🌱 Friday Care Package Week 21 of 52 —Orientation
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
Dearest Becoming Ones: Last year, I started writing on the word care in lots of different ways. It turned into the Friday Care Package. This year, I’m writing on the word possibility and synonyms of possibility. Today’s word is orientation. I hope you enjoy this one!
🌱 Friday Care Package
Week 21 of 52 —
Orientation
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
✨ The Word We Are Tending
Orientation
Dear Becoming Ones—
Orientation is not simply direction.
It is the way we position ourselves toward the world, toward one another, and toward what we believe is possible.
If arrival was the moment of being received, then orientation asks:
How will we now face the world?
🧭 Re-Orientation
I was in my PhD program when I first encountered the idea that queerness was not merely an identity, but an orientation.
That changed me.
Because identitarian logics often fail us. They reduce us to categories while the soul continues moving. We become trapped inside labels that cannot fully hold the complexity of becoming human.
But orientation—
orientation is different.
Orientation suggests movement.
Attention.
Relationality.
It asks not simply who are you?
but:
What are you facing toward?
🌊 The Terrain of Orientation
This word opens into deeper waters.
James Baldwin reminds us that moral life requires orientation toward truth, even when truth undoes us.
Gloria Anzaldúa teaches us that borderlands consciousness demands orientation toward multiplicity, contradiction, and nepantla—the in-between.
Fred Moten gestures toward a fugitive orientation, one shaped in the undercommons where relation exceeds institution.
And Byung-Chul Han helps us understand that reclaiming attention in an exhausted world is itself an act of resistance.
Orientation is bodily.
Spiritual.
Political.
Ecological.
It shapes what we notice.
What we refuse.
What we nurture.
🌿 Turning Toward
My entire research question—
“How might we turn toward one another right now?”
—is fundamentally a question of orientation.
Because the world is constantly trying to orient us toward fear.
Toward extraction.
Toward competition.
Toward despair.
And perhaps this is why we struggle to imagine another possible world: we have been trained to face the wrong direction.
🔥 The Possibility of Re-Orientation
What might orientation be teaching us right now?
How might orientation guide us through this moment of accelerating collapse, institutional exhaustion, and relational fragmentation?
When possibility becomes an orientation, our organizing shifts.
Care shifts.
Community shifts.
Even resistance shifts.
Because we stop asking only:
“What do we oppose?”
And begin asking:
“What are we becoming aligned with?”
🌌 The Difficulty of Turning
Perhaps we are not ready to be re-oriented.
Perhaps we are tethered to parasitic relationships, exhausted by systems that drain our imagination before it can breathe.
Perhaps we are so overwhelmed that paralysis feels safer than transformation.
I understand that.
And still—
I remain convinced that we need re-orientation.
Toward each other.
Toward care.
Toward the more-than-human world.
Toward another possible world.
🔁 The Refrain
Another world is not demanded of us— it is invited through attention, care, and courage.
🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice
Re-Orienting the Body
3–5 minutes
Pause wherever you are.
Slowly turn your body in one different direction than you were facing before.
Notice what changes.
The light.
The sounds.
Your breath.
Ask quietly:
“What am I currently oriented toward?”
Then ask:
“What would it mean to turn gently toward care?”
Take one slow breath facing this new direction.
Orientation begins in the body.
🕯 Closing
May we learn to face one another again.
May we reclaim our attention from fear.
May we orient ourselves toward what nourishes life.
And may our turning—
however small—
help reveal another possible world.
Paz,
—RCE+