Do you remember when we were all together for National Orientation? Toward the end of our time together, we distributed 3”x5” cards and asked people to write something they’d like to remember in five months. When you look through this list of hopeful remarks, do you remember which one is yours? Which one connects the most to where you are now?

One thing I want to remember 5 months from now is to always check in with yourself first before you point a finger to someone else. Analyze, pause and think before making a big decision.

The people. I want to remember my little conversations with each person, the big ones, their faces, reactions, tears, and joy. Maybe I won’t forget them. Hopefully, they don’t forget me. I want us to remember each other and our time together.

Remember the feeling of trust in this community, this process, these people, and my place as an individual member of it, which I feel through the care of others, even as I am not always sure of it within myself. The desire to build and imagine this community and take that creation out into the world.

A spiritual sense, or feeling, of the divine doesn’t have to be a higher power. It can be a grounded power. It can be derived from your guts and the soles of your feet and the structures you build with other people.

5 months from now, I want to remember that everything good is a collective destination.

One thing I want to remember 5 months from now is the distinction between solidarity and guilt, including how each is carried in the mind/body.

There are at least 17 other people who you could reach out to, buy a plot of land with, and create a beautiful and safe community with. Seriously, let’s consider.

Everyone I met from the other houses, all the connections we made.

Care-centered ideology, honesty, play and good intentions.

A group of people trying to carry individual burdens through collaboration. I want to live in a world where basic human conversational validation is not hard for anyone to come across. Therefore I try to give that to anyone I talk to. Introspection. Community. Honesty.

Five months from now, I want to remember the people I met here, taking time to be in silence, spending time being present every day.

In five months I want to remember the ease and comfort with which connections were made and conversations were had in this space.

Hope is an active pursuit. We must train ourselves to imagine and enact a vision of a new world, and we must do so with more strength and resolve than the billionaires currently building their own world.

All of the wonderful people/staff that have inspired me at orientation in hopes that they continue to inspire me the whole year.

One thing I want to remember 5 months from now was the openness to making connections in an authentically vulnerable way and how that blossomed unto something beautiful: new friends.

Try another new thing. Grow a little more this week.

I want to remember to practice reciprocity and to do the dishes plus one.