As nurses one of our shades is often the confining labels we give to ourselves as doers in service giving profession. I would like to go on record as most respectful of this aspect of my world. I regret, nonetheless, that we have not always similarly crystallized and floodlighted the discovery and creative possibilities in our communities. In our very personal, intimate, involved professional nursing relations with other man we are privileged to be included in human happenings open to no other group. As nurses, we have had and are having emphasized to us the importance of facts handed to us. Can we actuate the importance of the knowledge of man that becomes part of us through our nursing worlds? It is hard to honor the significance of the everyday, the commonplace, the intimately known? It has been said that one could know of the whole universe if one could make every possible relationship starting from a piece of bread. Think of a "simple" or "routine" nursing situation. Think of its true complexity and how it can trigger puzzlement, wonderment, and thinking. As learning situations, nurses' situations are existentially priceless. Returning now to Plato's conception of community understood through the terms macrocosm and microcosm, what can the nursing world situation reveal to us of community? What are the qualities of the participants, the microcosms, and how are these qualities reflected in our nursing communities? HISTORY: THE SHADES OF MY WORLD, BRACKETED In years past as a public health mental health psychiatric nurse I have structured facts about man, family, and community precisely for presentation. Approaching the data sociopsychologically I framed it in the public health model of promotion of health, prevention of illness, treatment, rehabilitation, and maintenance. I thought of family sociologically as nuclear, procreative, and extended. In accordance with the psychoanalytic model, family members were oral, anal, oedipal, latent, homosexual, adolescent, heterosexual, and/or mature. Community, like person and family, was considered according to a {39} closed paradigm, ranging from ideal to abysmal, from the smallest to the largest unit in which persons congregated for common purposes. I selected from experience nursing examples to make these sociopsychological public health constructs meaningful. I did not start from nursing experiences to come up with nursing concepts of man, family, and community. I denied my particular self as a source of knowledge of these areas. Had education programmed me to value only others' ideas gleaned in the classroom or from books? I projected this devaluation of my own ideas onto my colleagues and until I really knew them gave them what I thought they wanted, others' ideas. Presently I prize my uncertainty about the nature of man in family and community and my striving toward an ever explorative process of being and becoming, available for surprise. Paradoxically, I believe it was these very same