Friday Care Package
Tending in Exile
Dear Substack Community,
We’ve arrived, once again, at Friday—
a threshold I return to each week,
where I write about care in some form.
Today, I’m writing about exile and care—and I find myself leaning into the ecological gesture of tending as the bridge between them.
To tend is not just to care for, but to attune, to accompany, to keep watch.
It is a quiet, persistent form of resistance in a world of fracture.
So, as I often invite:
Take a breath.
Let your shoulders drop.
And then consider what I’ve written—not just as reflection,
but as a shared act of tending.
Thank you for being here.
For reading. For witnessing.
For helping me nurture this living imagination of Our Collective Becoming.
Paz,
—RCE+
Friday Care Package: Tending in Exile
Dear ones,
I’ve been thinking a lot about exile.
Not just as displacement, though that’s part of it. Not only as what we’ve been pushed out of, but what we’re being invited into. Exile, as I’ve come to understand it, is not simply the loss of home—but the beginning of a new kind of tending.
There is a peculiar clarity that arrives when we are unmoored. When the old temples fall and the familiar maps burn, what remains are our hands, our breath, the rituals we carry in our bones. The sacred doesn’t vanish. It migrates.
Tending in exile means learning to make sanctuary out of scraps.
It’s lighting candles on borrowed windowsills.
It’s holding grief like a compass and letting it guide you to new kin.
It’s boiling beans slowly on a stove that isn’t yours and realizing—you are.
Sometimes we find ourselves not when we return home, but when we locate exile.
Exile has a way of stripping us down to the essentials: What do you carry that cannot be taken?
What stories do you tell that refuse to die?
What acts of care do you perform even when the world says you are disposable?
In this way, exile is not a rupture alone—it is a revealing.
A tender uncovering of the truth you’ve always held, even when you didn’t have the words.
And so I say this gently:
Let us not only survive exile, but tend it.
Let us water the soil beneath our feet, even if it’s unfamiliar.
Let us plant rituals where the state tried to plant silence.
Let us love each other like we are the last holy thing we’ve got.
I believe the sacred is migratory.
And I believe we are too.
With tenderness from the threshold,
Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza+
📚 Reading List: For Those Learning to Tend in Exile
Borderlands / La Frontera – Gloria Anzaldúa
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being – Christina Sharpe
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
The Mushroom at the End of the World – Anna Tsing
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals – Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard (for wonder and wilderness in exile)
Psalm 137 — “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
🌾 Ritual of Tending in Exile
This weekend, find one small space—a corner of your home, your porch, your car, even a park bench—and claim it as sacred.
Bring something with you that feels like home: a photo, a stone, a piece of fabric, a shell, a book. Sit with it. Breathe. Speak aloud a single truth you’ve learned in your displacement. Say it like a vow. Then ask yourself:
What wants to grow here?
Leave a small offering behind—an intention, a prayer, a seed, a crumb of bread for the birds. Something to say: I was here. And I tended this.
🌀 Reflection Question
Where have you found parts of yourself that only exile could uncover?
How might you tend those parts now—with care, with witness, with breath?