🌱 Friday Care Package

Week 3 of 52 — Option A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

Dear Becoming Ones: In early 2025, I began writing on the word care each Friday, and I turned it into the Friday Care Package. For 2026, I am exploring the word possibility and synonyms for possibly.

Today’s word is option. I hope you’ll keep reading!

The world continues to escalate violence with federal takeovers of cities and accelerating immigration violence. Now is the time to create safety plans and weave yourself into the folds of community.

I’ll be traveling around eating with folks and might be in a city near you! Stay tuned!

Community is resistance!

Paz,—RCE+

---

Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash

🌱 Friday Care Package

Week 3 of 52 —

Option

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

---

✨ The Word We Are Tending

Option

Option names the moment of choice.

I can do this

or that

or something else entirely.

In a world of possibility, there are no fixed orientations—only movements, refusals, redirections. Option is not endless freedom, nor is it a menu handed to us by power. Option is the fragile, often fleeting recognition that another response is available.

Option is an opening toward fugitive care.

We are all socialized into violence.

We are trained—explicitly and implicitly—into the logics of domination, extraction, disposability. I am not exempt from this. Neither are you. This is the inheritance of the American Way: a genocidal orientation that teaches us whose lives matter, whose pain is tolerable, whose futures are negotiable.

And still—

there is an option.

Not a clean one.

Not an innocent one.

But a real one.

I have the option to choose fugitive care over rehearsed cruelty.

To choose relational accountability over numbing compliance.

To choose small, stubborn gestures of care that refuse the scripts of inevitability.

Option is where personal agency quietly interrupts structural violence—not by pretending the structures don’t exist, but by refusing to let them have the final word on who we are becoming.

Another possible world is not abstract.

It is not deferred to some distant horizon.

It is beckoning us in moments like this one—

in how we speak,

in how we listen,

in how we refuse to betray ourselves or one another.

The question is not whether options exist.

The question is whether we will recognize them when they appear—

and whether we will choose them together.

---

🔁 The Refrain (Week 3)

Another world is not demanded of us—

it is invited through attention, care, and courage.

---

🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice

Choosing Otherwise

Time: 3–5 minutes. Do this quietly. Do it imperfectly.

1. Notice a place in your body where tension gathers when you think about the world as it is.

   No fixing. Just noticing.

2. Ask yourself gently:

   “What response am I being trained to default to right now?”

   Let the answer arrive without judgment.

3. Then ask:

   “What is one other option—however small—that would feel more aligned with care?”

4. Place a hand over your heart or belly and say inwardly:

   “I am allowed to choose otherwise.”

This is fugitive practice.

It does not announce itself.

It does not seek permission.

Carry this option with you today—not as pressure, but as presence.

---

🕯️ A Closing Blessing

May you recognize the options that power hopes you will not see.

May you refuse the lie that violence is inevitable.

May your choices—small, collective, imperfect—

open pathways toward a world that is trying to be born.