🌱 Friday Care Package Week 15 of 52 - Becoming
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
Max Heaton, one of our Living Projects. Max’s art is available for purchase and installation.
🌱 Friday Care Package
Week 15 of 52 —
Becoming
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
✨ The Word We Are Tending
Becoming
Dear Becoming Ones,
There is no final version of you.
There is no final version of me.
No polished self waiting at the end of the work.
No arrival point where the contradictions resolve
and the body rests in perfect knowing.
There is only becoming.
Not arrival.
Not completion.
But the ongoing, unfinished process of being shaped -
in relation to self,
to others,
to the more-than-human world.
Becoming is possibility in motion.
A mythical improvisational dance, if you will.
🌊 The Long Way Around
I am learning this the long way.
Through rupture.
Through heartbreak.
Through crisis.
Through repair.
Through the slow, unglamorous work of noticing
how I have been shaped -
by what I love,
and by what I have refused.
Becoming is not linear.
It spirals.
It doubles back.
It interrupts itself.
…Retorcer…
It asks us to begin again
without the guarantee
that this time will be easier.
And still - we continue.
Because something in us knows:
to stop becoming
is to surrender
to the scripts handed to us
by empire,
by supremacy,
by fear.
🔥 Telling the Truth
To become is to risk.
To remain open
when everything in us wants closure.
To stay in relationship -
even when relationship undoes us.
I used to think becoming meant improvement.
Becoming better. Becoming clearer. Becoming whole.
Now I know -
becoming means telling the truth.
About harm endured.
About harm I have perpetrated.
Without collapsing into shame.
Without performing innocence.
As James Baldwin teaches us with unflinching clarity:
we cannot change what we refuse to face.
So becoming asks us to face it.
All of it.
So, I am facing
the violence that has shaped me
to be just as genocidal as the next person.
This is the hardest work
that I have stepped into.
Harder than the seminary degree.
Harder than the PhD.
Because -
becoming requires
an unflinching commitment
to transformation.
“Change is the only constant,”
they say.
🌿 The Undercommons of Becoming
There is a place beneath the surface of things -
where people gather without permission,
where life continues outside the scripts of legitimacy.
A place that Fred Moten calls the undercommons.
Becoming lives there.
Not in the perfected self,
but in the shared, unfinished, collective work
of learning how to live otherwise.
And sometimes -
in the middle of the mess -
in the middle of crisis-
in the middle of uncertainty -
there is beauty.
A moment of laughter.
A shared meal.
A glimpse of something alive.
What Ross Gay might call a discipline of delight.
Even here.
Especially here.
That is what we are trying to cultivate here.
Another possible world through fugitivity -
and conditions of exile -
that help us name right here.
🌀 Compost & Breath
Becoming is not clean.
It smells like compost.
It feels like breath catching in the throat
before the truth is spoken.
It is the slow breakdown of what no longer serves
so something more honest can grow.
You are not behind.
You are in process.
🔁 The Refrain
Another world is not demanded of us—
it is invited through attention, care, and courage.
🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice
Staying With Becoming
3–5 minutes
Sit or stand where you are. No need to prepare the space.
Notice your breath as it is—unforced, unfinished.
Ask quietly:
“What part of me is still becoming?”
Let one feeling or sensation arise—without naming it too quickly.
Place a hand on your body and say inwardly:
“I am allowed to be in process.”
Take one slow breath as if you are making room, not progress.
This is fugitive work.
It refuses finality.
It honors the unfinished.
🕯 Closing Blessing
May you trust the process that has not yet resolved.
May you find companions in your becoming.
May you tell the truth without fear of what it undoes.
And may your unfinished life
become the ground for another possible world.
Paz,
—RCE+