Article

Community

Culture

8 January 2024

7 min read

Think little: what villages teach about coming together

Elizabeth Wainwright explores the frustrations and encouragements of village life, real and virtual, and finds a need for communion.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A miniature tableau depicts a band performing at a concert as people dance and others watch from a marque.

A miniature village fete, Élancourt, France.

Frédéric Bisson, via Wikimedia Commons.

Since the birth of our daughter in May, I’ve been thinking about the village that it will supposedly take to raise her. I’m curious about where - or what - that village is today.

A meme I saw on social media depicted Tom Hanks in his role in the film Castaway, edited so that instead of being alone on a desert island, he was walking through an empty city shouting:

“IS ANYONE OUT THERE?”.

The creator, a mother, had added a caption:

“Me trying to find the village that was supposed to help me raise my children”.

I clicked on the comments - there were hundreds of responses of all kinds:

“Hyper independence is a narrative that is pushed on mothers” / “the world our grandparents and parents grew up in no longer exists” / “our lives are too busy” / “there is no village” / “the village is there but it takes work / “I struggle with ‘it takes a village, because for those of us who don’t have one, it highlights feelings of isolation” / “loneliness and isolation are a reality of our modern way of living, mothers especially feel this”.

It seemed that other mothers were thinking about their village – or lack of it - too.

My husband and daughter and I live in an actual village in rural Devon. In the summer, we went out into the garden, and - hearing a noise from the back of the house - turned to see one of our neighbours at the top of a ladder fixing a broken roof tile. Another neighbour was standing at the bottom of the ladder holding it in place. We hadn’t asked them to fix it - we’d only mentioned needing a new roof tile in passing. My heart swelled. Though not directly caring for our young daughter, they were easing the load by caring in the way they knew how.

Online community is vital for me, and it is also lacking. Physical local community is vital for me, and it is also lacking.

That act of neighbourliness made me wonder whether the village that will help raise our daughter is the literal village we live in. Here, there are people who care for this place and the people in it. Here, there is soil into which I can plunge my hands, anchoring me in this time, this place, amongst these people, all of it working to create a web of interdependence and care which I hope will steady us all in the face of a burning and unknowable future. But we’ve only been here a couple of years, and our stories don’t yet intertwine with the roots of the place. That takes time, and interdependence takes my little family being the village for others as well as benefitting from it. And there are days when I feel I have little capacity to reach out to others.

Living in a small rural village can also be hard. A welcome is not guaranteed, relationships often have to bridge real difference. And whilst historically the village was a physical place with clear edges, family roots, and familiar neighbours, that’s now not most people’s reality. My husband and I have lived in various places over the years, our scattered friends part of our journey still, even at a geographic distance. Whether or not a scattered village is possible, it knows me in a way that our local village does not and perhaps cannot. It is part of a social fabric that will weave around our daughter, despite not being immediately accessible day to day.

Or perhaps the village is increasingly virtual, made up of likeminded connections we draw near to online. Here I find not hands-on help, but understanding, ideas, encouragement, and a sense of possibility, even amongst people that don’t know me especially well. I find sustenance here, but I also know I close off real life encounters - and a more nuanced and unfiltered understanding of the world, of difference, of community - by investing in self-selecting online communities. And I want my daughter to encounter difference, to know that people can love and be loved even when they are nothing like her.

Online community is vital for me, and it is also lacking. Physical local community is vital for me, and it is also lacking.

They invite me to wonder but also to ‘think little’ as farmer and author Wendell Berry advocates, at the scale of this person, this relationship, this place.

And so I wonder what the village is, what it is becoming, and how we find it. Because whilst we’re told it takes a village to raise a child, in practice we often move to follow jobs, we live in isolated units and hear messaging that praises individualism and self-sufficiency and being able to do and have it all. And it can be as hard to call on the village as to find it in the first place - it can even be hard to accept the help of the village when it’s right there offering itself to us, so strong is the pull to look like we’re holding it all together, or to not burden others (I say this from experience). So we carry on trying to do it all ourselves.

