🌱 Friday Care Package (Arriving Saturday)
Week 7 of 52 —Chance | A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
🌱 Friday Care Package (Arriving Saturday)
Week 7 of 52 —
Chance
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
✨ The Word We Are Tending
Chance
Dear Becoming Ones—
Today’s Friday Care Package comes a day late.
Which feels appropriate.
Because this week’s word is chance.
Not randomness.
Not luck.
But the small unscripted moment when something unexpected can still enter—
when the future has not fully closed around us.
I have come to trust the unscripted.
I fled to Alfred, New York, not knowing what I would find here. I thought I was finding quiet. Instead, chance placed me inside a living diagram of rural empire — machinic oppressions you can see up close. State police woven into civic life. Families holding power across generations. A university that, to some critics, functions as real-estate more than education.
Chance brought me here.
And now I ask: what are the unscripted moments asking me to notice?
Last year I wrote about care every Friday.
This year I am tracing synonyms of possibility — trying to nurture small ecologies of the undercommons, those surprising sites where meaning gathers without permission.
Places where people still meet each other without credential first.
Where recognition happens before classification.
Where relation outruns institution.
This is where chance lives.
We are still wintering here. And I continue bearing witness to what feels like the moral exhaustion of white academia — its nostalgia, its symbols, its recurring legal battles, its inability to metabolize the very bodies it gathers. The devastation is not only structural; it is spiritual.
James Baldwin once warned that people cling to innocence to avoid responsibility. You can feel that here — a longing for a past that never existed except through exclusion.
And yet — chance interrupts inevitability.
Karl Barth insisted that history never has the last word because God remains free — free from our systems, free from our certainties, free even from our despair. The world is never sealed. Not by empires. Not by universities. Not by our own exhaustion.
That theological claim matters right now.
Because I am also reckoning with how violence lives in me. I have inherited it. I have participated in it. We all have. The wound persists through repetition — unless something interrupts the script.
Chance is that interruption.
Most of my unscripted moments are awakenings — realizing how ordinary harm has been normalized. How easily we misrecognize one another. How quickly we replicate the very worlds we critique.
But sometimes the interruption is gentler:
a conversation
a meal
a shared story
a gathering where nobody is performing belonging
This is what I am trying to cultivate in the Becoming Guild and in these small experiments of collective storytelling — spaces where we risk encountering one another without institutional mediation.
Chance becomes possibility when we stay.
So I wonder—
Might hope arrive not as a plan, but as an encounter?
Might another world begin in unscheduled togetherness?
Might meaning emerge where control loosens?
Take chance seriously.
It is where freedom first sneaks in.
Paz, —RCE+
Keep Watch!
Lunar Notes Coming:
A full-moon dispatch for those learning how to stay human while the world asks them to explain themselves.
🔁 The Refrain
Another world is not demanded of us—
it is invited through attention, care, and courage.
🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice
Receiving the Unscripted
3 minutes. No preparation.
Pause wherever you are.
Do not arrange your surroundings.
Notice the first sound you did not intend to hear.
Let your breath follow it for three cycles.
Ask quietly:
“What is arriving that I did not plan?”
Do nothing about the answer.
Chance requires space to enter.
This practice makes a small opening.
🕯️ Closing
May you recognize the interruptions that save you from certainty.
May you meet others outside the script.
May you remain porous to surprise.
And when chance appears—
may you stay long enough for possibility to take root.