🌱 Friday Care Package

Week 17 of 52 —

Opportunity (Deepened)

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

✨ The Word We Are Tending

Opportunity

Dear Becoming Ones—I started writing the Friday Care Package last year and wrote each Friday on the word care. I did a genealogy of care from Black Feminist, decolonial, and abolitionist thinkers. You can find a year’s worth of writing on care in the archives.

Today, I have taken my time to construct the lyrics of today’s Care Package. I lingered in bed yesterday needing additional rest after being gone for 10 days and also attending a grief retreat, which I highly recommend we all start doing on a routine!

My community sends me out into the world and expects me to bring back what I learn when I am in community with others. It is an opportunity, the world we are tending today!

I am very clear that I am an elder in training and everyone is my teacher.

And, now, the lyric essay can commence.

We return to a word we have already spoken:

Opportunity.

But not as before.

Not as a simple opening.
Not as a chance waiting to be taken.

This time, we return to it differently.

Because as Gilles Deleuze teaches us, repetition is never the same. Each return carries difference. Each encounter deepens the field.

So now—

Opportunity is not passive.

It is a threshold.
A charged moment where something has already emerged,
where becoming is underway,
and where we must decide how to respond.

🔁 Second Chances, Again

I have been given many opportunities.

Over and over again—
people have given me another chance.

A do-over.
A return.
An opening I did not always deserve.

My life is full of these stories.

Second chances.
Unexpected grace.
Moments where practice itself became the threshold of becoming.

And I am still learning:

Opportunity is not about getting it right.

It is about staying in the practice long enough
to be changed.

🌍 Imagination Under Threat

We are living in a time where imagination itself is under attack.

Possibility is being narrowed.
Erased.
Disciplined out of us.

And still—

opportunity arrives.

In small ways.
In quiet gestures.
In invitations that ask us to remember how to imagine again.

So the question becomes:

Will we turn toward the opportunities that enliven imagination—
or will we remain bound to what has already been decided for us?

🍲 Returning to Self

When I left public life and moved to rural New York,
I did not have an imagination for what was next.

I only had fragments.

Now, I am turning 50.

And I am gathering people.

Some I have just met.
Some who have been teaching me for years.

I cook for them.

On Mondays.
On Fridays.
In kitchens that become sites of communion.

A throw down, yes—
but also a remembering.

Of who I am.

🫀 Healing the “Talking Head”

Academia shaped me into what I once called a Talking Head—
a floating intellect detached from the body.

I named it in my TEDx talk.
And now, I am healing from it.

In real time.

Writing.
Weaving.
Returning to the body.

Returning to belonging.

Opportunity, for me now, looks like right relationship.

With myself.
With others.
With the more-than-human world.

🔥 What Is Taking Shape

Opportunity is not abstract.

It is forming.

It looks like:

• a book on belonging and freedom, long in the making

• meals shared with strangers who become teachers

• the question that keeps guiding me:
  “How might we turn toward one another right now?”

And—

an unfolding gathering:

The Atole Gathering
New Mexico, late 2026
A liminal space
A small circle
Woven with mystery and care

More will come.

But even now, it is an opportunity—
not yet formed,
but already calling.

🌌 Turning Toward

Opportunity is not neutral.

It asks something of us.

What opportunities do we have right now
to turn away from hegemonic forces—
and turn toward Love?

Toward compassion for all beings—
including the more-than-human world?

Opportunity is where choice becomes ethical.

Where responsiveness becomes responsibility.

Where becoming becomes relational.

⏳ Kairos

There is another time moving beneath the surface of things.

Not clock time.

Not productivity time.

But Kairos—
ripened time.
Sacred time.

Opportunity lives there.

In the folds.
In the openings.
In the moments that ask:

Will you respond?

🔁 The Refrain

Another world is not demanded of us— it is invited through attention, care, and courage.

🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice

Crossing the Threshold

3–5 minutes

1. Pause where you are.

2. Notice one place in your life that feels like a threshold—
   something emerging, but not yet decided.

3. Place a hand on your body.

4. Ask quietly:

   “What is this moment asking of me?”

5. Do not rush to answer.

6. Take one breath and say inwardly:

   “I will respond with care.”

This is opportunity.

Not something you take—
but something you enter.

