I don’t know if this is true for other writers, though it’s certainly true for me. As big as my ideas may be about people and the world, my actual, personal life is pretty small. My circle of intimates is tight and I primarily work from home, alone, moving from room to room chasing the heat or the coolness or the light depending on the season. This arrangement mostly suits me. As the Daddy Warbucks character in the recent remake of the musical Annie stated, “I like a lot of elbow room around me.”
But this last weekend I got to have an experience that is hard to come by in my relatively solitary existence. I saw my ideas about integrity come to life in a community setting.
Brian Leonard, a subscriber with whom I did a powerful interview for the newsletter a while back, organizes and runs a body justice festival every summer, on the grounds of the largest nudist family campground in New York state. He and his fellow organizers invited me to come and offer a keynote address on integrity for this year’s festival.
It’s a clothing-optional space, so yesterday morning I dressed as minimally as was comfortable for me, got in my car, and drove the forty minutes or so to get to the site. My talk went incredibly well. I can officially verify that having your audience be naked is no worse than simply imagining them naked. Everyone was welcoming, engaged, and focused. I hadn’t talked at length in front of a group since 2016, so to have it go so successfully was gratifying. That wasn’t the best part, though.
The best part was getting to witness and highlight for the talk’s attendees the ways the festival itself is a living example of how a devoted personal integrity practice can seed integrity for an entire community.
Brian, as I mentioned, is a subscriber to the newsletter. Over the years, he has developed a dedicated and thoughtful integrity practice. He and his fellow festival organizers have now also created an entire community experience guided by integrity.
The three essential steps in the process of integrity are discernment, action, and accountability, all of which are grounded in the desire to live into a core belief. For Sentient Fest, that belief is that everyone should be able to participate in a clothing-optional community experience in a way that is safe and joyful.
In order to live into that belief, the organizers discerned a host of Community Agreements that everyone who attends the festival has to read and accept. They include continual affirmative consent in all interactions; consistent, clear, and respectful communication with fellow participants and facilitators; honoring of the facility, the land, and the indigenous people who steward the land; engaged, supportive community behaviors; and structures of accountability when or if the Agreements are violated. Facilitators are subject to additional expectations around awareness of power dynamics and a commitment to not abuse power and authority.
The organizers then built structures into the daily life of the festival to keep everyone continually re-orienting towards the core belief and the behavior agreements that supported community integrity. They scheduled orientations every morning to revisit the Agreements. They provided staff trained in dealing with conflictual or complicated emotional situations who were available at all times to intervene if someone had a problem or felt the Agreements were violated. And they committed to follow through and remove anyone from the festival who violated the Agreements.
This powerful, transparent community integrity work allowed participants to be careless with each other. Not as in, not careful. Instead, as in they didn’t have to watch their backs with each other constantly. They could relax and trust each other.
This was truly beautiful to experience. Dozens and dozens of people (Brian told me there were approximately 300 people involved in the festival over the full five days.) just wandering around being themselves— participating in activities, having conversations, being clothed or partially clothed or completely covered up. Everyone was relaxed, open, and friendly.
I have said repeatedly, and truly believe, that communities based on integrity— where everyone has taken responsibility to practice their own integrity and the community has also committed to integrity collectively— exist and can be a transformative experience for everyone involved. I have been part of Quaker communities that functioned this way, which makes sense given that integrity is a foundational religious calling for us. But I’ve never experienced a secular community that pulled it off so beautifully until now.
Admittedly, the festival is a small community that comes together for a short period of time in a vacation-type environment. No one is scrambling for resources or having to pay bills. Everyone has housing and there’s food to eat. The participants were fairly racially homogenous, and presumably economically homogenous enough to be able to afford to attend such an event. Our day-to-day world is infinitely vaster and more complicated, making community integrity much harder to pull off.
Yet, the existence of these pockets of community integrity matter. They offer us the opportunity to see these ideas in action— to participate in the mechanics of bringing them to life, to understand the importance of our individual practice, and to see in real-time how that practice builds towards an entire community experience. For me, anyway, such an experience fills my spiritual cup. It reminds me of what is possible and motivates me to continue working toward making the possible actual, even when it seems distant. It gives me hope.
Have you experienced integrity in community? What did that look like? How did it feel? Tell us about it.
Hey, friends. Inspired by my recent experience writing for Oldster Magazine I am thinking about soliciting guest posts for the newsletter from other Substack writers. I’d also be happy to work on editing posts from any of you, even if you’re not Substack writers. Reply to this email and let me know if you’re interested!
I am stupefied!!
I am flabbergasted!!
I am stunned with admiration, Asha!!