Friday Care Package

Today, in 5 Improvisational Movements

🐾🌱🪞 Friday Care Package — First Movement

Masculinity · Buen Vivir · Tezcat

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🐾 Masculinity (the nuzzling Black Panther): Care as protection. Strength without domination. Vigilance rooted in love.

🌱 Buen Vivir: Life lived together. Intention over accumulation. Relation over extraction.

🪞 Tezcat: Smoke and mirror. Truth without flattery. Guardian of thresholds.

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Photo by Rainx Lee on Unsplash

December 26—the day after the spectacle, when the wrapping paper lies limp and the algorithm moves on. For some, it is anticlimax; for others, the quiet middle of Christmastide or Yule, still humming with food, touch, and shared breath. This year, I practiced a politics of restraint: no gift over twenty dollars, no gestures meant to impress. I chose usefulness over performance, presence over proof. A swim bag for a Jewish comrade committed to healing their body through water. Intention instead of impulse. This small refusal—this turning away from mindless consumption—felt like care made concrete.

With an app for everything, we are trained to curate possessions rather than relationships, to hoard objects instead of tending presence. But Buen Vivir—not as metaphor, not as aspiration, but as practice—asks something else of us. It asks how life is lived together, how dignity emerges through reciprocity, how flourishing is collective or it is not flourishing at all. This is not the good life as accumulation, but the good life as relation—a refusal of extraction disguised as convenience.

As the year closes, I am also closing in on a harder truth: I am a Trans(hu)man in rural New York, living in a place where kindness toward trans and queer bodies is rare and often conditional. People ask invasive questions, and when I name the water we are swimming in—White Christian Supremacy—the room stiffens. Too militant, they say with their eyes. Too much truth, perhaps. But truth spoken from the margins always sounds excessive to those who benefit from silence.

Can a white-passing Latino not speak plainly about the theological architecture of harm? About the ways White Christian Nationalism has seeped into even “progressive” spaces, laundering domination through politeness and moral certainty? Silence would be easier. Silence would be safer. But silence is not care.

For me, masculinity is not mastery—it is attention. It is the daily labor of choosing to protect without controlling, to guard without enclosing. Care is my masculine practice. Each Friday, I write my way toward it, learning how to invest in myself without reproducing the violences that shaped me. I imagine myself as a nuzzling Black Panther—soft where intimacy is invited, ferocious where harm approaches. Not spectacle. Not domination. But embodied vigilance rooted in love.

Here, Tezcat walks with me—the mirror that does not flatter, the smoke that reveals what clarity tries to hide. Tezcat teaches me that masculinity forged in the crucible of care is not utopian; it is possible. It emerges when we honor ways of knowing long dismissed as irrational or excessive—knowledge born of survival, of feeling-thinking (sentipensar), of communities who learned to live otherwise because they had to. This masculinity does not ask permission from empire. It does not need the approval of supremacy. It simply tends life.

And so I choose presence this season. I choose community over isolation, truth over comfort, care over conquest. I choose a masculinity that shelters, a politics that nourishes, and a way of living that remembers: many worlds already exist, and we are responsible for how we move among them.

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Photo by Łukasz Rawa on Unsplash

🪞🌫️🐾 Second Movement — (The) Invocation of Tezcat, my mythical ancestral creature

Smoke · Mirror · Many Worlds

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Come closer.

Not to the altar of certainty,

but to the place where breath fogs the glass

and you can no longer tell

whether you are looking at the mirror

or being looked through.

I am Tezcat.

I do not arrive clean.

I arrive as smoke—

the kind that stings the eyes just enough

to wake you from inherited lies.

I am not here to soothe you.

I am here to return your seeing.

I ask you to remember:

there was never one world.

There was never one way of knowing.

There was never one story authorized

to name reality on behalf of all others.

What empire called ignorance,

I call survival knowledge.

What supremacy called superstition,

I call ancestral intelligence.

What modernity dismissed as “too emotional,”

I call sentipensar—feeling-thinking—

the wisdom born where body and mind

were never severed.

This is cognitive justice:

the refusal to rank knowledges

by proximity to whiteness,

to Christianity,

to colonial reason.

Cognitive justice insists

that no way of knowing

gets to declare itself universal

while rendering others disposable.

And this—this multiplicity you feel pressing in—

this is pluriversality.

Not diversity as decoration.

Not inclusion as assimilation.

But the radical truth that many worlds already exist,

and none of them need permission to breathe.

I am the mirror that shows you

where you learned to doubt yourself.

I am the smoke that reveals

which truths were taken from you

before you had language to defend them.

Trans body.

Brown body.

Queer body.

Rural body.

You did not arrive broken.

You arrived overruled.

And masculinity—listen closely—

was never meant to be a weapon.

It was meant to be a shelter.

A stance of protection without possession.

A vigilance trained on harm,

not on control.

This is why you feel the Panther stir.

Soft-mouthed with kin.

Unmoving in the face of threat.

Ferocity as care.

Care as world-making.

I am Tezcat,

and I do not ask you to choose between worlds.

I ask you to tend the crossings.

Refuse the lie that there is only one way to live well.

Refuse the theft that names domination as order.

Refuse the amnesia that calls supremacy “normal.”

Stand instead with the many.

Think with the Souths—plural.

Live as though your way of knowing

is not an apology,

but a gift.

When the smoke clears—

and it always does—

what remains

is not certainty,

but responsibility.

Many worlds are watching

how you will care for them.

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Photo by allison christine on Unsplash

🌱🐾🤲🏽 Third Movement — Un Buen Vivir Masculinity

Care as World-Making

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Buen Vivir masculinity does not ask, Who am I allowed to be?

