Share

Read more

Photo taken outside of Verona, Italy after stopping on our way to Venice for me to catch my flight home. We were moving too fast and we spilled the coffee. We replaced the cup of coffee, because we were tenacious! Sometimes hard lessons can only be learned the hard way! June 2026

Read more

Read more

Photo taken in Verona, Italy, June 2026 by the author at Depo Clandestino

Read more

Subscribe

Share

Read more

Photo by the author form the hills of Verona overlooking into the city below

Read more

I am writing this Monday Meditation on a Tuesday.

On a bus from Cork to Dublin.

To catch a flight to Verona to be hosted for my last stop on my trip doing ethnographic research on belonging and freedom.

Perhaps that is fitting.

The calendar insists it is late. The algorithms insist I should have posted yesterday. The productivity gurus wo…

Read more

Week 22 of 52 — Alignment

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

Read more

Dear Becoming Ones,

I am writing from Cork, Ireland, where I have been for a spell eating with strangers and conducting ethnographic research around belonging and freedom through the shared practices of eating together. Over the past several weeks, I have stayed in homes, guest rooms, tiny flats, and community spaces, carried by extraordinary hospitality and kindness. Every place I have visited throughout Europe has had its own local pub ecology, its own rituals of gathering, its own choreography of conversation, laughter, and grief.

Last year, I was invited to Zürich to present a paper on my first book, Activist Theology, and once folks learned I would be in Europe for an extended period of time, invitations began to flow into my inbox. Scholars, organizers, pastors, artists, and ordinary people opened their homes to me so I could continue the research for the next book I am slowly writing: a project circling belonging and freedom through food, art, and ritual.

I remain deeply grateful for the support of Our Collective Becoming — both the Substack and the nonprofit. What began as a small experiment in public theology and correspondence has become a global ecology of care, with living projects emerging in various corners of the world. I do not take this lightly. Thank you for helping nurture this unfolding work.

For a long time, I have not known how to cultivate meaningful dialogue with paying subscribers. I am, at my core, a writer who observes the world and attempts to tell the truth about what I encounter: injustice, supremacy, fragmentation, loneliness, the collapsing architecture of empire, and the fragile beauty that still insists on living beneath it all.

Early in my academic career, after completing years of training and entering the progressive Christian speaking circuit, I found myself repeatedly tokenized as the “Trans voice” or the “queer perspective” invited into rooms that often did not know what to do with me beyond symbolism. Over time, I learned that I do not particularly enjoy performing expertise from a stage. I much prefer sitting at tables with people, listening carefully, asking questions, sharing meals, and allowing conversation itself to become a form of collective inquiry.

So while living in Nashville years ago, I began turning toward story and narrative intelligence as methodology. I started hosting conversations as content. That practice eventually took me across the United States by train, eating with strangers as a way of studying social trust, belonging, and repair. Now, it has carried me throughout Europe, where I continue asking the same driving question:

How do we turn toward one another right now?

That question feels more urgent to me than ever.

In Zürich, one of the things I learned is that nearly every worldview — every ideology, every system of meaning — is often structured around polarization and othering. We define ourselves against someone else. That realization saddened me deeply. I continue wondering whether we can recover a shared sense of dignity and purpose with one another without collapsing into sameness or domination.

While in London, being hosted by Black Pentecostal communities and Afro-Caribbean elders, I learned more about the art of listening. Truly listening. Not listening in order to reply, but listening as a spiritual discipline. I find myself speaking less these days and writing more carefully, hoping the words themselves might dance a little on the page.

I have also been carrying James Baldwin with me everywhere I go. Reading Baldwin while living between places has sharpened my awareness that I am, in many ways, living in exile from the nation-state that formed me. Baldwin has become a companion in grief and clarity alike, helping me turn away from the hegemonic structures that conditioned me and toward the vocation of becoming a cultural worker in an age marked by violence, genocide, loneliness, and profound spiritual exhaustion.

This fall, I plan to host a course situated at the intersection of my first book, Activist Theology, and Dr. Hanna Reichel’s Emergency Devotion. I want us to cultivate practices sturdy enough for the times we are living through — practices capable of nurturing ecologies of change, collective resilience, and generative relations. I am still building the course material now, slowly and intentionally. More details and a video announcement will arrive later this summer.

For those who are newer here, I wanted to connect a few dots.

Every Monday, I send a meditation meant to help us center ourselves amid the noise and velocity of the world. Every Friday, I send a Care Package focused on possibility. Last year, I spent an entire year writing about care because I remain convinced that care is not sentimental; it is infrastructural. It is political. It is spiritual labor.

I try to place care into everything I create, though I am imperfect and continually unraveling from the white supremacist practices and imperial logics that shape all of us in ways both visible and subtle. We are each compromised by the worlds that formed us. Even our goodness can become performance if we are not careful. “Good” itself feels increasingly contested in this historical moment.

What does it mean to become human together again?

That is the question underneath almost everything I write.

I also want to say clearly: my desire is for this work to remain publicly accessible. Every post stays free for two weeks before moving behind a paywall. I know this is not the best business model, but I continue to believe public thought and cultural work should remain available to as many people as possible.

For those who choose to become paying subscribers, thank you. Your support helps sustain this wandering, writing, listening life. It allows me to continue traveling, hosting conversations, writing publicly, supporting the nonprofit, and building spaces for collective reflection and repair. I never want this space to feel extractive or transactional. Think of a paid subscription less as purchasing content and more as helping keep a table open where these conversations can continue unfolding.