🕯 Closing Blessing

May you recognize the thresholds in your life.
May you trust the second chances that arrive.
May you turn toward what calls you into deeper relationship.

And may your response—
imperfect, embodied, real—
help shape another possible world.

Paz,
—RCE+

Dear Becoming Ones, 🌒

Today’s Monday Meditation arrives from a place I cannot quite name—

a place of emergence,

a place of becoming,

a place where grief and sorrow and fear

swirl together like weather systems we did not choose

but must now learn to read. 🌧️🌬️

This meditation is a slow drip.

Not a flood.

Not a solution.

Just a remembering.

A re-mem-ber-ing.

A stitching back together

of what has been scattered. 🧵

What would it mean this week

to re-member yourself—

not as an idea,

not as a role,

but as a body learning again

how to belong to itself?

How might we tend to ourselves

as gentle lovers? 💗

Not as projects.

Not as problems to be solved.

But as sacred sites of attention—

breathing, aching, alive.

And how might we tend to one another

as beloveds? 🤲🏽

Slowly.

Gently.

With compassion.

Compassion—com-passio—

to suffer with.

Not to fix.

Not to rush past.

But to remain.

To accompany.

To say with our presence: you are not alone here.

This past weekend,

I sat inside a grief retreat—

inside a kind of white space

where memory rose like breath.

And I found myself returning

to my white grandparents. 🕊️

They are part of the reason

I do not hate white people.

They loved me

as best they could.

And somehow,

that mattered.

Even as I trace the threads of my life—

through violence,

through absence,

through the ways I was shaped

to enact harm on command—

in classrooms,

in streets,

in churches—

still,

there were moments of love.

Small. Imperfect. Real.

And I am learning now

to gather those moments

not as justification,

but as material—

threads I can use

to mend what was torn.

I am learning to tend

to the places within me

that have not received love. 🌱

The unnamed places.

The unknown places.

The places still emerging.

This is slow work.

This is holy work.

This is the work

of becoming someone

who can hold themselves

without violence.

So today—

be gentle with yourself. 🫶🏽

As I am trying,

again and again,

to be gentle with myself.

Because part of turning away

from the hegemonic powers

that have betrayed us

is not only refusal—

it is also turning toward. 🔥

Toward compassion.

Toward agency.

Toward that which is Love.

I witnessed something this weekend.

Another possible world. 🌍✨

Not perfect.

Not complete.

But present.

People are ready.

Ready to turn toward one another.

Ready to witness grief

without looking away.

Ready to hold pain

without needing to dominate it.

This is the threshold we are standing in.

This is the emergence.

So this week,

let us practice:

✨ Re-membering ourselves

✨ Suffering with one another

✨ Moving with gentleness instead of force

✨ Trusting that something is already unfolding among us

Not later.

Not someday.

Now.

Benediction 🌿

May you be held in your own becoming.

May you find the courage to be gentle.

May you risk turning toward love,

even now.

And may we, together,

become the kind of people

who can meet this emerging world

with compassion strong enough

to remake it.

Paz y ternura,

Roberto+

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Share Our Collective Becoming

Dear Becoming Ones—I began writing on the word care last year as a way to care for myself. Now, in 2026, each Friday, I write on the word possibility in some form, because I am in need of another possible world. Today’s word is emergent. Let’s refresh our memory from weeks 14-16.

🌱 The Sequence of Weeks 14–16

Week 14 — Emergence → what arises

Week 15 — Becoming → the process of transformation

Week 16 — Emergent → the posture required to live inside that process

Think of it like this:

• Emergence is the event

• Becoming is the movement

• Emergent is the discipline

Now let’s make that sing. Follow along below.

🌊 A Lyrical Bridge (to carry into Week 16)

Dear Ones - I write to you from the American South today.

There are moments when something breaks open.

You didn’t plan it.

You didn’t cause it.

You couldn’t have predicted it.

Something arises.

This is emergence.

But emergence is only the beginning.

Because once something appears, you must decide:

Will you stay with it?

Will you allow it to change you?

Will you let it interrupt who you thought you were?

This is becoming.

And becoming is not a theory.

It is not a concept to admire.

It is a practice that asks everything of you.

It asks you to move without a map.

To tell the truth without rehearsing it.

To remain in relation even when relation undoes you.

