Friday Care Package
Love as Reparative Practice in a Fcked-Up World*
Friday Care Package
Love as Reparative Practice in a Fcked-Up World*
Sabbath began at noon today, as it does every Friday, and with it the soft permission to set down the week’s labor and place my body back into the slow rhythms of care. For me, Sabbath is not the absence of work; it is the choosing of a different kind of work—the work of tending myself, the work of being restored to the world, the work of becoming human again.
Today’s Sabbath companion was Dean Spade’s newest book, Love in a Fcked Up World*. Reading it felt like sitting down at a communal table where someone finally says aloud what we’ve all been feeling: this world is collapsing under the weight of extractive capitalism, racial violence, elite capture, patriarchal domination—and yet, the most radical thing we can still choose is love.
But not love as sentiment.
Not love as branding.
Not love as the thin veil we drape over injustice.
bell hooks reminds us that love is action and an ethic, a way of being in the world that rearranges our material practices, our economies, our desires, our consumption, and our accountability to one another.
And so I found myself asking—almost praying:
If love is an ethic, then how do I ethically love myself?
How do we ethically love one another right now?
How might love, in this age of collapse, become reparative?
Love as a Reparative Material Practice
I’ve been living under a vow of holy poverty as part of my monastic commitments—an indigenous, queer reinterpretation of humility, stability, and the mendicant path. It has forced me to ask different questions about consumption, desire, and responsibility.
If I love myself, then how do I make purchases with intention?
If I love the world, then how do I refuse to replicate extractive patterns in my daily choices?
If I love my neighbor, then how do I participate in economies that nourish life rather than drain it?
Here is the truth I keep learning:
If love is reparative, then it must repair something—starting with me, moving through us, radiating into the collective.
I am learning to treat every decision as an opportunity for repair.
The groceries I buy.
The meals I share.
The work I say yes to and the work I walk away from.
The tone of my voice.
The way I hold another person’s story without rushing to interpret it.
Love becomes reparative when it refuses extraction.
Love becomes reparative when it deepens our interdependence.
Love becomes reparative when it frees us from the lie of self-sufficiency.
Ancestral Anger as a Teacher of Love
Earlier this year, I told a friend that I finally understand why people of color carry such deep, righteous anger about how we’ve been treated by white-serving institutions. That anger isn’t abstract. It lives in the body.
It lives in my bones as a rigid fire, passed down through centuries of betrayal and erasure and survival. For years, my privilege allowed me to keep it at bay, to tuck it under degrees and respectability and academic armor. But now, as I unravel from the normative path, I can no longer pretend it isn’t there.
And strangely—that anger is teaching me about love.
Not a sentimental love.
A love born from truth-telling.
A love that refuses to lie about harm.
A love that honors the ancestors who never got to rest.
A love that turns us toward repair.
bell hooks is right: love and justice are the same thing.
Dean Spade is right: we must build economies of care, not monuments to hoarded wealth.
My accountability partner, Dr.
, reminds me again and again that another way is possible. A way that will not make us billionaires. A way that might not even build financial wealth. But a way that builds networks of trust → networks of care → networks of solidarity.A way that generates what I call abolitionist abundance, where we turn toward one another and remember that the world we want is carried in the bodies we tend.
The Ethic of Love We Need Now
I keep thinking about this question:
How might we learn to love in a world compromised by consumer collapse?
We start small.
We start hyperlocal.
We start with the ethic of repair.
When consumption becomes mindful, it becomes reparative.
When anger becomes honest, it becomes clarifying.
When accountability becomes mutual, it becomes love.
When rest becomes a discipline, it becomes resistance.
Maybe this is the good news of today’s Sabbath:
We can choose a reparative love.
We can become a reparative people.
We can build reparative communities.
As a writer once said, “They will know us by our love.”
I hope they do.
And I hope that love is unmistakably reparative—
material, embodied, courageous, and tender,
the kind of love that builds another possible world.
Friday Care Package: Reparative Practice for the Weekend
Pause Before You Purchase
Ask: Is this purchase rooted in love or in fear? Desire or depletion? Repair or escape?
Let one choice this weekend be a practice of ethical self-love.
Name Your Ancestral Emotion
Sit for 3 minutes in silence.
Ask your body: What anger or grief am I holding that belongs to someone before me?
Let the naming be an act of care.
Communalize One Act of Care
Text a friend and say, “Let’s share the load in one small way today.”
Repair happens in micro-gestures.
Practice Economic Abundance
Offer something freely—your time, your attention, your presence, your skill.
Not as charity. As mutuality.
Closing Ritual Exhale
Place your hand over your heart.
Take a breath that feels like it belongs to your ancestors.
Take a breath that feels like it belongs to your future.
And whisper to yourself:
“Love is my ethic.
Repair is my practice.
Another world is possible through us.”