Communities are groups of people with something in common. There’s the scientific community, the Asian community, the gay and Lesbian community, the Jewish community, the disabled community, the vegetarian community, the church community, the sex without partners community and on and on. You can declare yourself as part of a community or wait for others to declare you as part of a community. It will happen.

I'm a photographer, so does that include me in the photographer community? I imagine there is also the digital artist community, literature community so on and so forth. In the end are we not just part of the larger community of artists?

Perhaps this attraction to community is simply about our need to belong. If so, how do you explain hermits? Okay, hermits are the exceptions. But if communities are about people with something in common, then hermits constitute a community. Imagine their meeting announcement. “Hermit community meeting. Tonight at eight. Don’t come.” In the spirit of community, together, they could make it not happen.

Maybe the hermits are onto something about the nature of community. If community is more than the need to belong, perhaps it’s about the need to keep others out. Wow. That sounds contrary to community spirit. But isn’t that true? Does the vegetarian community want to include bow hunters at their monthly dinner meeting? I don’t think so. Do singles want married people at their community events? Probably not without a note from their spouse.

The practice of community is as much about exclusion as inclusion. Community is as much about defining how you are different from others as it is about how you are the same. The word is a noun: a person, place, or thing. That’s my problem. I don’t like it that the word is a noun. I want the word to go deep and describe a universally shared feeling that’s part of the Jungian collective unconscious. I want community to be an action verb describing behavior. Let’s community tonight at eight and end world hunger.

I want to belong. I want to be included. Moreso, I want you to belong and feel included. That's my job here in Community Relations. I embrace that social apple pie in my own way. We have an incredible diversity of genres, races, religions, beliefs, understandings, people.. here on deviantART. We belong to a community of artists here. It is our responsibility to nurture and sustain the development of that larger community and all of the smaller sub-communities that spawn from it.

To do that requires work, commitment and patience. It involves looking past differences and working for the greater good, taking a moment to think before responding to an insult with another insult and instead finding a better way to combat such a volatile remark.

Beyond our virtual community of artists that we have here, we must remember that we all belong to a much larger community. The community of human beings.

I have made the commitment to deviantART and whether you want me or not, I'm part of the community.

Are you?