Dear Becoming Ones:

The apple does not fall far from the tree, my teacher tells me. I talk with her on the daily, one person who occupies my time and attention, as I tend to another possible world. I love visiting my teacher.

To be a student, is to devote oneself to study. I have done that my entire life, trying to tease out the complexities that tether me to norms of hegemony.

I keep returning to the Source, which was the last thing she urged me to do. Not my teacher, but a Transwoman who betrayed me.

I’ve learned how to compost pain and tend to the grief of betrayal. I was reflecting the other day and realized that every white person I’ve known and had some kind of intimacy with has betrayed me. We betray each other, and I wonder if that is part of our ancestral wounds that need healing?

Discourse seems to be the thing that is impossible these days. We are losing the art of connection and we no longer know how to gather. And, how we gather matters.

I took my Monastic Vows recently and will spend this year as a Novice in service to the charism of reconciliation. The Order holds me and my various complexities and I am met by folks who have known me since my 20s.

I have been spending time with some of my most favorite people on the planet. Kate and Larry Kamphausen. I’ve known them since I was in seminary when I lived in Chicago, and in fact, Larry, an Evangelical Covenant Church Priest, asked me once to be the Prior of their intentional community.

I was in my 20s at the time called to community, but was in a long-term relationship that didn’t support communal living. That should have been my first clue about white women. I don’t always learn from the obvious.

I was not ready then, and am not ready now, and yet I think community is the way forward. My teacher encourages me to study intentional communities. I am doing that as I travel around eating with people and asking them how we turn toward one another.

I believe we need a cultural metanoia, a cultural turning to(ward) connection, to(ward) each other.

I tell people that connection is the antidote to fascism. I also tell people that this country has always been fascist; we are just now beginning to see it, because we cannot reckon with the fact that we also stole land.

My white ancestors come from Ireland and Scotland. I have been to these ancient lands and learned about their histories. I am learning about the genocide of these United States and learning how genocidal we have been socialized to be. I am learning poco a poco how anstrestral trauma shows up in patterns, and the kind of social healing that is needed is healing on an individual, communal, and social way for the patterns to be interrupted and repaired.

So, I have become quite closed to the world and am focussed on this cultural turning that I think we need. I think it has something to do with food, art, ritual, and so I travel to eat with people and remain chaste for liberation.

I have been spending quality time with my friend Larry, and Larry and I have been eating together and drinking coffee together for more than 25 years. It feels nice to have steady and stable people in one’s life that share the same values of radical interconnectedness that you came to learn all these years ago when you did your stint in Chicago, IL!

Place.

I arrived by train and left the same way. Quiet, unnoticed, and fugitive.

Fugitive. Finding cracks and sinking into them to see what is possible.

I did not announce my arrival nor did I announce my departure.

I was in Chicago for a few days and got to reclaim my anonymity for a brief moment at Kopi where I’ve been having their bottomless cup of coffee for over 25 years. I see them every time I’m in town. Kopi is a place to which I return.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to return to my homeland of Mexico more than weeks at a time, and I don’t know how long I will feel exiled in the northern most past of Appalachia in rural New York, but for a brief moment in time, I am home.

It’s taken time for me to experience Chicago to be a home place. I lived in Chicago in my early 20s and cut my teeth on radical queer politics in the city of Chicago.

I gravitated to queer spaces in my 20s, avoiding gay male spaces, because as a gender queer masc presenting young person, I didn’t feel safe in gay male spaces. So, I hung out in feminist spaces and communities of color spaces. This land of Chicago was foreign to me, leaving land I knew for the promise of education.

The grief I carry from being far from the land that I know is hard, and yet I know I am cultivating another possible world from exile and as a fugitive.

But, back to Larry…

Larry and I talk about everything and because he is a historian, we are able to traverse many years together, since I was trained in the Humanities with a particular liberationist lens. I love talking with Larry. I love meaning making with someone that I’ve known for a long time; someone who calls forth virtues of the beloved community. I love coming into greater awareness of who my people are.

It reminds me to circle back to you, dear reader, whom I think about every day as I pen these thoughts in my mind before they make it onto paper and eventually into a note on my computer, then onto Substack.

Who are your people, dear reader? Who is your ride or die?

I live in a country where I could be murdered and I seek refuge every day in boltholes around the world. I have found refuge with Larry since we were together for our monastic retreat, and being with your people is one way we can experience the oneness of being. I’m so grateful for the folks in my life where I experience the radical interconnectedness of all things that reminds me of what is possible when we cultivate intentional relational gardens.

Who are your people? What kinds of relationships are you nurturing?

Since leaving the stage of public life and nurturing intentional relationships with churches and organizations, strangers and kin, alike, I have seen who have become my people.

We are socialized into transactional relating. If you look at your relationships, look at what the outcomes are. You grow what you feed! People enjoy being around me for who I know and what I think, and when I then leave public life to actually live what I think, people disappear. I see now the limits of the white liberal progressive.

For a year, I wrote on care and for a year, I began thinking about how to put care into everything I do.

It’s why I decided to do a relationship inventory after my dear friend, Meg, suggested it. This has been the best thing that I have ever done.

I am learning, slowly, like Baldwin, how important relationships are to the artist.

He wrote to people who were his heart people. I write to my heart people an analog note. This helps remind me to whom I am accountable.

While I am learning who wants to be in right relationship with me and who only wants proximity to the ideas, discernment and learning to be faithful in the small things has been what has carried me this last year.

I’ve been hoping that these migratory letters and meditations on community might spark an idea in you, dear reader, to begin nurturing an intentional relational landscape with the folks around you.

As I’ve been on the road this year doing auto ethnographic research on belonging and freedom, I have learned that we feel like a better body when we engage in the work of food, art, and ritual.

I’ll be finishing my research out in Mexico for the rest of the year and learning how to be in right relationship with the underside of history. As I leave, once more, I leave behind loved ones who are struggling to make sense of their life and others who are suffering in environments that are extractive and death-dealing. It’s always hard to leave, and it is always hard to bear witness to the suffering that I see on the daily, from the assault on the poor to the toxicity and supremacist mindset of the academy.

I hope to have a chance to write a bit more on some reflections from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I recently listened to with Larry on a long road trip. We need to recover the work of consciousness raising in a moment where nuance of discourse has evaporated.

Paz, —RCE+

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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

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

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

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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.

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Week 22 of 52 — Alignment

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

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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+

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