Dear Aldea Family,
I appreciate these words from Pema Chodron’s book Start Where You Are: a guide to compassionate living: “When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.”
I love the idea that the human heart is huge, vast, and limitless—that each of us there is a spacious kind of warmth and gentleness.
As most of you know, we’ve just celebrated our fifth anniversary at aldea! in the five years since our official launch, we’ve seen amazing things happen. Our community has grown, and our impact has been resoundingly positive. I feel very lucky to be part of this place.
We’ve been revisiting our core values of late. You can see our complete values statements elsewhere in this brochure, but here are the key words. We are a community that values the practice of being: Present, Hospitable, Improvisational, Divergent, and Unfolding. When these values were written, they were largely aspirational. We were hoping to become such a community. Over the past years, these values have been forged at aldea, and they have forged the kind of community we are.
Looking forward, we know that change is happening. Change is always and already happening. In the midst of the change, our values will continue to drive and shape us. I’m excited about the future of aldea and the impact our community will have in our own lives and in the lives of those yet to come.
Our annual pledge campaign this year is called Open Hearts. I hope you’ll consider how you might participate financially in 2019 to make aldea better and to extend our community in the days to come. As always, if you decide not to participate, you are loved, valued, welcomed and an essential part of who we are.
If you want to give, click here.
Much love to you all,
Kevin Skinner