Monday Meditation
what might the desert fathers and mothers teach us about commitment, consistency, & control?
Art by Max Heaton, one of Our Collective Becoming’s Living Experiments. Using art to help shift culture paso a paso.
Dear Becoming Ones—
“We are not asked to control the storm, only to learn how to be with the weather.”
—after Christina Sharpe
It was Diana Butler Bass who first told me to begin a Monday Meditation.
Back when I was in Nashville, trying to survive what I did not yet have language for—
the slow unmaking of a life under siege.
I could not meditate then.
My body would not let me.
Stillness felt like danger.
And yet—
I wrote.
Not because I was ready,
but because something in me was already committed
to a future I could not yet see.
Now, years later, I try to sit for 49 minutes a day.
Not all at once—
but in fragments of stillness.
A minute for every year I have been alive.
A fugitive practice of time.
This morning, I woke at 7am and chose not to rise.
Instead, I lay there and held people in my heart.
Some call that prayer.
I call it participation in a field of relation.
Poco a poco. Paso a paso.
🏜️ The Desert Knows Something About This
The desert fathers and mothers—
those early contemplatives who fled empire for the margins—
they did not go into the wilderness to control their lives.
They went because control had already failed them.
Anthony the Great did not master the desert.
Amma Syncletica did not conquer her mind.
They learned something else:
Commitment without certainty.
Consistency without applause.
Control not as domination—but as gentle self-regulation.
A tending.
A staying.
A returning.
They called it askesis—
not punishment,
but practice.
🌧️ Weather, Not Mastery
Christina Sharpe teaches us to live in the wake—
to understand that we are always already inside the weather of history.
Not outside it.
Not above it.
Inside it.
And so the question is not:
How do I control my life?
But rather:
How do I remain present in conditions I did not choose?
🌿 Beholding as Resistance
This is where Ross Gay helps me.
He teaches me to behold—
to notice what insists on life
even in the midst of collapse.
A tiny arm of a knitted sweater on a train.
A shared meal in a place I do not belong.
A breath that returns to me
even when I did not ask for it.
Beholding is a kind of consistency.
A returning to attention.
Again and again.
🔁 Commitment, Consistency, Control
This week, I am sitting with these three:
Commitment
—not to outcomes, but to practice.
—to showing up, even when I do not feel ready.
Consistency
—not perfection, but rhythm.
—the quiet repetition that opens the possibility of difference.
Control
—not domination, but attunement.
—the capacity to regulate my nervous system
so I do not abandon myself in the storm.
🕊️ A Fugitive Monk Practice
My friend, the painter Max Heaton, named this for me, which he learned from a friend in New Orleans:
commitment, consistency, control.
And I realized—
I have always wanted to be a kind of warrior monk.
Not in the sense of conquest,
but in the sense of devotion under pressure.
A fugitive contemplative.
One who practices stillness
in a world that profits from my fragmentation.
🌍 The Great Turning
Joanna Macy calls this The Great Turning:
Turning toward ourselves.
Turning toward one another.
Turning toward the margins of the margins.
This is not abstract work.
It is daily metanoia.
Daily turning.
And if I am honest—
we are not always ready for that kind of commitment.
But still—
we begin.
🕯️ An Invitation: The Sacred Pause
This is why I am creating something new with you.
Beginning Friday, July 10, 2026 at TBD,
I will be hosting a weekly 60-minute gathering.
I am calling it:
🌍 The Sacred Pause: A Global Sabbath Practice
A space where we practice:
Arriving in our bodies
Breathing together across distance
Learning from contemplative traditions (desert, mystic, abolitionist)
Listening without fixing
Sitting in shared silence
Returning to ourselves, together
You can come every week
or only when you need it.
No performance.
No pressure.
Just practice.
🌬️ Ritual Exhale
The desert knew.
The poets remind us.
The body insists.
We cannot control the world.
But we can commit to returning.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Poco a poco. Paso a paso.
Paz,
—RCE+