Community

This blog post originally appeared on the Island Oasis Farm website, now decommissioned. Not sure if it translates over, but I did want to preserve some of that writing (2020-2024).

May 25, 2021

Community is something that has been lacking these 14 long COVID months. It’s a subtle thing, too, community. It takes time to grow, and like aging, one hardly notices it happening until it has arrived or there are drastic changes. The absence of community can creep in the same way. Once COVID began to settle in, and we adjusted our lifestyles to being more solitary, that became the norm. Now that we are gradually returning to making more face to face contact, we can experience what had been missing.

Island solitude

Just recently, folks were gathering for a night of glass blowing at Ken and Linda Perrin's Atlantic Art Glass in the heart of Ellsworth, Maine. They live the example of building community from the ground up, gradually, over time. Their studio had long been home of an annual winter solstice fire gathering and a variety of other art glass events. Little by little, they built a thread of community where like-minded folks can gather to appreciate the craft of glass blowing and art, in general. Their love of the art emanated outward, drawing in others with similar passions. In turn, their studio became a cross-roads that seeded inspiration and ideas for newer, blossoming projects like the Fogtown brewery below, another place where the like-minded gather. In Belfast, the Three Tides has been reawakening in similar fashion.

Our first live music since March 6, 2020 at the Three Tides in Belfast.

Building community is part of what such projects are all about. Likewise, Island Oasis Farm is not just a grow operation distributing “weed.” This is not a business driven by profit or market share or "crushing the competition." This is a small operation devoted to a type of quality that weaves like-minded folks together in a larger fabric of common pathways. Medical cannabis is a product, yes, but it is more than that. It is reaching out and making deliveries to patients during a pandemic. It is taking the time to talk shop and compare notes with other farmers. It is the hub of one wheel within a community of many wheels, overlapping and Venn diagramming.

Many Americans lack the town square or open air marketplace that so many cultures around the world enjoy on the regular. We are car culture, rural Americans anyway, and we are dispersed. COVID made that clear for many of us, and it is a welcome change for things to start opening again. We thrive on that connection, even if it's non-verbal. Isn't that why many of us are drawn toward farmers' markets? We can connect produce with the actual farmer, and there is a closed loop. There, we can bump into other folks who share a similar mindset seeking small-scale, organic, products from the heart.

Obviously, not everything in our lives can operate this way in our modern society. However, COVID showed us that the absence of such community leaves a gaping hole in people's lives. This is why there is such a high demand to return to live music in America: it is a place of gathering. Restaurants and pubs, too, are a part of that fabric. It is deeply wired into our DNA, a piece of what makes us human. Scurrying through the grocery aisles, grabbing products in a hurry, scanning them and checking out is not the same community experience. It never will be.

We choose to inhabit these spaces; and we rely on our friends.

While Island Oasis Farms may not have begun as community builder, we can now see that it actually is. Derrick's values about growing a superior product, regardless of the extra time and effort and detail, attracts patients who expect the same. His passion for doing it right is what keeps a steady roster of patients returning. The alternative, the transactional grocery store version of massive scale cannabis sales through large dispensaries is more akin to the grocery store transaction. The patients, here, want to know their farmer, to know their product, and to have that deeply personal connection. That is community.

Some months ago, this webmaster shared the Island Oasis blog with some acquaintances online for feedback. One critic wrote, “There should just be pictures of the buds with prices, and then show me how to buy it. Period. This website looks like an ad for a lifestyle or something.” 

While we would never act on this criticism, in part, we agree. It is about lifestyle, and that lifestyle is all about building a strong fabric of community.

No man is an island. We may inhabit them, we may need them, but we are not islands.