🌱 Friday Care Package Week 19 of 52 — Passage
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
🌱 Friday Care Package
Week 19 of 52 —
Passage
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
✨ The Word We Are Tending
Passage
Dear Becoming Ones—
I am living inside passage.
And perhaps you are, too.
Our recent words have carried us here:
Emergence → what arises
Becoming → the unfolding
Emergent → the posture
Opportunity → the invitation
Threshold → the crossing point
Passage → the journey through
What began as a meditation on possibility is beginning to read like a spiritual-philosophical migration narrative.
And maybe that is exactly what this moment requires.
Because when we respond to what is emerging, when we allow ourselves to become responsive to the emergent, eventually we arrive inside the passage itself.
Not arrival.
Not resolution.
But movement.
🚂 Living Inside the Passage
Passage asks us to pay attention.
To become attuned to what the crossing is doing to us.
How might we do that when accelerating forces produce devastation all around?
I think about gerrymandering.
The gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The steady erosion of collective life.
The normalization of cruelty as governance.
We are living through accelerating collapse.
And still—we are asked to move through it without surrendering our humanity.
That is passage work.
🌿 Slowing Enough to Feel
Recently, I attended a grief retreat.
It was one of the most profound experiences I have had in years—gathering with others to tend ourselves and one another within the work of anti-oppression.
No performance.
No branding.
No floating heads.
Just bodies.
Breathing.
Grieving.
Trying to remain human together.
This morning, I am writing from Zurich, sipping cacao-infused coffee while my body struggles to adjust to another timezone. And I realize:
this slow pace—
this savoring—
is what supports the passage.
We do not survive passage through acceleration.
We survive it through attunement.
🌌 The Missing Directions
When we slow down enough to savor the passage, we begin to find ourselves again.
Not the self manufactured by institutions.
Not the self optimized for productivity.
But the self capable of relation.
The self oriented toward Love.
When we reorient toward Love, we recover the missing directions.
As James Baldwin reminds us again and again through his moral clarity, the task is not innocence but consciousness. Not perfection, but the courage to remain awake to one another.
And perhaps that is what passage ultimately teaches:
How to remain in motion without abandoning care.
🫀 Passage as Practice
Passage is not glamorous.
It is exhaustion on the train.
It is uncertainty.
It is crossing borders inwardly and outwardly.
It is the long middle where the old world has not fully released you and the new one has not yet arrived.
This is why fugitives understand passage.
The fugitive moves without guarantee.
Improvises without certainty.
Finds companionship in movement itself.
As Fred Moten teaches, there is something sacred in moving together beneath the official scripts of the world.
Passage creates that possibility.
⏳ Radical Hope
So today, as I run off to the university to give my talk, I leave you with this:
Slow your roll.
Savor the crossing.
Become attentive to the passage you are already inside.
Because radical hope allows despair to dissipate—not all at once, but enough for us to continue.
And perhaps that is enough for today.
🔁 The Refrain
Another world is not demanded of us— it is invited through attention, care, and courage.
🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice
Attuning to the Passage
3–5 minutes
Pause wherever you are.
Feel your body supported by something—chair, floor, earth, train seat.
Notice one thing that feels unfinished in your life right now.
Do not rush to resolve it.
Ask quietly:
“What is this passage teaching me?”
Take three slow breaths.
Not to escape the crossing—
but to remain present within it.
🕯 Closing
May you trust the movement even when the destination is unclear.
May you find companions along the crossing.
May your body remember that slowing down is not failure.
And may passage teach us all
how to remain human together.
Paz,
—RCE+
Isn’t the passage what humanity is? We are passing from not being human to being human to no longer being human again.
Being human, we discover, is not necessarily an easy thing