Community is an intangible treasure I've always yearned for. It is knowing people and being known. It means belonging, being connected, being a well-loved person. I wish I had more of it. Why don't I?

Over the generations, this common treasure of community has been taken for granted, neglected and has thus decayed. Especially in Houston. But just as we realize what we've lost, we must dedicate ourselves with courage and creativity to restore it.

I believe my background gives me insight into how we have lost community. My parents were like so many young people that grew up during the Great Depression. In the prosperity after World War II, they devoted their lives to getting ahead in the world. Dad was a scientist for big corporations. Eight times we left our community behind to move to a new city for a better paying job.

We gained material plenty but lost the intangible treasure of cousins and grandparents and community. In television ads, Bell Telephone told us to keep in touch by long distance phone calls. But it's not the same as being there for each other.

I grew up with material abundance but with social and psychological scarcity. I was a loner in high school, awkward, shy. Now, I'm more comfortable with my computer than chatting at a party. I've got a high IQ, but in EQ, Emotional Intelligence, I'm a retard. Too often I spend my evenings by myself watching videos instead of in happy talk with my beloved community.

I'm typical of modern America says the book Bowling Alone. We used to bowl in leagues but now we bowl alone, it says. And that statistic is part of a larger trend. In the last 25 years, family dinners are down 33%, having friends is over down 45% and club meetings are down 58% according to www.BowlingAlone.com. The author, Robert Putnam says these changes hurt our health as much as smoking. "if you smoke and don't belong to any groups, it's kind of a close call which you should address first," he comments. This growing social isolation is a key reason behind the epidemic of clinically measured depression in the United States, says Putnam.

Whew! I'm OK, even typical, and it's our shared culture that's not OK. Putnam blames our isolation from each other on two-career families having less time to for community life and family life, on urban sprawl and on television. Just like our health, after we lose it, we realize we what we had and wished we had taken better care of it.

Community is an asset we own together like parks, clean air, the broadcast spectrum, and airline security. We don't assign a dollar value to them. But just like clean air, we couldn't live a day without our trust in each other, our ability to come together to resolve our common problems, and related intangible assets.

Putnam names it social capital; those "networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit." In cities with a substantial stock of social capital, life is easier, says Putnam.

Like physical capital, social capital contributes to our well-being. The Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey showed that a city's level of social capital predicts happiness better than the city's mean income or education levels (Results at www.cfsv.org/communitysurvey). This survey was done last spring by Harvard, Putnam, and community foundations. It rated 40 communities on their social capital to allow us to measure in later years whether it has improved or declined. The inescapable message: We hang together or hang separately.

Houston scored poorly compared to 39 other communities. Houston is better than average in "faith-based engagement," but in every other category (e.g. social trust, giving and volunteering) Houston was in the lowest quartile. We don't socialize much; only Silicon Valley folks join fewer associations than we do. We trail the nation in participation in protest politics and are the second lowest in involvement in conventional politics.

What can we do about it? Reach out to others. Talk and learn and work together to serve the community. It scares me; but the thrill of it also revitalizes me. Instead of devoting myself to making money, now my best energy goes into relationships. My passion is not shopping but serving the community. I'm changing from a techie nerd computer programmer into a person whose creativity flows.

Creativity is ... a spiritual experience and using it will result in many gentle but powerful changes, says Julia Cameron in the Artists' Way. Soul is a trait of artists, poets, musicians, writers, and community activists.

I'm one of a huge minority. A quarter of Americans are creating this new culture that values relationships, integrity, sustainability, and spirituality according to Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson in Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. Our movements are coming together in a great river of change.

Community participation feeds the soul.

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