🌱 Friday Care Package Week 23 of 52 — Attunement
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
Photo by the author form the hills of Verona overlooking into the city below
Dearest Becoming Ones—
Each Friday, I send a Friday Care Package into the world, a small offering to carry us gently into the weekend.
Last year, I spent the year writing on the many dimensions of care. This year, I am tracing the contours of possibility—following one synonym each week and turning it over like a stone in my hand, listening for the wisdom it might reveal.
If you’re new here, welcome. We find ourselves at Week 23 of 52, exploring possibility through the lyrical essay, story, philosophy, theology, and the ordinary experiences of being human together.
If you’ve been traveling with me all year, thank you. You know these writings are less about answers and more about attunement; less about certainty and more about learning how to notice what is emerging among us.
Together, we are practicing another possible world.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here.
Welcome to Friday. Welcome to possibility.
Paz,
—RCE+
Photo by the author from the hills of Verona
🌱 Friday Care Package
Week 23 of 52 —
Attunement
A Care Practice for Living Into Possibility
✨ The Word We Are Tending
Attunement
Dear Becoming Ones—
I am writing from the hills of Verona, my final stop on this ethnographic pilgrimage.
Trains, planes, and cars have carried me across countries.
Tables have carried me into conversations.
Strangers have become teachers.
And what I am learning is that possibility often arrives as attunement.
Not certainty.
Not mastery.
But the willingness to listen closely enough that another world can begin to speak.
Attunement is the cultivated capacity to notice, receive, and respond to what is alive within us, between us, and around us.
If orientation asked what we are facing toward, and alignment asked whether we are living accordingly, then attunement asks:
Are we listening?
🌧️ Listening to the Rain
As I sit in bed at ten minutes until seven in the morning, listening to the rain gently fall and hearing birdsong through the rain, I am reminded that listening has become my primary practice these days.
This surprises me.
I was trained to be an expert.
I earned a PhD in Constructive Philosophical Theology and Philosophical Ethics. For much of my life I was rewarded for speaking, presenting, explaining, arguing, and knowing.
Yet somewhere along the way, I began letting go of the talking-head persona.
The floating head.
The expert.
And I began learning the art of listening.
Because listening is an art.
Perhaps even a vocation.
👂 The Presence of Story
I was invited to attend an international gathering with Nexus, a community seeking to make meaning through practices of listening to the presence of story.
Attunement has been at the center of our days together.
Listening not only to one another.
But to silence.
To memory.
To place.
To what emerges when people feel safe enough to tell the truth.
Standing here in the hills of Verona, I find myself amazed at my life.
The travel I have been able to undertake while remaining working poor.
The communities that continue to welcome me.
The people who have become companions and teachers along the way.
None of this feels earned.
Most of it feels like grace.
🌿 Cultivating Attunement
Attunement did not come naturally to me.
It had to be cultivated.
Like many of us, I have been conditioned by dominant culture and dominant narratives.
I have absorbed the assumptions of supremacy culture.
I have inherited stories about worth, productivity, expertise, and belonging.
To become attuned required something difficult.
Stillness.
Looking honestly into the mirror.
Allowing myself to feel what needed to be felt.
Listening to hard truths.
About myself.
About the world.
About the people and institutions that shaped me.
Much of my healing has been an untangling.
An untying of knots.
A slow release from the narratives that taught me domination was normal.
🔥 Attunement and Social Repair
The work of social repair begins with attunement.
Attuning ourselves to the kind of love that builds another possible world.
Attuning ourselves to wounds that require tending.
Attuning ourselves to movements that sometimes mirror the violence they claim to oppose.
This is difficult work.
Because attunement asks us to remain awake.
To ourselves.
To one another.
To the world.
And perhaps most importantly, attunement asks us to stop treating the world as something we stand against and begin relating to it as something we are called to nurture.
🌉 Becoming Bridges
At the root of my work is a philosophy of being.
A metaphysical orientation toward becoming.
For years, I have been attempting to build a bridge between the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Gilles Deleuze.
Anzaldúa teaches me that the borderlands are sites of transformation.
Deleuze teaches me that becoming is always underway.
Together they remind me that life is movement.
Flow.
Relation.
Crossing.
When we become attuned, we become bridges.
And when we become bridges, we begin learning how to turn toward one another.
Which is still the central question guiding this entire journey:
How might we turn toward one another right now?
🌍 Possibility as Attunement
Perhaps possibility itself is a form of attunement.
Not a destination.
Not a plan.
But a way of listening.
A way of responding.
A way of becoming available to what is trying to emerge.
Possibility needs our attention.
And we need its invitation.
🍷 Verona
As this particular chapter of the journey continues, it will also come to a close, and I find myself deeply grateful.
Grateful for the hills of Verona.
For landscapes that invite wonder.
For food that carries memory.
For conversations that alter us.
And yes, for the meals that continue to shape my next book:
Belonging and Freedom: Food, Art, and Ritual.
Look for Verona to appear in those pages.
The food is too good not to.
🔁 The Refrain
Another world is not demanded of us— it is invited through attention, care, and courage.
🌿 Fugitive Somatic Practice
Listening for What Is Alive
3–5 minutes
Pause.
Do not speak.
Notice the furthest sound you can hear.
Then notice the closest.
Allow your attention to move between them.
Ask quietly:
“What am I not yet listening to?”
Remain there for three breaths.
Attunement begins before understanding.
🕯 Closing
May you listen closely.
May you become attuned to what is alive within and around you.
May you trust the wisdom that emerges through attention.
And may possibility find you listening.
Paz,
—RCE+