🌱 Friday Care Package Week 10 of 52 —Promise
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
🌱 Friday Care Package
Week 10 of 52 —
Promise
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
✨ The Word We Are Tending
Promise
Dear Becoming Ones—
Today’s Friday Care Package arrives on Saturday.
I spent the last two days on a train traveling from California to Denver without WiFi, which meant I had to practice something rare these days: being unreachable.
When I arrived, I shared a long coffee conversation with Robert the contemplative. Time with scholars of color who are not tethered to the academic machine is rare. Many brilliant minds remain contorted by the supremacist mechanics of the academy — navigating systems that reward assimilation more than imagination.
But not Robert.
Robert reminded me of the word I am tending today:
Promise.
Not a guarantee.
Not a contract enforced by power.
But the felt sense that something meaningful might still emerge —
a future leaning toward us, asking for our care, courage, and patience.
Promise lives in the tension between what is not yet and what calls us forward.
🔍 Confession
I have not always kept promises to myself.
For years I contorted my life to fit the academic machine. I served supremacist imaginaries without fully understanding how deeply they had shaped me. When I finally received my papers in 2015, something shifted inside me. I felt free in ways I hadn’t known before.
Still, freedom is not immediate.
It has taken years to unravel from the hegemony of academia.
These days, I describe myself — somewhat humbly, somewhat humorously — as a recovering elitist.
A recovering elitist.
That confession alone is a kind of promise.
🌍 Imagining Another World
This year I am writing on 52 synonyms for possibility through the Friday Care Package. It is my small act of resistance — a practice of language that helps us imagine another world.
Promise is the word for this week.
Promise allows me to imagine what might still emerge.
Promise lives inside the tension between the already and the not yet — what theologians call the eschatological horizon.
The future calls us, but we cannot fully reach it.
And perhaps that is precisely where imagination lives.
🤲 Bearing Witness
When I think about promises I have made, they have always been promises to people.
Promises to treat others with dignity.
Yet because of the ways I assimilated into white-serving institutions, I also participated in harmful practices. I have enacted the genocidal logics embedded within whiteness. I have harmed students in the classroom.
I admitted this to Robert.
He listened.
He bore witness to my confession.
We need more spaces like that — spaces where we can tell the truth about our participation in systems of harm so we can begin practicing new ways of being with one another.
That is one of the deepest lessons of this research trip.
We are out of practice with one another.
So out of practice that many of us embody the divide-and-conquer mentality without realizing it.
🚂 Learning on the Train
Traveling by train and eating with strangers has been teaching me something surprising.
People outside white-serving institutions — ordinary folks living ordinary lives — are often more willing to turn toward one another.
Women especially have been speaking freely and thoughtfully.
But many people feel trapped inside narrow political imagination. When I ask, “What if replacing the president is not the real problem?” the room goes quiet.
Few people have language to describe the deeper wound — the colonial wound — or to recognize that our cities and rural towns alike are hyper-colonized sites of empire.
Still, the conversations continue.
And I am learning.
I might be Team Train now.
🌅 The Horizon of Promise
I want to be well.
I want to believe in the promise of another possible world.
I want to believe that I can make a promise to someone — and keep it.
Perhaps the promise we must begin with is simple:
To hold the tension between the already and the not yet.
To remain oriented toward a horizon we cannot fully reach.
To cultivate imagination that stretches beyond what institutions allow.
That is courage in action.
Will you join me?
🔁 The Refrain
Another world is not demanded of us—
it is invited through attention, care, and courage.
🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice
Breathing the Promise
3–5 minutes
Pause wherever you are.
Notice your breath entering your body.
Remember that in Jewish tradition, life begins with breath — the first miracle.
Take three slow breaths and say inwardly:
“I am alive in this moment.”
Ask quietly:
“What promise is asking for my care today?”
Do not rush the answer.
Let breath carry it.
🕊 Closing Blessing
May we remember that breath is the first miracle.
May we practice turning away from the hegemonies of empire and toward one another.
May we embody daily metanoia — small acts of turning that nurture another possible world.
Paz,
—RCE+