This short, crystalline essay by Roget Lockard does a lot to wipe off the vaseline on the lens of how we see ourselves. Specifically, it espouses that theme I am repeatedly discovering of our society’s lack of community.

Yesterday, I mentioned elsewhere that I recently was introduced to the idea of the Third Place. It’s precisely the concept I was hedging around when I wrote about wanting to build some kind of arts center here in Owensboro.

It’s the same feeling I get when I talk about wanting a return to the free-form and broad reach of the very best forums of the Internet we used to know. These were places were the esoteric, the universal, and the profound could all commingle into a connecting network. A community.

This is no new discovery. However, it’s more evidence that all these threads around me, like my fascination with the social life of trees, my rediscovery of theatre, my reading and writing, and even my wanderlust all seem to distill down to some core disconnect. As Lockard explains, finding and building community is the only solution.