Commusings: Ten Peas in a Pandemic Pod by Jake Laub

Or, listen on Spotify

---

Dear Commune Community,

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

I’m not sure there is a better quote from all of literature that encapsulates my experience during COVID than this Dickens riff from A Tale of Two Cities.

I harbored a lot of guilt during the COVID lockdown. There was tremendous suffering every direction I turned my head. I had good friends who lost parents and some of the hardest-working entrepreneurs I knew shuttered their businesses. Yet, despite having limped through long COVID myself, I reminisce on this period with tremendous nostalgia.

As Jake will describe, our 10-person COVID bubble decamped on our property in Topanga. It was here – sheltering-in-place – that we congregated around the communal table every night, that my middle daughter taught my youngest how to dance, that we grew a wonderful garden and harvested eggs from the chickens. It was a taste of a simpler, more local life.

Simultaneously holding the suffering of the world and my own contented serenity was a challenge. It still is. But, above all, this time reminded me of what is important about life in the first place: connection.

Today’s essay is the first in a series of reflections from my co-founder and brother-from-another-mother, Jake, on the importance of community and how to rebuild the village.

Connect with me on IG @jeffkrasno or at [email protected].

In love, include me,
Jeff 

• • •

Ten Peas in a Pandemic Pod
By Jake Laub

This is Part 1 in a three-week series on Rebuilding the Village. You can listen to all three essays on the podcast here.

It’s Thursday, March 12, 2020.

The WHO has declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the NBA has canceled its season, and thirty guests have arrived for Schuyler’s yoga retreat at Commune Topanga.

As airlines cancel flights, people scramble to repack and head home. By Sunday morning it’s just me and Julia, Jeff and Schuyler, the two property managers, and the retreat chef Paco sitting around the patio table.

Paco – normally serene, jolly, and vaguely Buddha-like – looks at us seriously over the rim of his glasses. “I would be going back to a 1-bedroom apartment on the East Coast. That’s going to be pretty lonely. Can I stay here?”

And so, counting Micah, Ondine, and Phoebe (Jeff and Schuyler’s daughters), we became ten peas in a lockdown pod.

I still carry a lot of guilt about that summer.

It was one of the happiest times of my life.

While the world convulsed, we sent a weekly emissary to the farmer’s market and cooked a communal meal every night. I would bake sourdough bread early in the morning and watch half of it disappear while still warm on the countertop. We had 30-minute dance parties in the yoga studio. We co-parented eight Rhode Island Red chicks and bottle-fed two foster kittens.

None of my social interactions were scheduled, but my life was full of interesting conversations. For once, I felt both relaxed and socially fulfilled.

If you asked me to pick eight people to be stranded with on a desert isle, this would not have been my exact list. But here we were, a community.

Why is it so rare to feel this way?

In a 2018 Cigna survey, 54% of American adults reported feeling lonely. Unsurprisingly, that jumped to 61% in 2020. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called loneliness a public health epidemic.

More than half of Americans feel that “no one knows them well” and a majority also report that they eat all their meals by themselves.

After about 10 months, COVID restrictions began to loosen and our idyllic bubble began to deflate. By the Spring of 2021, Julia and I were expecting a baby and living alone at Commune Topanga in our off-grid yurt.

As the gravity of our atomized culture reasserted itself, we spent a lot of time reflecting on our taste of Eden — and how we could get it back.

We settled on three key elements that make community really work:

1. Proximity
2. Consistency
3. Culture (or Intention)

Proximity means true physical proximity. Everyone is “close” these days in our “hyper-connected” world. But our human hardware is designed for 100% 4-dimensional input, including all the smells, textures, and microexpressions that simply don’t come with a video call. As a society, we discovered this during lockdown, and it’s why “loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily,” according to Surgeon General Murthy. Human touch and face-to-face interaction are just as important to us as sunlight.

Consistency means interacting with the same people often. I sometimes secretly dread meeting with certain friends because we only see each other every few months — or years. Half of the conversation is a biographical rehash of our time apart.

During our little lockdown bubble, I didn’t need to “catch up” every time I saw Paco. We dropped in immediately — about music, or vintage serving utensils, or the sublime nature of the universe as explained by last night’s cornbread. We knew what was present and alive for each other without having to dig it up.

Culture is the least measurable of the three, but equally critical to the mix. In fancy social science language you might ask, “Is there a spirit of communitas?” Is the intention to get to know your fellow humans and care about each other?

Before starting Commune, Jeff co-founded and I worked for Wanderlust Festival. Those festivals exuded a culture of communitas combined with proximity. Thousands of yogis would converge on a mountaintop with the expectation of having a communal experience. You chatted with people in the lunch line and traded stories with your yoga mat neighbors before class.

But while festivals combine culture and proximity, they lack consistency. For weekend after weekend, we would create an ephemeral flower of community that scattered its seeds to the wind on Monday. A thousand new friendships wilted into the workweek.

My current cookie-cutter neighborhood in Los Angeles (an unfortunate series of events ended yurt life a year ago) is another good example of “two out of three.” We have at least a dozen neighbors with young children. I yearn for a community playground to glue us together, but instead I pass them on the street and wave. Occasionally I have wrangled a playdate, but the culture simply isn’t there. When the workday ends, each nuclear family retreats into its own castle, complete with pool and backyard play structure. Maeva and I can hear them from the street or see them through windows, but it would be awkward to knock on the door and invite ourselves in. Proximity and consistency, but no culture of community.

So where do all three come together?

The answer Julia and I are most passionate about is a type of intentional community known as cohousing.

Cohousing comes in many forms – from walkable neighborhoods to urban apartment buildings – but at its heart is proximity, consistency, and a culture of community. In cohousing you own your own private home (with kitchen, bedrooms, etc), but you also share a “common house” which usually has a large kitchen and dining room for communal meals plus kid’s room, cozy nooks, and maybe even an art studio or workshop.

Cohousing projects are places where, unlike in most modern American settings, old and young people constantly overlap and interact. Everyone has extra “aunts,” “uncles,” “cousins,” and “grandkids.” You share things. There’s a community closet where your kid’s too-small shoes get passed along to new tiny feet, or a once-favorite shirt becomes someone’s new favorite shirt. When chatting with one cohousing community member, he said, “We have one lawn mower for the whole village. Why would we need more?”

If you want to play a board game, you walk to the common house. If you need someone to take you to a doctor’s appointment or watch your kids, you make plans over a shared meal or from your front porch. It’s not all perfect and conflicts are inevitable, but relationships are more intentional and there’s a culture of addressing problems productively rather than hiding behind a high fence.

This is the dream, but cohousing still represents far less than 1% of total U.S. housing.

After exploring a variety of cohousing options, Julia and I decided to join a group building a 40-home village combined with 240 acres of regenerative farmland in Western Washington. For the past 3 years, we have made slow, steady progress on this ambitious development that bends the rules of modern housing development and rural county code, because while those 10 months of happenstance community were especially sweet, we want it to last for the rest of our lives — no global pandemic necessary.

P.S. If you also dream of living in community, we are looking for more households to join our project, Rooted Northwest. Someday, maybe we can be cohousing neighbors and bond over a slice of warm sourdough bread in the common house. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions at [email protected].

Photo: A Rooted Northwest community gathering.