And because targeted harassment shaped much of my life for many years, comments remain open only to paying subscribers. This boundary protects my mental health and allows conversation to remain slower, gentler, and more intentional. Thank you for understanding this act of care.

Today in Cork, where it is unexpectedly hot, I am cooking beans for dinner. I tend to eat simply while traveling, sharing meals in homes and resisting the pressure to constantly consume experiences. Though I will admit: I recently revisited a pizza spot here connected to memories of writing Activist Theology, and I have happily sampled my fair share of Irish whiskey and local beer while wandering both the Republic and the North of Ireland.

I miss my whiskey dates back in Alfred, and I am already looking forward to eventually returning to Alex’s for another evening of conversation and slow laughter.

Until then, thank you for being here.

Thank you for reading.

Thank you for helping nurture Our Collective Becoming.

Paz,
Roberto+

Read more

Dear Becoming Ones:

I started writing a meditation on Mondays because I was in need o…

Read more

Read more

My Dearest Becoming Ones:

I am writing this Monday Meditation from London, where I have been eating with people across the…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

I will keep up with my writing while I’m away in Europe. I head to Zurich today to speak at the University of Zurich at this conference. I’ve been asked to speak on Activist Theology, which I’m looking forward to doing. The remarks will be published in a manuscript, so my one hour plenary remarks will need to be reworked for publication later this summer. I look forward to letting you know when those remarks are available.

After Zurich, I’ll be in Belfast, London, Cork, and Verona. I’ll be hosted by people in their homes and exploring peace and reconciliation and non-oppositional logics while I’m away. I’ll also be eating with people for ethnographic research for my next book on belonging and freedom that I’ve been working on at the Friendship Library all year in Friendship, NY.

I look forward to being in touch on Friday with the Friday Care Package, writing on possibility! Stay tuned for a Zurich inspired Care Package on possibility!

Keep Hope Alive!

Paz, —RCE+

Dear Becoming Ones:

Even though the Monday Meditation is arriving on a Wednesday, wisdom still guides us. Wisdom is not bound to the clock or the calendar. Wisdom arrives slowly, like dusk stretching across the hills of Allegany County. Wisdom arrives through grief retreats and library conversations, through strangers at the table and the quiet knowing of our own bodies. Wisdom arrives when we finally become still enough to hear what has been trying to speak beneath the noise of empire.

We are living in an economy obsessed with extraction. An economy that measures value through productivity, speed, accumulation, domination. The neoliberal imagination wants us exhausted and isolated, convinced that our worth is tied to output. Byung-Chul Han reminds us that burnout is not simply personal fatigue; it is the spiritual condition of a culture that has forgotten how to rest, behold, and belong.

But there is another economy available to us.

The wisdom economy.

The wisdom economy cannot be traded on Wall Street. It does not reward scarcity or hoarding. It emerges in kitchens, libraries, trains, gardens, prayer circles, recovery meetings, and community tables. It emerges wherever people risk turning toward one another again.

Wisdom asks different questions than capitalism.

Not:
How much did you produce?

But:
Did you remain tender?

Not:
How efficient were you?

But:
Did you notice who was left behind?

Not:
How much power did you accumulate?

But:
Did you help someone survive?

The wisdom economy teaches us that knowledge without care becomes domination. Information without embodiment becomes noise. Intelligence without love becomes machinery.

I think this is why elders matter.

I think this is why stories matter.

I think this is why meals matter.

Because wisdom is not merely data transfer. Wisdom is relational. It moves through presence. Through attention. Through apprenticeship to living. Through learning how to sit beside sorrow without trying to conquer it.

James Baldwin once wrote that “the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.” Wisdom does something similar. Wisdom interrupts certainty. Wisdom softens the ego. Wisdom reminds us that we belong to one another in fragile and necessary ways.

And perhaps this is why the world feels so starved right now.

We are drowning in information while dying from a lack of wisdom.

The algorithms know how to capture our attention, but they do not know how to help us grieve. The market knows how to monetize loneliness, but it cannot teach us how to love each other well. The empire knows how to extract labor, but it does not know how to nourish the soul.

Wisdom economies move differently.

They move at the speed of trust.

At the speed of compost.

At the speed of bread rising.

At the speed of healing.

In the wisdom economy, a conversation at the library matters. Cooking for a grieving friend matters. Sitting quietly with your body matters. Taking a walk without your phone matters. Calling your mother matters. Learning how to apologize matters. Resting matters.

These gestures may seem small in an age of spectacle, but the small things are often where wisdom hides.

Even now, especially now, wisdom still guides us.

Not toward perfection.
Not toward domination.
Not toward certainty.

But toward each other.

And perhaps that is enough for today.

A small turning.
A shared table.
A slower breath.
A wiser way of being alive together.

May wisdom guide you this week.
May you resist the violence of urgency.
May you trust the slow intelligence of your body.
May you remember that another economy is already emerging among us whenever we choose care over control, presence over performance, and relationship over fear.

Poco a poco.
Paso a paso.

We become otherwise together.

Until next time, —Roberto+

Share

Share Our Collective Becoming

Read more

Max Heaton April 2026. Max Heaton’s work is available for purchase and installation. He is one of our living projects.

🌱 Friday Care Package

Week 18 of 52 —

Threshold

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

Read more

Read more

Read more