And this is where most of us falter.

Because we want emergence

without the cost of becoming.

🔥 Week 16 — Emergent

🌱 Friday Care Package

Week 16 of 52 —

Emergent

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

✨ The Word We Are Tending

Emergent

Dear Becoming Ones -

If emergence is what arises,

and becoming is the process,

then emergent is how we live inside it.

Emergent is not a destination.

It is a posture.

A way of moving through the world

without demanding that it resolve too quickly.

To live emergent is to practice responsiveness.

To listen before deciding.

To adjust without collapsing.

To stay open without dissolving.

🎷 Improvisation (Moten)

Emergent life is improvised.

Not chaotic.

Not random.

But shaped in real time -

in relation,

in tension,

in the undercommons where we learn from one another without permission.

This is what improvisation teaches:

You do not control the moment.

You enter it.

You respond.

You risk.

You listen for what is already moving.

🌺 Responsiveness (Anzaldúa)

To live emergent is to live at the borderlands.

Where identities blur.

Where certainty thins.

Where the wound becomes a site of knowledge.

Responsiveness is not weakness.

It is a cultivated sensitivity

to what is shifting—within and around you.

You feel it before you can name it.

And instead of shutting it down,

you stay.

🔥 Moral Clarity (Baldwin)

But let’s be clear -

Emergent living is not passive.

It does not mean going with the flow of injustice.

It requires moral clarity.

Because not everything that emerges

is life-giving.

Some things emerge from violence.

From domination.

From fear.

So we must ask:

What am I participating in?

What am I allowing to take shape through me?

To live emergent is to stay awake.

🫀 Somatic Attunement (Han)

And the body knows.

Long before the mind organizes meaning,

the body registers pressure, exhaustion, fracture.

In a world that demands constant output,

to live emergent is to resist depletion.

To feel your limits.

To honor your capacity.

To move at the speed of what can actually be held.

This is not withdrawal.

It is precision.

🌿 The Practice

Emergent living asks us to do something simple, and nearly impossible:

Stay responsive without losing yourself.

Not rigid.

Not reactive.

But attuned.

Because possibility is not something we control.

It is something we participate in.

🔁 The Refrain

Another world is not demanded of us—

it is invited through attention, care, and courage.

Share Our Collective Becoming

🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice

Practicing Emergent Life

3–5 minutes

1. Pause where you are.

2. Notice one thing in your environment that is changing—light, sound, temperature.

3. Then notice one thing in your body that is shifting.

4. Ask quietly:

   “What is asking me to respond right now?”

5. Do not rush.

6. Let your next small action come from attunement, not obligation.

This is emergent practice.

🕯 Closing

May you trust what arises.

May you stay with what changes you.

May you learn the discipline of response.

And may your life—

improvised, responsive, awake—

become a site where another world can take shape.

Paz, —RCE+

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We are living inside a tightening.

Not just of budgets or bank accounts -

but of breath,

of imagination,

of what feels possible in a world

that keeps telling us:

there is not enough.

Not enough time.

Not enough money.

Not enough care.

Not enough room for all of us to live.

Scarcity has become a kind of theology -

preached not from pulpits alone,

but from policies,

from institutions,

from the quiet violence of everyday decisions

that ration dignity.

And yet -

contemplation interrupts this liturgy.

Contemplation does not deny scarcity.

It does not romanticize struggle.

It does not ask us to spiritualize hunger.

Instead, contemplation teaches us how to see.

To see what is here.

To see what is withheld.

To see what is possible

even now.

This morning, I sat in silence,

not because the world is calm,

but because it is not.

Silence, for me, is not escape.

It is a form of refusal.

A refusal to let the world’s pace

dictate the worth of my life.

A refusal to believe

that urgency is the same as importance.

A refusal to accept

that scarcity gets the final word.

Because here is what contemplation reveals,

slowly,

over time:

Scarcity is often manufactured.

There is enough food,

but not enough distribution.

There is enough land,

but not enough justice.

There is enough care,

but it has been privatized,

professionalized,

and priced out of reach.

Scarcity, then, is not only a condition -

it is a system.

And systems can be interrupted.

The contemplative life,

especially in times like these,

is not passive.

It is insurgent.

The desert mothers and fathers knew this.

