Coffee & Sativa: Leaning Into the Gaps

“The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”

— James Baldwin

“Without community, there is no liberation… but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”

— Audre Lorde

“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”

— José Esteban Muñoz

Dear Becoming Ones,

This morning, coffee warms my body and sativa opens my imagination. I sit in the stillness and think about isolation. About polarization. About the quiet, crushing weight of disconnection that seeps into our days. We live in a time where walls are easier to build than bridges, where difference feels like a threat instead of an invitation.

Yet history reminds me that queer and trans people have always known the antidote. When the world refused us, we found one another. In bars, on dance floors, in secret circles, in chosen families—we made worlds of belonging when no one else would give us one. Our survival has always been a communal act. Our joy, too, has been communal—born in the cracks of empire, nurtured in the shadows of rejection, dazzling in its defiance.

There is no future without connection. No future without community. If polarization fragments our bodies and our bonds, then belonging stitches us back together. The practice of world-making—what José Esteban Muñoz called a horizon of hope—is the work of refusing isolation and leaning into the gaps with tenderness, imagination, and courage.

So I ask: what signs of hope do we have right now? I see it in the queer kid who finds family online when their home is hostile. I see it in the communities sharing food and rent money when the state abandons them. I see it in the farmers who grow food as a form of resistance to scarcity. I see it in every small act of repair, every circle that gathers to listen deeply, every protest that refuses to be silenced.

The gaps are not voids. They are thresholds. They are invitations to turn toward one another with open hands and beating hearts. To practice connection in ordinary ways: sharing a meal, offering a listening ear, telling a story that risks vulnerability. These are the seeds of another possible world.

Somewhere beyond this fracture,

there is a table wide enough for all of us.

I can almost hear the laughter,

see the glimmer of hands reaching across difference.

The horizon is not far away.

It lives in the pause before despair,

in the shimmer of a story shared,

in the breath we take when we choose each other again.

Another world is not only possible—

she is already humming in our bones,

already dancing at the edge of our vision,

already breaking through like dawn.

This Saturday, as I sip coffee and breathe into the haze, I find myself grateful. Grateful for you. Grateful for the ways we keep showing up for one another. Grateful that, together, we are world-making.

Paz,

Roberto