I don't believe that there is anything new I that anyone can say about relationships, or love anymore. Throughout history, and prehistory, and even before that, people have been involved in relationships with other people. There is no way around it; humans are social animals and as such, we have what amounts to an innate need to be involved with other people. 

Recently I have developed a heightened appreciation for the importance of family relationships in our lives. This aspect of my life commenced just about a year ago when the husband of my wife's sister passed away rather suddenly. My wife's family has always been pretty close, but in a loose sort of way. In recent years some of us have drifted apart while others have remained closer and have communicated more frequently. 

Upon the passing of my brother-in-law, however, my wife's family really came together and supported their sister and her two young children. Although it was a time of great sadness, I discovered a sense of security and comfort in this newfound network of support that had been some-what lacking before. I also discovered that although the support was offered primarily to my wife's sister, the residual energy had spread out to the rest of the family so that a deeper sense of compassion for, and commitment to, each other has resulted. 

The ironic part of this is that I have spent the greater part of the last decade or so of my life searching for a sense of community. There seems to be some tendency in our society to isolate people and although I believe this is largely the unintentional byproduct of a sociopathic cultural milieu, the result has been to leave millions of people feeling cut-off from each other. It was from this sense of isolation that I began to search for connection, for a community. 

Over the years I have gradually connected to people with whom I have felt a kinship, and more recently there have been small groups of people with whom I have almost felt a sense of community even. And yet, I had never thought to look to family to find this community spirit that I had been seeking, although I admit that the stray thought of doing so had passed through my mind every now and then. So it was a little bit of an unexpected surprise when things unfolded as they did after the passing of my brother-in-law. 

Of course, change does not always come suddenly, and so I did not truly recognize what was happening until a few months later, during one of those rocky bumps that nearly every marriage goes through over time. Our "bumps" seem to hit just about every seven years. At any rate, my wife and I crested the bump during one fateful night last summer which gave rise to a sleepless night of reviewing the nature and future of my spousal relationship. During the evaluation, it dawned on me that there was a bigger picture that I should be looking at; that this wasn't simply a matter of my relationship with my wife, but that her whole family was involved in this. I had to ask myself if I truly thought that our current impasse necessitated a need to terminate not only our connection to each other, but also our respective connections to each other's families. 

As I contemplated this aspect of our relationship, I realized that there was a lot more at stake here then I had previously considered. I discovered that during the course of my fourteen years of marriage I had been weaving a web of connections throughout my wife's immediate and extended family, a web of connections that amounted to a community. I realized, that the "sense of community" that I had been seeking in the external world already existed for me in the internal world of my wife's family so that they had become my family. Having looked at Native American tribal communities as something of a model of what I was seeking, I realized that a tribal community is, in many respects, nothing more than an extended family. What I was really looking for in a community was already present within my family. Our "sense of community" had become substantially stronger and more focused during the months following the passing of one of our members. 

I realized that sometimes the nature of the relationships that we develop with people, and particularly with our families, are not always readily apparent to us because we often take them for granted. Sometimes it is only through a crisis, or some other notable event, that we take a moment to sit back and focus on what is already on our plate, and at such a moment we may discover, as I did, that rather than having an empty plate, our plate is really rather full. 

Are there lessons to be learned from this? In one sense, I am reminded of Dorothy from the movie version of the "Wizard of Oz," when she realizes that what she had been seeking all along—a way to return to her home—had always been within her power. In that same way, sometimes we spend too much time and energy perhaps looking too far afield for elements of relationships and a sense of community that already exists within our lives, if only we would take a moment to step back and objectively view what is before us. I realize that my own experience may be very different from that of other people for both my family and my wife's family provide a supportive and loving foundation for us. Perhaps in an Utopian world everyone would have access to such a familial base of support, but sadly that is not the case.

In instances where such a familial community is not available, I do believe that it is possible to find an external community that can provide many of the same social supports as that which may be found through family. Sometimes it may develop through one's work or through a network of friends. As a member of several such external communities, I know that through them I receive important encouragement and support in areas of my life where my familial community does not always reach. Perhaps it is the nature of our modern world that even our familial communities have gaps in what they can provide to us, which necessitates that we build relationships that transcend those of family. Or perhaps it simply follows from the adage that we are all related—we are all family—so that even those people who are not a part of our family community through blood or through marriage, are still a part of our greater community through the personal interactions that we have with them and through the shared experience that comes from being human.

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John Austin is an administrator in the Business Office of The New England Center For Children, which is a private school for autistic children, located in Southborough, MA. In his spare time he is a freelance writer, a devout fitness enthusiast, a practitioner of Zen meditation under the Chozen-Ji lineage of rinzai Zen, and pursues a spiritual path of inquiry, discovery, and understanding, as expressed in the lifeways and wisdom of the indigenous peoples of North America. He currently resides in Holliston, MA. He can be reached via e-mail at: Baltasar@aol.com, and is always open to exchanging ideas and information as a way of promoting individual and global spiritual growth. His personal website URL is: http://members.aol.com/baltasar/johnspage.html