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My story of intentional communities is partly the story of having a child on my own. When I was 34, the relationship that I'd been in since I was 20 broke up, and all of a sudden I was the loneliest I had ever been in my adult life. I knew that I wanted to have a baby, and although I was lucky to have incredibly loving and supportive family in town, I also knew that I needed to develop more of a community around me-in part because I wanted lots of connections for the child I hoped to have.
Although I owned a lovely house in a child-friendly, urban neighbourhood in my hometown of Ottawa, I found myself walking my dog every day without running into a single person I knew, circling my block, longing to have someone with whom to have a few minutes of conversation. Although I am a dogged and eager community builder, I had struggled for years to make the communities of which I was a part cohere and thrive. People moved away, people were busy with work or with children. Sometimes, the thought of coming home to my lonely house on Friday evening, with a long weekend ahead of me, made me want to fall to my knees and howl. I actively dreaded the weekend, when others would disappear into the routines of family life. I liked my neighbours in my old neighbourhood, and enjoyed talking to them on the street, but I felt shy about keeping them talking on the street too long when the expectation was that they were headed in the door.
In the midst of this period, I took a lot of long walks and listened to a lot of podcasts, including one on intentional communities. I had never heard of this term, but the emphasis on geographic proximity and being connected to your neighbours immediately felt like a thrilling possibility. Intrepid researcher that I am, on one long evening alone in my single family home, I plugged the term "intentional community" into Google along with my city's name, and up came a single search result. For weeks, my to-do list had at the top "call intentional community," but I felt too shy or too...