Dear Becoming Ones,
What if ritual isn’t something reserved for temples or churches, but a way of moving through the world with attention and tenderness? In today’s Coffee + Sativa, I’m exploring how ritual becomes a rhythm for healing — a sacred choreography of breath, meal, and return. You’re invited to join me in crafting your own rhythm of repair, where presence becomes prayer and rest becomes an act of collective freedom. This turning toward ritual is also my practice of social repair — my way of stewarding anti-fascist theologies and ethics in a world aching for tenderness, truth, and renewal.
Paz, —RCE+
☕️ Coffee + Sativa: Rituals of Repair
Theme: Pleasure and Presence
“Rituals are the bridges between the visible and the invisible.”
— Victor Turner
“The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains.”
— Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera
Today is Saturday.
My body knows this before my mind does. I wake differently — slower, softer. The day is not for production but for presence. My schedule says Deep Rest + Embodied Joy, and I am learning to live into that without apology.
Morning: I write — not toward a deadline, but as a devotional practice of becoming a writer. Words rise like incense, unforced, fragrant. No goals, only openness.
Afternoon: Unstructured time — a long meal, music, movement, sunlight spilling across the floor.
Evening: Table repair — sometimes with a friend or beloved, sometimes through a screen across distance. We eat as theology. We break bread as liturgy. We name what’s broken and shorten the distance between us.
No obligations beyond joy. Let writing and rest braid together like breath.
Turning to Ritual
Tricia Hersey, the Nap Bishop, teaches that rest is resistance, and I finally believe her in my bones. I used to resist her resistance — how ironic. I thought my siestas were rest, but they were only collapse. Now, I am learning rest as ritual — a sacred turning toward myself, no longer performing survival.
It was emilie townes who said I needed to learn how to be with myself. She was right. I am finally doing that — sitting with my breath, my ache, my becoming.
There’s a circle of care around me — healers, mentors, friends, ancestors — all reminding me that when we turn toward ourselves, we begin to find the freedom we need.
Liminality + the Borderlands
Victor Turner wrote that ritual creates liminal space — the threshold where we are no longer who we were, but not yet who we are becoming. Ritual holds the in-between. It dissolves hierarchies, undoes binaries, and lets the sacred seep into the ordinary.
He called this communitas — that radical kinship born in the threshold. Not the institutional church with its performance of belonging, but the shared fire at the edge of the forest, where vulnerability becomes a new form of worship.
This is where Gloria Anzaldúa meets Turner. She names the borderlands as sacred terrain — the wound that becomes a womb. She calls us to inhabit Nepantla, the middle space of transformation, where rupture turns to revelation.
My Saturday rituals — the writing, the meal, the breath — are small acts of Nepantla. Thresholds where I meet myself again.
The Work of Repair
Institutions often cannot metabolize the vision of another possible world. Supremacy culture’s grip is strong, its logic still rooted in colonial fear. The church, too, remains compromised by the architecture of domination.
So I have turned toward myself — to the slow, embodied practice of repair as a way of life.
Ritual by ritual, I’m re-membering myself into belonging.
This is not retreat. It is incubation.
The slow ritual of rebirth.
Like Anzaldúa, I am learning that the inner struggle is always the outer struggle in miniature. Like Turner, I am remembering that liminality is not a void but a womb — a place of regeneration.
Ritual Exhale
Today, I will light incense and write what wants to be written.
I will cook something that tastes like repair.
I will remember that healing is not productivity; it is participation in the sacred rhythm of becoming.
Poco a poco. Breath by breath.
Ritual by ritual.
🌿 Five Gestures of a Sacred Return
A brief field guide for those longing to step into rhythm, rest, and ritual:
Identify your threshold.
Notice where your week bends — from labor to rest, from noise to stillness. Mark it with something small and sacred: a candle, a bell, a deep inhale.
Name what needs rest.
Ask your body what has carried too much. Let your next action be a response — a nap, a walk, a stretch, a tear.
Craft a micro-ritual.
Choose one act that repeats — journaling at dawn, washing your hands with intention, sitting by a window at dusk. Let repetition become reverence.
Practice table repair.
Share a meal — in person or virtually — as an act of mending. Let conversation be slower than the food, and presence be the main dish.
Close with gratitude.
At day’s end, whisper thanks for something small: the way the light moved, the taste of sweetness, the simple miracle of being here.