tribal living

I love my tribe.

I think it was friend who first introduced this idea to me: a modern day tribe.  the people you call when you have a flat tire, when you need emergency childcare, when only a beer on a back porch can solve your problems.  the people who call because you were on their mind, the only people you aren't bothered by when they drop by unannounced.  the people who help celebrate birthdays and just-because days, the ones that get the bad news phone calls first. 

I grew up surrounded by a tribe, although that certainly isn't how I thought of it then.  my mom has always said that my dad collects people the way other dads collected sport memorabilia or electronic equipment, but I think my mom did her fair share of people collecting as well.  the tribes of my childhood where families from church small groups, neighborhood friends, and the occassional colleague of one of my parents.  these were the families where we knew where they kept the silverware in the kitchen and whose dogs never barked at us because they saw us so often.  these were the folks we camped with, prayed with, potlucked with, and counted as our own.  my family moved a lot growing up, but we found our tribe wherever we landed.

my tribe in brevard is more tangled than anywhere else I've lived.  I've thought a lot about this and I think it is because our family has more needs than we ever had, partially because our family is bigger than it's ever been.  when I lived by myself in asheville, I only needed friends for me, and most of those friends were single folks themselves.  when it was eric and I together, we mashed tribes for a while, but married life parred down our tribal numbers, and only those that mattered most made the cut, I think.  the people that could value eric and I together and appreciate us separately are the ones that stuck around.  I can remember sitting on the porch at the HEAP having an in depth conversation with ally about who was actually tribe and who was "from a neighboring tribe where we have good relationships and intermarriage is allowed even if they aren't really our tribe."  my definitions were broader than hers, but we both counted each other as in the inner circle, and that is the important part.

now that we have kids, our tribal needs are different yet again.  and it isn't just that we need families with kids in the mix, although that is important.  we need people that get us, that value us, ALL of us; people that understand us as a family and as individuals.  people who have much to teach us and much to let us teach them.  our tribe is the village in which we are raising our children, the village where we are being raised as well.

I love my tribe.  I love that this is how my children are growing up, that they will remember people in their lives who were both their friends and their parents' friends all at once.  and my hope is that they will make finding their own tribe and a tribe for their own families the priority it deserves to be.