🌱 Friday Care Package Week 17 of 52 —Opportunity (Deepened)

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

Photo by Emily Hallam on Unsplash

---

🌱 Friday Care Package

Week 17 of 52 —

Opportunity (Deepened)

A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility

---

✨ The Word We Are Tending

Opportunity

Dear Becoming Ones—I started writing the Friday Care Package last year and wrote each Friday on the word care. I did a genealogy of care from Black Feminist, decolonial, and abolitionist thinkers. You can find a year’s worth of writing on care in the archives.

Today, I have taken my time to construct the lyrics of today’s Care Package. I lingered in bed yesterday needing additional rest after being gone for 10 days and also attending a grief retreat, which I highly recommend we all start doing on a routine!

My community sends me out into the world and expects me to bring back what I learn when I am in community with others. It is an opportunity, the world we are tending today!

I am very clear that I am an elder in training and everyone is my teacher.

And, now, the lyric essay can commence.

We return to a word we have already spoken:

Opportunity.

But not as before.

Not as a simple opening.
Not as a chance waiting to be taken.

This time, we return to it differently.

Because as Gilles Deleuze teaches us, repetition is never the same. Each return carries difference. Each encounter deepens the field.

So now—

Opportunity is not passive.

It is a threshold.
A charged moment where something has already emerged,
where becoming is underway,
and where we must decide how to respond.

---

🔁 Second Chances, Again

I have been given many opportunities.

Over and over again—
people have given me another chance.

A do-over.
A return.
An opening I did not always deserve.

My life is full of these stories.

Second chances.
Unexpected grace.
Moments where practice itself became the threshold of becoming.

And I am still learning:

Opportunity is not about getting it right.

It is about staying in the practice long enough
to be changed.

---

🌍 Imagination Under Threat

We are living in a time where imagination itself is under attack.

Possibility is being narrowed.
Erased.
Disciplined out of us.

And still—

opportunity arrives.

In small ways.
In quiet gestures.
In invitations that ask us to remember how to imagine again.

So the question becomes:

Will we turn toward the opportunities that enliven imagination—
or will we remain bound to what has already been decided for us?

---

🍲 Returning to Self

When I left public life and moved to rural New York,
I did not have an imagination for what was next.

I only had fragments.

Now, I am turning 50.

And I am gathering people.

Some I have just met.
Some who have been teaching me for years.

I cook for them.

On Mondays.
On Fridays.
In kitchens that become sites of communion.

A throw down, yes—
but also a remembering.

Of who I am.

---

🫀 Healing the “Talking Head”

Academia shaped me into what I once called a Talking Head—
a floating intellect detached from the body.

I named it in my TEDx talk.
And now, I am healing from it.

In real time.

Writing.
Weaving.
Returning to the body.

Returning to belonging.

Opportunity, for me now, looks like right relationship.

With myself.
With others.
With the more-than-human world.

---

🔥 What Is Taking Shape

Opportunity is not abstract.

It is forming.

It looks like:

• a book on belonging and freedom, long in the making

• meals shared with strangers who become teachers

• the question that keeps guiding me:
  “How might we turn toward one another right now?”

And—

an unfolding gathering:

The Atole Gathering
New Mexico, late 2026
A liminal space
A small circle
Woven with mystery and care

More will come.

But even now, it is an opportunity—
not yet formed,
but already calling.

---

🌌 Turning Toward

Opportunity is not neutral.

It asks something of us.

What opportunities do we have right now
to turn away from hegemonic forces—
and turn toward Love?

Toward compassion for all beings—
including the more-than-human world?

Opportunity is where choice becomes ethical.

Where responsiveness becomes responsibility.

Where becoming becomes relational.

---

⏳ Kairos

There is another time moving beneath the surface of things.

Not clock time.

Not productivity time.

But Kairos—
ripened time.
Sacred time.

Opportunity lives there.

In the folds.
In the openings.
In the moments that ask:

Will you respond?

---

🔁 The Refrain

Another world is not demanded of us— it is invited through attention, care, and courage.

---

🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice

Crossing the Threshold

3–5 minutes

1. Pause where you are.

2. Notice one place in your life that feels like a threshold—
   something emerging, but not yet decided.

3. Place a hand on your body.

4. Ask quietly:

   “What is this moment asking of me?”

5. Do not rush to answer.

6. Take one breath and say inwardly:

   “I will respond with care.”

This is opportunity.

Not something you take—
but something you enter.

---

🕯 Closing Blessing

May you recognize the thresholds in your life.
May you trust the second chances that arrive.
May you turn toward what calls you into deeper relationship.

And may your response—
imperfect, embodied, real—
help shape another possible world.

---

Paz,
—RCE+

---