🌱 Friday Care Package, arriving on Saturday Week 12 of 52 — Likelihood
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
🌱 Friday Care Package
Week 12 of 52 —
Likelihood
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
✨ The Word We Are Tending
Likelihood
Dear Becoming Ones—
Last year, I wrote on the word care in all of its forms.
This year, the Friday Care Package is attuned to possibility—
each week tracing a synonym, listening for what the word reveals about how we might live otherwise.
Today’s word is Likelihood.
Not probability as prediction.
Not statistical certainty.
But the sensed direction of what is becoming more or less possible
based on how we are living, choosing, and relating right now.
Likelihood asks:
What future are we quietly increasing the chances of—
by the way we are showing up today?
🧭 Attunement
Likelihood requires attunement.
To space.
To time.
To place.
It asks us to notice the small things—the gestures, the patterns, the habits—that are shaping the conditions of the future before it arrives.
What are we practicing, daily, that makes justice more likely?
🌾 Soil & Memory
This week, Dolores Huerta, at nearly 96 years old, broke her silence about experiencing sexual violence.
What is the likelihood that truth-telling like this shifts culture?
I hope it does.
Because we know—intuitively, historically—that violence does not remain contained. It moves through bodies, through relationships, through land, through memory.
The ground remembers what has been done upon it.
And so we must ask:
If violence has been sown so deeply,
what is required to cultivate something different?
🔥 The Inheritance of Violence
We are shaped by violence.
Conditioned by it—through the Church, the Academy, the Movement, the State. Many of us have learned to survive by internalizing the very logics that harm us.
I know I have.
And this is where likelihood becomes personal.
If violence is what we practice, violence is what becomes more likely.
But if we begin—slowly, imperfectly—to practice repair,
to suture the wounds within ourselves,
to turn toward one another instead of away—
then something else becomes possible.
🤲 The Turn
What is the likelihood that we can turn toward one another right now?
It feels wild to even ask.
And yet—that turning may be the very thing that teaches us what belonging and freedom mean in this moment.
We are out of practice with one another.
But practice can be relearned.
As James Baldwin reminds us in his moral clarity:
We cannot heal what we refuse to face.
So we must face it—
the violence,
the inheritance,
the systems that shape us.
Not to be consumed by them,
but to begin untethering ourselves from them.
⏳ Generational Work
Let us be honest:
The work of turning away from violence will take generations.
And still—
we begin.
Likelihood is not about immediate transformation.
It is about direction.
What are we orienting toward?
What are we practicing into being?
🔁 The Refrain
Another world is not demanded of us—
it is invited through attention, care, and courage.
🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice
Sensing Likelihood
3–5 minutes
Sit or stand where you are. No preparation needed.
Notice your breath as it is—unforced.
Ask quietly:
“What am I practicing right now—without realizing it?”
Let one answer arise—not in words alone, but in feeling.
Then ask:
“What small shift would make care more likely today?”
Take one slow breath and commit—not to perfection—
but to direction.
Likelihood is shaped in small, repeated acts.
🕯 Closing Blessing
May we become people who increase the likelihood of care.
May we tend the soil of our lives with honesty.
May we face what must be faced—together.
And may our small, faithful turns
make another possible world more likely.
Paz,
—RCE+