🌱 Friday Care Package arriving on Saturday Week 11 of 52 —Viability
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
🌱 Friday Care Package
Week 11 of 52 —
Viability
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
✨ The Word We Are Tending
Viability
Dear Becoming Ones—
This Care Package arrives from the road again.
I have been traveling by train, moving through communities, listening carefully. This week the train carried me through New Mexico. Each mile reminds me why the word possibility continues to animate this year’s writing.
While pursuing what I have come to call a fugitive auto-ethnography of belonging, I am more convinced than ever that we are deeply out of practice with one another.
Each Friday I write on a synonym of possibility.
Today’s word is Viability.
Not mere survival.
Not the ability to persist under oppressive conditions.
But the capacity for life to continue with integrity—
to grow, adapt, and remain relational within the conditions we inhabit.
Viability asks a deeper question than possibility:
What forms of life can actually sustain themselves without reproducing the very harms we are trying to escape?
🔎 Learning to See
This question has followed me across the country.
From Chicago to the Bay Area to the deserts of New Mexico, I keep asking: how do we unravel from the episodic violences that structure our lives?
Once you learn to see violence clearly, you cannot unsee it.
It has taken me a long time to see clearly.
And now that I do, the question of viability matters even more.
What do we do now?
🌵 The Desert Question
This week someone drove me into the desert to visit a monastery.
I was curious about the place — curious about the racial dynamics within it. I was told that monks of color often live more hermit-like lives there.
I found myself wondering why.
Of course, I understand the need to hermit from dominant culture. Many of us have learned that dominant culture rarely serves the global majority.
Still, the question lingers:
What does viable life look like in a world structured by domination?
Where can communities breathe?
Where can difference live without constantly defending itself?
🚂 Grace on the Train
Traveling by train and eating with strangers continues to teach me something unexpected: grace goes before us.
I do not always read emotions easily. Navigating the neuro-normative world has always been complicated for me. Yet through these encounters I am realizing something humbling about my own vocation.
My life’s work has not been about doctrine or dogma.
It has been about building communities of difference.
That realization has been both humbling and difficult to translate.
What does a public theologian actually do?
Perhaps the simplest answer is this:
we help people imagine how to live together again.
🕊 Small Acts
As I continue this journey, I am convinced that small acts of grace and repair carry more power than we often admit.
They buoy us.
They interrupt the machinery of harm.
They open space for another possible world.
The Friday Care Package itself is a small act like this — an attempt to help our nervous systems settle through the weekend so that imagination can breathe again.
Today’s invitation is simple:
Let us practice small acts of grace and repair.
Not the grand gesture.
Not the heroic performance.
Just the quiet work of making life more viable than it was yesterday.
🔁 The Refrain
Another world is not demanded of us—
it is invited through attention, care, and courage.
🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice
Practicing Viability
3–5 minutes
Sit somewhere you feel marginally safe.
Notice your breath without trying to change it.
Ask quietly:
“What would make life feel slightly more viable today?”
Do not reach for the large answer.
Look for the small adjustment—
a call, a walk, a moment of rest, an honest conversation.
Take three breaths while holding that possibility.
Viability grows through small acts repeated over time.
🕯 Closing Blessing
May care buoy us into waves of grace.
May we notice patterns that guide us toward repair.
May small acts of attention make viable what once felt impossible.
And may we continue, together,
to nurture another possible world.
Paz,
—RCE+