Our Common Life

I've been taking part in a weekly discussion course called "Choices for Sustainable Living." The workbook is filled with essays on environmental sustainability, organized under different topics, such as "Business and Industry," "Communities," "Food," etc.

I was just reading an excerpt from a piece called "The Common Life" by Russell Sanders, which first appeared in Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place. In that piece, I found something extraodinarily beautiful:

In our common life we may find the strength not merely to carry on in face of the world's bad news, but to resist cruelty and waste. I speak of our life as common because it is ordinary, because we make it together, because it binds us through time to the rest of humanity and through our bodies to the rest of nature. By honoring this common life, nurturing it, carrying it steadily in mind, we might renew our households and neighborhoods and cities, and in doing so might redeem ourselves from the bleakness of private lives spent in frenzied pursuit of sensation and wealth.