Welcome

THIS BOOK IS AN INVITATION into a new possibility for each of us to live a more satisfying life. We welcome how you, the reader, bring your own unique experience and insights into this book through the act of reading it. In this way, you are creating this book just as you are creating your life, your neighborhood, and the larger community of the world. This idea of cocreation is key to a satisfying life, which becomes possible when we join our neighbors to live and create a community that nurtures our family and makes us useful citizens.

This possibility of more satisfaction through creating something with those around us is idealistic, and yet it is within our grasp. It is a possibility that is both visionary and realistic. Our culture tells us that a satisfying life can only be purchased. It tells us that in the place where we live, we don’t have the resources to create a good life. That we must find the expertise from marketers and professionals. This book reminds us that a neighborhood can raise a child, provide security, sustain our health, secure our income, and care for our vulnerable people. Each of these is within the power of our community.

This power is silent on most streets where we live. However, it is possible to give voice to a neighborhood that is able to speak the language of satisfaction—a language that the marketplace can never speak, in spite of its alluring promise that we can buy a good life.

There is a neighborhood ideal that we all believe in, but it is usually a whisper. When we speak up for this ideal, our voices tell of our gifts, our hospitality, our relationships, and living by the habits of our heart.

This book gives voice to the ideal of an abundant—or some call a beloved—community. It reminds us of our power to create a full and complete life. It assures us that when we join together with our neighbors, we are the architects of the future that we want to live within. Such a future is made possible through the untapped abundance of every community, especially our own.

This is why the book concludes with ways in which neighbors have awakened to their abundance. And also why the book invites you to connect with the thousands of others around the world who are collecting the gifts of their family and neighborhood to create a more powerful community and satisfying life.