ago, originally as the Mandala of Socially Engaged Buddhism. It draws on the concept of archetypes to help us tap into our inherent strengths. When you discover an archetype that’s alive in you, you connect with a deep source of power. This is key to preventing or overcoming the burnout that can easily come when we’re taking part in activism.
One of the four archetypes is the Healer. The essential energy of this archetype is about bridging divides and helping to make things whole again. That might mean coming back into relationship with a disowned part of ourself; it might also mean weaving back together a community that’s become fractured by polarization.
All of us have some aspect of the Healer in us; for some it may be the dominant archetype. I’ve made this module of The Four Ways of Engagement — which is a gift for paid subscribers — free for this week. It includes real-world examples of the Healer, an audio guided meditation to help you tap into the energy of the Healer, practices, and guiding questions. Have fun exploring it and let me know what you discover!
Other Places to Find My Writing
I’ve got another Substack: Postcards from New Mexico. It’s a lot of fun to explore, please check it out!
Dharma Compass is my monthly column on the Buddhist Global Door website. My most recent article: Toward a Socially Responsible Mindfulness
I’ve got a book! Work That Matters is a mindfulness-based guide for people who are seeking right livelihood. Please check it out and tell others about it.
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Thank you!
This piece is so important right now. Thank you Maia. You have really been a warm spot in my life these last weeks.
I just got to look at this. It is a wonderful breath of fresh air. Thank you for all that you do. I needed tomorrow’s good news today! 👏