I find myself turning to ancient things for guidance. The Christian idea of communion – a table, bread, and wine shared in community – is beautiful to me, both in how it is practiced and what it represents. Bread and wine grow and are consumed in a particular place, at a particular time. The community that shares it is knowable, together at this particular time in the world. That this entrance into faith depends so much on place and time feels significant. Communion could easily be a mystical, cerebral, hard-to-grasp idea. But crucially it’s also personal, accessible, locatable. And church - not the idea or the institution but the local gathering place - can be a place where we find this access too, as can gardens and fields and food; tethers that remind us of this created earthy peopled world. To me, these things call me back to living here and now. They invite me to wonder but also to ‘think little’ as farmer and author Wendell Berry advocates, at the scale of this person, this relationship, this place. There is a tendency to think big when it comes to solutions to world crises when perhaps thinking little - at the scale of the ‘village’ - is more actionable, more sustainable, more appropriate – a solution that works here might not work there, and that’s ok. Berry says in multiple thoughtful ways that ‘what we stand on is what we stand for’. His is a call to know place, to invest in place, to be in place, despite (and perhaps because of) the challenges that come with doing so.

I think the local is going to become more important - calling us to find our way back to community in a time of division and overwhelming global challenges.

‘Thinking little’ might happen in a street, a church, a garden, a neighbourhood. A place where we can root into literal or metaphorical soil, where isolation can turn to relation, where interdependence becomes easier to live out. It need not be an either/or between this and geographically distant or online communities though - I think online spaces offer their own care in the world as it is. But the communion table shows me hospitality as well as mystery, and Jesus – whose body communion draws us closer to – shows us a truth built locally, relationship-by-relationship. It calls us to the challenge and beauty of caring and being cared for in our own here and now.

Perhaps the early Christians had it right by being deeply invested in place, and in something beyond place too. They lived locally whilst acting globally and spiritually, ready to leave if the call should come. They were ready to build the church, person by person into something whole. God, after all, calls us to be a collective, to love our neighbours and in return, to feel love. I think the local is going to become more important - calling us to find our way back to community in a time of division and overwhelming global challenges, when faceless corporations would rather we relied on them than each other. As part of that, I think it’ll become important to engage with local civic bodies too, to all feel able to take part in placemaking and decision-making, especially when national government seems increasingly out of touch (my time as a District Councillor has given me a whole new lens on what living locally means).

Working out what the village might mean – as a mother, a citizen, a neighbour – as our daughter grows is an ongoing journey and it’s a theme I’ll return to here. But what I know is this: that I want us to be part of an ecology of care. I want us to offer and more graciously receive that care. I want us to be like the trees outside my window: linked together, rooted in place whilst reaching upwards and outwards to the light that is sometimes hard to see, but is always there.

Article

Comment

Community

Sustainability

Wildness

12 June 2025

5 min read

What my noisy, messy crow neighbours have taught me about how to live

We can’t control nature; we just need to become more porous to it

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Meet the neighbours.

Townsend Walton on Unsplash.

Our neighbours hate our crows. I can’t blame them. The hundreds of crows that occupy the tops of the ancient pines which surround our rural manse are the noisiest and messiest residents I have ever lived near. They greet each sunrise with a din of caws and counter-caws, as if they are deeply concerned that anyone might miss this momentous daily event or the fact that it’s now happening before 5:30a.m. In nesting season, which lasts most of April and May, our car is easily identifiable in any carpark by the crusted grey spots with which the crows see fit to adorn it. Within a week of moving in, we gave up on the washing line so invitingly strung between two of the pines. Our pristine whites were too tempting a target for our crows.

I do not attend the meetings of our local community council, but I hear whispers of what transpires there. Our crows, evidently, have been a regular topic of conversation. Multiple solutions have been proffered for driving them away. All have been tried and all have failed. Our crows cling fiercely to their homes and their determination is more than a match for any human efforts. If I have the vibe of my community right, at least some of its members feel that there’s something perverse, obscene even, about a flock of birds being allowed to upset our human right to create a serene, comfortable, and convenient habitation. Our clump of houses is surrounded by a visually stunning landscape; shouldn’t the aural landscape be equally beautiful?

