The recent writing here about community helps me think about Lucy's statement, above, that "there aren't answers, that social problems aren't ever 'solved.'" They aren't solved in the manner that purely abstract or purely mechanical problems can be solved. They can be more creatively and more dialogically understood, and we can create, sustain, and change communities of thought and action (gardens?) that work on them over time.

Safety and nurturance are no more necessary functions of community than they are of singularity. Rather than think of community as garden, or farm, I gloss it as "thinking collective." We need, and sometimes have access to, both individual and collective (current and over time) thinking in order to engage urgent circumstances. We also need different experiences to think with and about; different, and differing, experiences are part of what we make thinking out of -- they are a signficant part of the garden, in which we find some growing things we recognize and have names for and in which we find and bring about other growing things that are new, or mysterious, or that exceed our languages and narratives. Often, thinking collectives too quickly become exclusive through the concern to make them "productive" (whether of scholarship or of policy).