🌿 Friday Care Package: The Care of Belonging
Belonging as the Wild Work of Kinship
🌿 Friday Care Package
The Care of Belonging
Belonging as the Wild Work of Kinship
“We can make each other safe.” — James Baldwin
“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” — bell hooks, Communion
“We find the Way by walking it together.” — Michael T. McRay, The Wild Way
Dear Becoming Ones: I’ve been thinking about how Baldwin lived belonging. How he understood kinship not as a sentimental posture, but as the daily decision to turn toward one another, especially in the ache. He refused the convenience of indifference. Instead, he said that to love someone is to make their world larger. I keep trying to learn that.
bell hooks reminds us that love — and therefore belonging — is not a private emotion. It’s a practice of freedom, where we make a life where each person knows: You matter here. Your existence rearranges the universe.
I’m slowly realizing that belonging is disrupted when we are trained to compete, to compare, to annihilate each other with brilliance or productivity. Scarcity and supremacy whisper the same lie: you must earn love, and you will probably fail.
And that lie keeps us lonely.
As I unravel from a lifetime of white Christian supremacy — a story that taught me to sever myself from my own body and from community — I’m learning that belonging is a search for love that does not dispose of us. It’s the ongoing sacrament of becoming human again through one another.
Belonging is Communion — not the tidy ritual, but the messy table, where the crumbs are enough, and so are we.
When Michael McRay writes about The Wild Way, he isn’t giving us a map — he’s inviting us into a practice:
show up, listen, risk the bridge, choose relationship over being right.
That is kinship. That is how the belonging we hunger for gets built — meal by meal, memory by memory, breath by breath.
I confess: It is hard for me to trust I belong.
It is harder still to believe others belong with me.
But this, too, is my daily metanoia:
to practice the care of belonging as a refusal to let anyone — including myself — be disposable.
Because love is the only economy where abundance grows as we give it away.
May we turn to(ward) one another, right now.
Paz, —RCE+
🥖 Field Guide: Practicing the Care of Belonging
A hyperlocal practice for this weekend:
The Small Invitation
Text or call one person and say: I’m grateful to belong alongside you. Let that be enough.
The Kinship Meal
Share food with someone — even toast and tea. Declare the table a site of Communion.
The Baldwin Practice
Speak up for someone being silenced this week. Expand their world.
Return to the Body
Place a hand over your heart. Whisper: I belong here.
Notice what softens.
✨ Ritual Exhale
Breathe in: We are connected.
Breathe out: No one is disposable.
Breathe in: Love is our Way.
Breathe out: We belong.