They withdrew not to abandon the world,

but to see it clearly -

to unlearn the empire’s logic

of accumulation and control.

They practiced a different economy:

one of enoughness,

of presence,

of daily bread.

They knew that to sit still

in a world obsessed with more

is already a kind of rebellion.

So what might contemplation ask of us now,

in this age of precarity?

Not withdrawal,

but reorientation.

Not escape,

but attention.

Not resignation,

but participation

in another possible world

already breaking through.

A world where:

Care is shared,

not commodified.

Time is honored,

not extracted.

Bodies are tended,

not disciplined into productivity.

And relationships -

fragile, imperfect, necessary -

become the ground of our survival.

I am learning,

in real time,

that scarcity narrows the imagination.

It tells us to clutch,

to hoard,

to isolate.

But contemplation widens the field.

It reminds us:

You are not alone.

You have never been alone.

Even here,

especially here,

life is teeming.

Not always in abundance you can measure,

but in connections you can feel.

In the neighbor who brings eggs.

In the friend who shares venison.

In the stranger who becomes a table companion.

In the breath that returns to you,

again and again,

without asking for payment.

So today,

a small practice:

Before you rush,

before you scroll,

before you brace yourself

for another day in a world that feels like too much -

Pause.

Place your hand on your body,

wherever feels most tender.

And notice:

What is here that I have been told is not enough?

What is here that I have overlooked?

What is here that could be shared?

Stay there for a moment.

Let the answer come,

not as a solution,

but as a softening.

Another world is not built all at once.

It is composted

in these small acts of attention.

In choosing to share

when the world says hoard.

In choosing to rest

when the world says produce.

In choosing to turn toward one another

when the world says disappear.

Scarcity may be the condition.

But it is not the conclusion.

We are still becoming.

And even now -

especially now -

there is enough

to begin.

With you in the quiet rebellion,

Roberto+

Max Heaton, one of our Living Projects. Max’s art is available for purchase and installation.

🌱 Friday Care Package

Week 15 of 52 —

Becoming

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

✨ The Word We Are Tending

Becoming

Dear Becoming Ones,

There is no final version of you.

There is no final version of me.

No polished self waiting at the end of the work.

No arrival point where the contradictions resolve

and the body rests in perfect knowing.

There is only becoming.

Not arrival.

Not completion.

But the ongoing, unfinished process of being shaped -

in relation to self,

to others,

to the more-than-human world.

Becoming is possibility in motion.

A mythical improvisational dance, if you will.

🌊 The Long Way Around

I am learning this the long way.

Through rupture.

Through heartbreak.

Through crisis.

Through repair.

Through the slow, unglamorous work of noticing

how I have been shaped -

by what I love,

and by what I have refused.

Becoming is not linear.

It spirals.

It doubles back.

It interrupts itself.

…Retorcer…

It asks us to begin again

without the guarantee

that this time will be easier.

And still - we continue.

Because something in us knows:

to stop becoming

is to surrender

to the scripts handed to us

by empire,

by supremacy,

by fear.

🔥 Telling the Truth

To become is to risk.

To remain open

when everything in us wants closure.

To stay in relationship -

even when relationship undoes us.

I used to think becoming meant improvement.

Becoming better. Becoming clearer. Becoming whole.

Now I know -

becoming means telling the truth.

About harm endured.

About harm I have perpetrated.

Without collapsing into shame.

Without performing innocence.

As James Baldwin teaches us with unflinching clarity:

we cannot change what we refuse to face.

So becoming asks us to face it.

All of it.

So, I am facing

the violence that has shaped me

to be just as genocidal as the next person.

This is the hardest work

that I have stepped into.

Harder than the seminary degree.

Harder than the PhD.

Because -

becoming requires

an unflinching commitment

to transformation.

“Change is the only constant,”

they say.

🌿 The Undercommons of Becoming

There is a place beneath the surface of things -

where people gather without permission,

where life continues outside the scripts of legitimacy.

A place that Fred Moten calls the undercommons.

Becoming lives there.

Not in the perfected self,

but in the shared, unfinished, collective work

of learning how to live otherwise.

And sometimes -

in the middle of the mess -

in the middle of crisis-

in the middle of uncertainty -

there is beauty.

A moment of laughter.

A shared meal.

A glimpse of something alive.

