🌱 Friday Care Package
From Care to Possibility
🌱 Friday Care Package
From Care to Possibility
Dear Becoming Ones,
At the beginning of this year, I made a quiet commitment:
each Friday, I would write toward care.
Not as a slogan.
Not as a performance.
But as a practice.
Week after week, I turned the word over in my hands—
examining care through biological systems and scientific interdependence,
through cultural memory and communal survival,
through religious ritual, theological struggle, and ethical demand.
I followed care through Black Feminist wisdom and the long philosophical tradition,
learning how care is held, refused, distorted, and reclaimed.
I chose the word care because as I crossed into 2025, I wanted to put care into everything I did.
But wanting care was not enough.
I needed to be educated by it.
Care required my organized curiosity.
Borrowing from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, I began to treat curiosity as a form of research
not extractive, not clinical,
but devotional.
Attentive.
Relational.
Care taught me that research is not only what we study,
but how we listen,
how we linger,
how we return.
What does care make possible here?
What does care ask of my body today?
What does care require that I stop doing?
I am still learning how to put care into everything I do.
Still learning how to turn ordinary days into ceremony—
where life itself becomes a living offering,
a ritual of repair,
a practice of togetherness.
As this year draws toward its close, I find myself reflecting more honestly:
on how I have cared for myself,
and how I have failed to.
And how those choices—small, cumulative, often invisible—
have shaped the ecosystems I inhabit,
near and far.
I am grateful for the care that has held me
as I live out my vocational life as a Movement Theologian,
nested in multiple communities,
here in exile and in the American South.
I am grateful for the care I’ve been shown
as I come to terms with a devastating truth:
this world is constructed on the violence of caste
and the caste of violence—
a truth I am writing into my next book
as I return to myself,
poco a poco.
Care, when practiced as expansive love,
becomes a way of rebuilding trust.
A way of tending networks rather than extracting from them.
When we prioritize care of self,
we learn what we actually need to be well.
We learn that wellness is not a product,
but a practice.
We make the way by walking—
something I have known for a long time,
but did not know how to embody.
Becoming a talking head,
becoming fluent in dominant literatures,
did not save me.
It compromised me.
It trained me to abandon my body
and neglect my own care.
Now—following Gloria Anzaldúa, Gilles Deleuze, and Frida Kahlo—
I claim myself as the subject of my own becoming.
I am investing in careful attention
to what it means to become a trans(hu)man at the end of empire.
We desperately need care practices shaped by bell hooks,
anchored in love as an ethic.
We need the moral clarity of James Baldwin
and the unflinching truth-telling of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
These thinkers have been my companions this year.
They have helped guide the Friday Care Package
to its next threshold.
And so, in 2026, I am pivoting—
from writing on care
to writing on possibility.
I have outlined fifty-two weeks.
One word each week.
An invitation to practice imagination as discipline,
hope as labor,
and curiosity as collective research.
I hope you will keep reading.
I hope you will walk with me
as we invest in an imagination of possibility—
not as escapism,
but as survival.
For now, let us tend these longer nights.
Let us put care into everything we do,
no matter how mundane.
Because the mundane
is where care learns to breathe.
And the abundance of the ordinary
is where we remember how to live.
With care,
in becoming
-RCE+
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