friends and penguins

i was talking to a friend the other day about the cycle of life. I started thinking about how strange this all is. Here I am in this phase of life where my life is my family. This is evidenced by the fact that when my family is gone i feel a horrible sense of loss. They are my community, and so it is hard to sustain really deep relationships with others. As my family gets bigger, my sense of loneliness gets much greater whenever they take a vacation without me.

But i think back to college and seminary only a few years ago, and things were different. Our lives (mine and jocelyn's) were much more connected with other people's lives. We had this grander experience of community that was much larger in scope. But now here we are with our tight intimate "family" circle. With little outside intrusion.

My friend and I were reflecting on how as time goes on, and your kids grow, you reconnect in with the larger community. Suddenly your circle becomes larger. It can happen too as people age, as spouses die, suddenly the walls of "family" aren't there and so you mingle back out into the larger societal cohort and so you experience closeness with many other people, a more diverse "circle"

we chalked this up to the normal cycle of life. But then i started thinking about those crazy penguins.

If you've seen "the march of the penguins" you know what i'm talking about. Their life cycle is almost reversed. They do their own thing for a few years and then when it comes time to have baby penguins, they all come together. In the movie they kept saying how it was as if the penguins together were becoming a new collective organism. They repeat this for a number of years, year after year, coming together to populate the antarctic with penguins. And then when they're done they go off and do their own thing again.

So my question is, does it have to be this way? This cycle of life thing? Sure we're talking about creatures as different as arctic birds and humans (although those of us who live in michigan might actually relate better to penguins than to those who have no idea what even an "ice scraper" is). But do we unnecessarily cloister ourselves off from the rest of the world when kids come into the picture. And is that always healthy? Don't get me wrong i love to be cloistered off with my family. They are my life's joy, but maybe that's part of this whole problem... should i be keeping that joy to myself or might that joy be something worth sharing with others around me.

Maybe this is the loneliness talking, but might there be room to surround your kids with a loving and safe home environment while at the same time not removing yourself so greatly from community with others? could we stand to be more penguin-like?