What Ross Gay might call a discipline of delight.

Even here.

Especially here.

That is what we are trying to cultivate here.

Another possible world through fugitivity -

and conditions of exile -

that help us name right here.

🌀 Compost & Breath

Becoming is not clean.

It smells like compost.

It feels like breath catching in the throat

before the truth is spoken.

It is the slow breakdown of what no longer serves

so something more honest can grow.

You are not behind.

You are in process.

🔁 The Refrain

Another world is not demanded of us—

it is invited through attention, care, and courage.

🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice

Staying With Becoming

3–5 minutes

1. Sit or stand where you are. No need to prepare the space.

2. Notice your breath as it is—unforced, unfinished.

3. Ask quietly:

   “What part of me is still becoming?”

4. Let one feeling or sensation arise—without naming it too quickly.

5. Place a hand on your body and say inwardly:

   “I am allowed to be in process.”

6. Take one slow breath as if you are making room, not progress.

This is fugitive work.

It refuses finality.

It honors the unfinished.

🕯 Closing Blessing

May you trust the process that has not yet resolved.

May you find companions in your becoming.

May you tell the truth without fear of what it undoes.

And may your unfinished life

become the ground for another possible world.

Paz,

—RCE+

Art by Max Heaton, one of the Living Projects of Our Collective Becoming. Click the link to learn more!

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🌱 Friday Care Package

Week 14 of 52 —

Emergence

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

✨ The Word We Are Tending

Emergence

Dear Becoming Ones—

Each Friday, I return to the word possibility.

I circle it.

I listen to it.

I let it speak back.

I listen, again…

the space between the words.

They holler.

This week, the word is:

Emergence

Not something planned.

Not something imposed.

But what arises through relationship,

through time,

through unfolding conditions we cannot fully control.

Emergence is how possibility comes into being without domination.

It is how life organizes itself

beyond our designs,

beyond our timelines,

beyond our need to know.

🌊 What Is Forming

My therapist tells me:

Pay attention to what is emerging.

To what can be felt,

but not yet seen.

To what is gathering

just beneath the surface of language.

This is not easy work.

We are trained to name things too quickly.

To define.

To stabilize.

To control.

But emergence resists all of that.

It asks us to stay close

to what is still becoming.

🌿 The Discipline of Noticing

There is a kind of quiet discipline here

the kind that Ross Gay writes toward

to notice what is still alive,

even now.

A shift in breath.

A softening in the body.

A conversation that opens something.

A moment of beauty that interrupts despair.

Emergence rarely announces itself loudly.

It gathers.

It hums.

It waits for our attention.

🔥 Refusing Domination

In a world shaped by domination -

by urgency, extraction, and control -

emergence is a different logic.

It does not force.

It does not conquer.

It does not rush.

It unfolds.

And this unfolding requires something of us:

Patience.

Attention.

Trust.

Not passive trust -

but the kind of trust that stays awake.

🔁 The Refrain

Another world is not demanded of us -

it is invited through attention, care, and courage.

🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice

Leaning Into Emergence

3–5 minutes

1. Sit or stand without adjusting your surroundings.

2. Let your breath arrive naturally.

3. Ask quietly:

   “What is emerging in me right now?”

4. Do not answer immediately.

   Let sensation speak before language.

5. Notice one subtle shift -

   a warmth, a tension, a softening.

6. Say inwardly:

   “I will stay with what is becoming.”

This is fugitive work.

It refuses premature certainty.

It protects what is still forming.

🕯 Closing

So today -

lean in.

Not toward clarity.

Not toward control.

But toward what is quietly, persistently,

finding its way into being.

Paz,

—RCE+

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Art by Max Heaton, one of Our Collective Becoming’s Living Experiments. Using art to help shift culture paso a paso.

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🚆 Theology on the Tracks

Notes from Exile in the Wake

“Nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

— James Baldwin

“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us.”

— Fred Moten

“I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures… I have always had to live in…

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Monday Meditation

Anchors in the Liminal

A meditation on trains, knitting, breath, and the slow work of belonging

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Today I had the honor of returning to the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley — the place where I held my first faculty appointment after finishing my PhD. Walking those halls again felt a bit like stepping into a palimpsest of memory: the past layered gently beneath the present, whispering reminders of who we once were and who we …

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