🌱 Friday Care Package
The Gap of Disembodiment | Care as Return to the Body
Dear Becoming Ones,
If you are new here, welcome.
This is a becoming space—a space of emergence, practice, and return.
Each Friday, I write on the word care. I’ve been doing this all year, slowly and deliberately, because care is not an abstraction for me—it is a discipline, a survival practice, and a way of telling the truth. Looking ahead to 2026, I plan to spend 52 weeks writing on the word possibility. I hope you’ll stay with me for that unfolding. You might be surprised how many words live inside possibility—and where they lead when we study them together.
Today, I return to the gaps of care, and specifically to the gap of disembodiment.
I come to this gap honestly. I have struggled with a lifetime of disembodied living. From church, to the academy, to movements for justice, I learned how to leave my body in order to survive, succeed, and serve. I even gave a TEDx talk in Nashville in 2022 about this very thing. The body, as we are learning again and again, keeps the score.
Recently, after falling in the driveway and injuring my left leg, I’ve been invited—unexpectedly—into a new relationship with my own body. I am learning to listen to my leg. To communicate with it. To honor its pace and its limits. This has been humbling and strangely tender. The body has a particular intelligence, if we are willing to slow down enough to hear it.
So today, I’m writing about disembodiment—and about a way forward.
We make the way by walking. Always.
I hope you’ll join me today, and in the days to come, as we practice putting care into everything we do.
As Hanukkah 2025 and Yule 2025 approach, I’ll also be writing about Light and Dark, and what wisdom each offers us in this season. As someone moving through the dark forest and listening for my wild twin, I feel ready—ready for Hanukkah, ready for the quiet insistence of light, ready for a celebration of wisdom drawn from many traditions, held within the shell of the year.
If you feel called, come walk with me.
There is more becoming ahead.
— RCE+
🌱 Friday Care Package
The Gap of Disembodiment
Care as Return to the Body
“The body is what you have, and it must be taken care of.”
— James Baldwin
Dear Becoming Ones,
There is a gap in our care that many of us were trained to step over.
It lives between thinking and feeling.
Between conviction and capacity.
Between what we promise and what our bodies can actually carry.
This gap has a name: disembodiment.
Disembodiment is not a personal failure.
It is a cultural achievement.
Empire depends on bodies that override themselves.
So do white supremacy, productivity theology, and the academy as a formation machine.
I know this because my body was trained there.
From Body Becoming
(Field Note)
For years, I learned to treat my body as a problem to solve rather than a truth to listen to.
In graduate school, my body learned stillness as survival.
In ministry, my body learned endurance as virtue.
In activism, my body learned urgency as love.
None of these were neutral lessons.
My body carried panic before I had language for it.
It carried collapse before I called it rest.
It carried terror before I named it trauma.
My body knew before I did that something was wrong.
What the Quartet Teaches Us
James Baldwin reminds us that the body remembers what the nation denies.
Before policy tells the truth, the body already has. Before theology repents, the body has already paid the cost.
Fred Moten teaches us that the body does not speak in straight lines.
The body hums. Hesitates. Breaks into rhythm. Care begins not in mastery, but in resonance—in listening for what is vibrating underneath our explanations.
Gloria Anzaldúa tells us the body is a borderland.
A site of crossing and contradiction. Wounded and visionary at once. The body is where spirit and history collide and refuse to separate.
Ta-Nehisi Coates refuses abstraction altogether.
The body, he insists, is the first site of theft and terror. Before land was stolen, bodies were. Before labor was extracted, flesh was disciplined. Abstraction is not innocent—it is how violence disguises itself.
Together, they tell us this:
To return to the body is not indulgence.
It is truth-telling.
It is resistance.
It is repair.
From Body Becoming
(Field Note)
I am learning—slowly, imperfectly—that my body is not in the way of my work.
It is the work.
Each time I ignore my body’s no, I rehearse a small violence.
Each time I listen, I interrupt a long inheritance.
The body does not ask for perfection.
It asks for consent.
Naming the Gap
The gap of disembodiment shows up when:
we say yes while our bodies whisper no
we schedule ourselves into collapse and call it faithfulness
we spiritualize endurance instead of honoring limits
we theorize pain rather than tend it
This gap widens when urgency becomes a moral virtue.
But care asks something else of us now.
This Week’s Care Practice
🫀 Ask your body what it needs before asking your calendar.
Before the email.
Before the meeting.
Before the explanation.
Pause.
Place a hand on your chest or belly.
Take one slow breath.
Ask—not efficiently, not rhetorically:
What do you need right now?
Where are you holding tension?
What would honoring that look like today?
Listening is enough.
From Body Becoming
(Closing Reflection)
I am learning to build a life that my body can live inside of.
Not heroically.
Not perfectly.
But honestly.
This, too, is becoming.
Benediction / Gentle Refusal
May you refuse the lie that your worth is measured by output.
May you trust that your body is not a barrier to your calling—it is its ground.
May care return you to yourself without shame, without hurry, without extraction.
We will keep practicing.
— RCE+