Do my values resonate with you? Do you want to spend time creating, sending snail mail, meeting new friends, growing personally, and shaping the world we live in?
I’m starting a community based on my values! The name’s still coming, but what any community needs are people who support what it’s all about.
What We’re About
We encourage one another to enjoy being adult beginners and to take the tiny steps, bit by bit, which allow us to pursue and explore our curiosities. We know that starting before we feel ready and making mistakes are fantastic indicators of growth—and that’s something to celebrate.
We actively push our comfort zones to grow and learn—however this looks for us individually—but with the understanding that this is far from a 24/7 pursuit. We measure our human lives by the moments, not our “productivity” or page views. Things take time and we’re patient—both with ourselves and others. We practice kind, love-filled self-talk.
We know that a person cannot be defined by labels, a book they wrote, a quote, a site, a piece of work, an action, followers, or a mistake. All humans are so incredibly complex and ever-changing. Since we’re constantly absorbing new information and experiences, who we are today in this very moment is not necessarily who we’ll be tomorrow.
We like our meals and social time to be smartphone-free. We’ve recognized that turning down the noise of others will allow us to turn up our inner voice. We’re learning to tap into ourselves more often and to trust our intuition. It’s how we’ll come up with ideas and creations that only we can bring into the world.
We can spread light and change lives through our daily words and interactions. We’re shaping the world right here, right now, by living our values.
Community Activities
Here’s what I’m envisioning at the moment:
- Doing things together offline and online. Yes, we can certainly connect online. I’m hoping to get some G+ Hangouts going so that we can meet one another face to face. We can do creative challenges together, push our comfort zones, celebrate small moments, and more through virtual connection. But I also want regular face-to-face, in-person interactions within our community. This will develop as we grow and learn where everyone’s located, but initial ideas include having art nights, helping each other through issues, exploring new topics together, taking turns giving little workshops and teaching each other something. Adult show and tell—live!
- Snail mail meet and greet. Here’s an idea: What if everyone sent in a question or two via email, I compile them into a questionnaire and email it out to everyone. You can then print the questionnaire, write your responses, and mail it to me. I would photocopy the responses and send all participants a copy of everyone’s. Wouldn’t that be a fun way to get to know each other?
- Helping each other. I’d like to foster a community of friends who help one another learn and grow. A pinch of encouragement can be all it takes to completely change the course of someone’s life.
- Testing our ideas with a safe community. I hope to encourage you to create, and to also attract those already creating. Do you have an idea you want to test out? A project we could all do together? A creative challenge? This is space to share!
- Collaborating to create the world we want. There’s lots of value in creative practices or projects that have seemingly no purpose. Keep doing them! But I’d also love to do projects as a community that do ripple out into the world—something as simple as The Montague Workshop’s “Because You Were” or sending encouraging snail mail to organizations we support.
What ideas do you have? We’d love to hear them!
Want to Join Our Community?
We’d love to have you! Here’s what to do:
1) Say hello!
If you haven’t yet, pop over and say hello! I want to meet you so we can interact and have fun creating together!
So we’ll start with hellos and go from there.
2) Receive news via blog / email (Optional)
I’ll post any community projects/news to the blog, whose RSS feed is here. (I use Feedly to track the blogs I read; it keeps them all in one place, organized, and automatically lets me know what new posts have been published so I don’t have to go back and manually check every blog I read.)
In the future I’d love to send out a quarterly newsletter by post to members who are willing to toss in two quarters for postage, but in the meantime, if you’d like to know about projects/creations we’re doing together, we’re using email.
I send out a monthly email sharing my latest writing on the blog, current thoughts, and happenings. If this is where you want your attention to be once a month, you can sign up for that here. (Also, if you haven’t done an inbox audit in a while, unroll.me is an excellent service to help get you unsubscribed from lists!)