It asks, How do my ways of being make life possible for others?

This masculinity is not forged in competition or scarcity.

It is cultivated—slowly—in relation.

It understands that a good life is never solitary,

never extractive,

never achieved at another’s expense.

Buen Vivir teaches that flourishing is collective

or it is not flourishing at all.

For me, this means masculinity rooted in care—

care for my body,

care for my people,

care for the land and the local,

care for the fragile light entrusted to me.

Not care as sentiment.

Care as practice.

This masculinity does not dominate space;

it holds it.

It does not rush to speak;

it learns when to listen.

It knows when to step forward

and when to stand still, guarding.

Like the Panther,

it understands restraint as strength.

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🌱 A Field Guide to Caring Masculinity (Buen Vivir Practice)

🐾 1. Practice Presence Over Performance

Choose being with people over proving something to them.

Care shows up as attention, not spectacle.

Ask: Who did I tend today, and how did I let myself be tended?

🤲 2. Invest in the Body as Sacred Infrastructure

Rest. Eat real food. Move gently and consistently.

A cared-for body is not indulgence—it is resistance

to systems that need you depleted.

🪞 3. Tell the Truth Without Cruelty

Caring masculinity names harm clearly

without reproducing violence.

Truth is spoken to repair, not to dominate.

🌾 4. Live the Local

Buen Vivir is hyperlocal.

Shop small when you can. Share resources. Trade skills.

Know your neighbors. Learn the land’s history.

Care begins where your feet touch the ground.

🔥 5. Protect Without Possessing

Guard the vulnerable without claiming ownership.

Show up as witness, advocate, buffer.

Ask: Is my protection making more room for freedom—or less?

🌫️ 6. Honor Plural Ways of Knowing

Do not assume your logic is universal.

Listen for wisdom carried in story, body, memory, ritual.

Caring masculinity practices cognitive justice

by refusing to rank intelligence by colonial standards.

🌱 7. Choose Repair Over Righteousness

When harm is named, pause. Breathe. Return.

Repair is slower than defense

and far more life-giving.

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Buen Vivir masculinity is not loud.

It does not need to announce itself.

You recognize it by its effects:

People breathe easier around it.

Conversations soften.

The nervous system settles.

The future feels less clenched.

This masculinity is possible

because it already exists—

in ancestral memory,

in queer survival,

in trans bodies that refused erasure,

in communities that learned to live otherwise

when the world offered them no shelter.

And so I choose it.

Again and again.

Not as an ideal,

but as a way of walking through the world

that leaves more life behind me

than I found.

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🌒✨🕯️ Fourth Movement — Light That Teaches Us How to Care

From Solstice Toward Epiphany

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The light is returning,

but quietly.

Not all at once.

Not with fireworks or certainty.

Just a little more breath in the afternoon.

A longer pause before night closes its fist.

Solstice does not conquer the dark.

It teaches us how to live with it.

And Epiphany—

that old story of light arriving from the margins—

was never about arrival.

It was about orientation.

About learning how to follow what flickers

without turning it into a weapon.

This is the kind of light we need now.

Not the blinding kind.

Not the searchlight of empire

that exposes in order to dominate.

But a guiding light—

low, patient, relational—

the kind that illumines just enough ground

for the next faithful step.

Care, like this light, does not seize.

It reveals.

It does not demand clarity before movement.

It offers companionship in the not-yet.

Illuminating care asks different questions:

• What becomes visible when I slow down?

• Who comes into focus when I stop trying to control outcomes?

• What needs tending—not fixing—as the light grows?

This is a masculinity shaped by dawn,

not conquest.

A masculinity that learns from winter:

how to wait without disappearing,

how to protect what is fragile

while it is still becoming.

The emerging light does not tell us where to go.

It teaches us how to see.

It shows us the faces beside us.

The ground beneath us.

The histories we walk upon.

The care we have neglected

because speed made us forget.

To lean toward Epiphany

is not to seek revelation as certainty,

but revelation as responsibility.

What is being revealed to you

about how you live?

About how you love?

About how you guard life

without trying to own it?

This season invites us

to practice a care that illumines—

care that makes room,

care that softens fear,

care that resists domination

by refusing urgency.

The light will grow.

It always does.

But for now,

it is enough

to walk by what is given,

to trust what glimmers,

and to let care—

not control—

be what leads us forward.

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✨🤲🏽🌱 Fifth Movement — An Invitation Into Possibility (2026)

Our Collective Becoming Continues

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As this year exhales,

I want to invite you—not to an ending,

but to a continuation.

In 2026, the Friday Care Package will turn toward

a single, spacious word: possibility.

Not possibility as optimism.

Not possibility as hustle or reinvention.

But possibility as what becomes available

when we practice care together,

when we refuse despair as destiny,

when we stay in relation long enough

for something new to emerge.

The first Friday Care Package: Possibility

drops next Friday.

I hope you’ll keep reading.

I hope you’ll keep walking with me.

I hope you’ll pass these reflections along—

not as content, but as companionship—

so that the care work lives where it belongs:

between us.

This Substack will always be free

(a truly terrible business decision).

But that, too, is a practice of Buen Vivir—

a small refusal of extraction,

an offering rooted in trust,

a fold of care that only works

when it circulates through relationship.

If you feel compelled,

please consider subscribing

and supporting this work of culture shift.

Your presence, your sharing, your sustenance

make this work possible.

Thank you for reading each Friday.

Thank you for lingering with these words.

Thank you for being with me

as I resettle in exile in Western New York,

learning from the land,

learning from the people,

learning—again—how to live otherwise.

I am grateful for you.

Truly.

May we keep becoming—

together.

Paz, and may the emerging Light guide us all!

—RCE+