If my family does not mind our crows, it is because the treetop drama is just one more example of many natural encroachments on the house, some more welcome than others.

Every year we celebrate the miraculous return to our eaves of house martins, home from their intercontinental peregrinations. We look forward to another summer spent watching their acrobatics and listening to their chicks in the nests an arm’s length from our windows.

Clearing up the mess of our attic’s bats is an annual chore, one thankfully performed stoically by our church’s property convener, but there are compensations - such as the twilight shows they put on outside our living room window, performing impossible turns and reversals midair in their search for prey.

Less welcome are the massive spiders, which are a perennial presence; the slugs, which seemed to apparate onto the hall carpet all through winter, the mice, two of whom sacrificed themselves to knock our dishwasher out of action by chewing through its hose; and the wasps who built a nest the size of a telephone box in the roof space above our back bathroom.

Least fun of all has been what we call the Great Earwig Migrations, which have happened twice in our half-decade in the manse and which involve weeks of finding the little bugs under, seemingly, every object and on every surface.

When we moved into the manse, we expected challenges, the high heating bills, the leaking roof, and the isolation of the countryside. What we did not expect was the experience of porousness; the shock of realising that we had so little control over what other forms of life saw fit to share our habitation with us.

At first it felt to me perverse, obscene even, that a house, even a 120-year-old house, should be so vulnerable to incursions by animal creation. Shouldn’t our home, our space, be a haven where we can control who or what enters, who or what we feel comfortable with, and who or what we can exclude?

If I had to give a name to this expectation, maybe it would be that of the buffered home, a play on philosopher Charles Taylor’s description of the modern self as buffered. Taylor contrasts the selves we aspire to be in modernity, ones able to control and order our bodies, our space, our lives, and our relationships so that they accord with our autonomous desires and actions, with those of our premodern ancestors. Medievals and ancients assumed porosity. Bodies were subject not just to biological infection, but spiritual infections too. Projects and plans were frustrated not just by mistakes or personal failings, but by the ever-fickle whims of the goddess Fortuna. Their lives, their bodies, their homes, existed in a perpetual state of vulnerability. The threat of everything falling apart was always on the horizon.

We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security.

Modern technology has helped us tame the more unwelcome of these forces, but it has also given us an overly naive expectation that all that is inconvenient about nature can and should be gradually eliminated. This expectation frames the way we respond to worries about climate change and other creeping environmental crises. We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security. But as our ancestors might remind us, we are part of nature too, and, just as in any relationship, mutual vulnerability and sacrifice are needed if we are all going to survive. This is scary, but there are resources within Christianity - within other faiths too - to help us understand that there are benefits to affirming our vulnerability, our porosity.

My daughters love our crows. They point in wonder as the crows flood into the sky at dusk, hundreds of them making a giant circle once, then twice round the garden, before settling down for the night. When, in late May, grounded fledgings appear, bundles of feathers shocked at the sudden inhospitality of the nest, too stunned to realise they can fly home, my daughters watch over them, anxious lest the local cats take advantage of their bewilderment.

A few Sundays ago, my youngest, who struggles to stay quiet and well-behaved in Sunday School, pulled me out of church early. We sat on the church lawn staring up at the crows and soon were adapting the andante melodies of that Sunday’s hymns into imagined songs of praise that crows might sing. “No,” my youngest said, simpatico with the crows as she is, “I think they’d want something more upbeat.” And so we tried setting our own corvid-themed praise lyrics to Rosé and Bruno Mars’ song APT, while listening to the caw and counter-caw above. “Dad, how do you think God sees the world?” she asked me when we finished. I stumbled through my best theologically informed explanation of how God could be in every part of creation without being of it, before she stopped me. “I think it’s like a giant snow globe that he holds in his hands.” Watching the birds swirl around us, two stationary figures caught by the same currents of air that were sweeping them aloft, what could I do but agree?

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