“Hey, Doritos! Why you not eating meat today?!”
These words, lobbed in my direction daily by one of the home people residing at Sólheimar year round, rank as one of the indubitable highlights of my every lunch hour. Earning the nickname ‘Doritos’ because I once got caught trotting down the road with shame in my eyes, crumpled bag in fist, offers a grin far too wide to wipe away.
The inquisition into my dietary choices comes welcomed too because it serves as affirmation of my efforts to eat more sustainably now that I’ve ditched the Doritos and given up meat (I was by far bacon’s #1 fan before joining the CELL program).
This whole exchange tickles my amusement mostly, though, because I’m a huge fan of anyone willing to be a wisenheimer, a fancy I also heartily extend to anyone willing to let their weird out – lucky for me there’s no shortage of willingness among our group:
The notion of the importance of community building in finding momentum for making change in the world is a ubiquitous part of this program’s curriculum and one of my favorite aspects of the experience as a whole. The camaraderie I’m finding with the home people here along with the workshops we partake in with them allow me an ability to build a strengthened sense of kinship with the people who live and work here as permanent fixtures.
The dinner conversations we have nightly with each other in our CELL group, however, may be of the highest caliber of community building I’ve ever experienced; certainly the most cherished.
Each night a different pair in our group prepares dinner for the rest and from the very first night we arrived a tradition was born where the pair who cook dinner choose an ice-breaking question (increasingly more meaningful as time marches on), and we each take turns answering it while we eat. This practice pushes our group to share philosophies of spirit, the biggest of belly laughs, and at times, the vulnerability of a tear stained cheek. I walk away every single night with an enlightened sense of who this temporary family is and where it is I fit right in.
That we practice a shared trust so solid we can cry with one another at the dinner table leaves me not only humbled by what we’ve been able to accomplish in building a tightknit community unit within a tiny timeslot, it also gives me the sense that as I move forward in life and with any endeavors where I’m trying to make an impact for the betterment of the world around me, this group will be a community I can rely on for support. Because of the practices that grew this confidence I now understand why building community is the top priority of any campaign. It gives you more than an extra set of hands; it gives a set you can trust.
-Sass Linneken