So, I am writing today.

I’ve decided to write to you, dear ones, because I cannot not write. Bearing witness to the atrocities of our world have undone me, and I am wondering how we learn to re-mem-ber ourselves?

One of the things I did yesterday with alexis is I breathed.

In.

Out.

Then, I chanted: “remember us.”

Franz Kafka wrote once that writing is a form of prayer. I’d like to think about my writing as a form of hoping wakefulness and prayer. A kind of both / and approach to making meaning in today’s fright world.

I’m waking up from a lifetime of inherited trauma that has been accelerated by the different ecologies I’ve been a part of: my family system is one ecology that I’ve endured trauma; my religion is another ecology that has perpetuated harm against me; my entire educational journey conditioned me to be just as violent as people who are issuing bombs to be dropped on innocent people.

I am compromised. That has been sobering.

Waking up to re-mem-ber myself is something I learned about in my 20s when I was in seminary. It was Gloria Anzaldúa who uses Coyolxauhqui—the moon goddess dismembered in the Mexica story—as a figure for the ways trauma, colonization, and exclusion can scatter a person or community.

I wasn’t awake or aware enough to begin to put myself back together while also being ripped apart.

The weekend after I defended my PhD dissertation, I scheduled tattoo medicine and had Coyolxauhqui tattoo’d onto my arm. That was the beginning of me using tattoo medicine as a way to move energy and to put myself back together. I continue that path, as do many others.

I’ve always been sensitive to the Lunar Cycles. The recent eclipse has been amazing for me. Were they for you?

No one can hand you your epiphanies, my teacher, Michael McRay says, which is why we must put ourselves by together in a story rich manner.

So, today, as I write to(ward) you, may you re-mem-ber yourself in all the ways you can imagine and then lean into the magic of the radical interconnectedness of all things to suture your wounds. I’m doing that work in real time!

Paz, —RCE+

The work of Our Collective Becoming continues to focus on 1:1 engagements and small circles of gathering together. We have embraced degrowth and the wisdom that small is all.

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Teaching using the socratic method has always been helpful for me. I’ve had scholars train me in the European method of going deep with one subject. So, I am doing that these days with Baldwin, and the sobering history of this country that hold open wide the woundings that have been perpetuated by the very same systems we try to reform!

One of the things I’m sad about missing is The Wild Way Retreat with my teacher, Michael McRay. He’s one of my closest friends and a person I have entrusted my life to. I’ve asked him to do my funeral when the time comes. I think he’ll have good stories to tell about me from Palestine to Belfast and everywhere in between! The weekend he is doing his retreat, I’m taking temporary vows with my monastic community. I want to be there, but cannot. So, do one of you want to attend and then tell me all about it?

Those of you who’ve followed my becoming know this: I spent years living from the shoulders up. A story-alienated academic, disconnected from my own body, mistaking exhaustion for devotion. What returned me to myself wasn’t another argument. It was breath, and movement, and the pain awareness of my own complex traumatized story. The slow, tender work of coming home to the body, and the struggle I’ve had to come alive.

I want to tell you about a place where that work happens.

My friend Michael McRay—whose orbit I’ve been in since 2018, whose witness to story and repair I trust completely—is gathering a small circle this fall. It’s called The Wild Way Retreat: two nights in the woods outside Nashville, October 9–11, held by Michael and the therapist and somatic guide Lauren Russell. Story on one side, the body on the other. Firelight, movement, dance, old tales told aloud, deep rest, and the kind of belonging that reminds you you were never meant to carry it all alone.

So many of us who tend the world’s repair forget to tend ourselves. We give and give from a self we’ve stopped nourishing. This is an invitation to stop — to set down an old story, to let your body lead, to remember your own aliveness. To become.

The circle is small—only 10 to 12—and registration closes September 4. If it calls to you, I’d love for my people to be in that room. I desperately want to go, but I have another commitment.

You can see everything at thewildwayretreat.com. And because you’re part of this community, Michael made a gift for you: the code WILDWAY15 takes 15% off.

Rest is not a reward. It’s repair.

With tenderness, RCE+

Gracias for being here.

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I still am committed to the work of contemplation and activism / contemplation in activis…

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Dearest Becoming Ones: By the time you open this email and begin reading I will have arrived at my 50th year. Today, July 30 marks the day of my birth, and when I was in college, I did not have a future for mys…

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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.

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

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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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