Monday Meditation
Tides and Harbours
Dear Becoming Ones:
I started writing a meditation on Mondays because I was in need of a contemplative practice. I had spent the entirety of my life inside institutions of learning—studying, writing, presenting papers all over the world, gathering degrees that taught me how to survive within systems of legitimacy. Academia gave me language, but it did not always teach me how to live.
Somewhere along the way, after the conferences and classrooms and carefully constructed arguments, I began turning toward correspondence, epistle writing, and conversation as methodology. Walking, too, became pedagogical. Eating with strangers became a research practice. Sitting at tables became a kind of fugitive curriculum.
I did not learn these things in the academy. I learned them in community. I learned them from ordinary people trying to survive extraordinary conditions. I learned them from cooks, librarians, bartenders, organizers, elders, taxi drivers, artists, and migrants. I learned them from bodies that supremacy culture often refuses to name as intelligent.
Empire wants us to believe intelligence only belongs to credentialed people. The imperial project sanctifies expertise while dismissing lived wisdom. Yet here in Cork, Ireland, where I have been living quietly for the past little while, I am once again being reminded that intelligence is everywhere.
It lives in markets.
It lives in kitchens.
It lives in tides.
It lives in the body’s ability to endure.
The River Lee runs through Cork as a tidal river. The water rises and falls with the pull of the sea, reminding me that life itself moves in rhythms of return. The harbor carries migrants, tourists, workers, refugees, students, sailors, and wandering theologians like myself. Cork becomes a site of cosmopolitan bodies, people arriving and departing, carrying stories inside them like weather systems.
And I find myself wondering:
What returns with the tide?
Grief returns.
Memory returns.
Longing returns.
Hope returns too.
Even after heartbreak.
Even after collapse.
Even after exile.
The tide keeps teaching me that becoming is not linear. We circle back to ourselves over and over again. Baldwin once reminded us that nothing can be changed until it is faced. Perhaps the tide knows this too. The water keeps returning to the shoreline until the land finally listens.
This week, I wandered through the English Market and bought a fresh hamhock to make beans. I eat simply while traveling because simplicity allows me to keep moving. Beans and rice. Granola and yogurt. Peasant food. Survival food. Food that remembers poverty and migration and endurance.
I think often about how empires are built on excess while communities survive through improvisation. Fred Moten writes about the undercommons, those fugitive spaces where people make life together beneath the violence of institutions. Sometimes I think a pot of beans is part of the undercommons. A small refusal against the spectacle of extraction. A quiet insistence that nourishment belongs to everyone.
At the wine shop in the market, I spoke with an Englishman who now lives in Cork. He told me that growing up, the table was never really social. Meals were formal events, structured and disciplined. His story stayed with me because the table reveals so much about a culture. Empire shapes tables too. The imperial boot teaches hierarchy even in how we eat together. Who speaks. Who serves. Who cleans. Who is welcomed. Who is made to feel like a guest in someone else’s world.
But harbor cities disrupt purity. Harbors are places of mixture. Of collision. Of translation. Of encounter. The harbor refuses isolation because the harbor depends upon arrival.
And perhaps that is what I am learning in this season of my life:
Hospitality is not perfection.
It is not performance.
It is not etiquette.
Hospitality is learning how to remain open to what arrives with the tide.
The stranger.
The memory.
The grief.
The possibility.
The self we abandoned in order to survive.
Anzaldúa taught us that borderlands are painful precisely because they are places of transformation. Harbor cities feel like borderlands to me. The water itself becomes a threshold. One world touching another. One body brushing against another. One language interrupting another.
And maybe contemplation is not escape from the world after all.
Maybe contemplation is learning how to sit long enough to notice what keeps returning.
The tides.
The hunger.
The ache for belonging.
The desire to gather around tables again.
So today, dear ones, perhaps the invitation is simple:
Notice what keeps returning to your shore.
Not everything that returns is meant to destroy you. Some things return because they are still asking to be loved. Some things return because they still carry wisdom for your becoming. Some things return because another world is trying to arrive through you.
And perhaps we become harbors for one another precisely there—in the slow practice of making room for what the tide brings home.
Paz, —RCE+