Dear Becoming Ones:
I have had an eventful August teaching at Duke and speaking at Wild Goose Festival. It was great to be back on stage with a friendly audience! Thank you!
I’ve been thinking about Labor Day and how hard it is to unwind and take time off and chill and relax. So, I want to write thru the internalized capitalism that we all have and offer something that might help us turn toward one another, again.
It was Roland Barthes who, in Mythologies, wrote: “Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop.”
He follows it up with something much ore punchier here:
“By having holidays, he displays the sign of his being human; but the god remains…”
Both are from Roland Barthes’s “The Writer on Vacation” in Mythologies.
I am in the deep American South working this week. I have returned to be a witness. This is no easy work. I am not strategizing with people; I am not speaking on stages; I am accompanying people, along the way.
I am bearing witness to the atrocities of our world by eating with strangers and accompanying people along the way, as people have done for me. Today, it is Labor Day, and I am, once again, writing to(ward) you.
There have been many people find their way here to Our Collective Becoming. It’s humbling to have a growing audience who is interested in world-building and possibility.
The question I have today is: What might today look like, if we were to take the day off?
Now, not everyone has the day off. Many people are working. And, those of us who might have a flexible schedule are also dealing with internalized capitalism that often prevents us from being able to take time off. I know this is true for me!
This past weekend, I spoke of being compromised. I spoke of being just as off the way as everyone else. We need each other to be able to participate in a cultural turning, a Cultural Metanoia. Yet, how do we manage that when we have so much internalized oppression and other forms of supremacy culture to which we are tethered?
We first start with waking up to our interior life and following wisdom’s path.
Where might wisdom take us today?
Whether we are at home on the couch or at the lake today, we deserve to pay attention to ourselves, so that we can have a right relationship with ourselves and then be in right relationship with others.
Attention and Intention is what we need right now.
We need to be so fiercely attentive to ourselves, so that we can steward our way, along the path toward wisdom. Yet, with so much grabbing our attention, how might we do that?
First, breathe!
Breath work is a great way to start managing one’s attention and intention to self.
Meditation or ritual is another way to return to oneself.
I’ve been returning to the simple practices of becoming to steward another possible world. I eat with strangers and stay with them, and then I make my house, like a pilgrim, to another place. All in service of auto ethnography and world-building.
Recently, I was in North Carolina and stayed with Gavin. Meeting Gavin and Ben at the Sauna House in Durham helped me see that the work that Our Collective Becoming is doing, beyond dogma and politics, is reshaping our discourse.
We no longer know how to talk with one another, but in the Third Space of the Durham Sauna House, a place where community comes together, dogma and politics are not present. Sure, everything is political, and when we regulate our nervous system, we learn that there are other pathways to connection. I have discovered this first hand at the Sauna House!
Perhaps Labor Day is one of those days where dogma and politics can be set aside and we practice the coming together over food. That is my plan with steak and potato salad here in the American South where the collapse is real and people are scared.
It’s frightening to bear witness, and yet as James Baldwin said, we cannot change that which we do not face. So, in the spirit of ecologies of change, I am bearing witness!
Thank you to those who have become paying subscribers. I use the funds from Substack to do community meals. I’m grateful for the chance to eat with strangers and to practice another possible world!
If you’d like to give to support Our Collective Becoming and encourage the work, we are currently fundraising for community support yoga and to put heat in our other program space. Your donation could help create a Third Space in Western NY.
Here’s the link to give: https://www.ourcollectivebecoming.org/give
Recurring donations are especially helpful for our ongoing work of world building!
Thank you in advance for helping us build Third Spaces in rural America! I’m hopeful for ecologies of change and Oak Trees steadying us as we sojourn this pilgrim’s path.
We are at the mercy of one another. Please be kind. It’s the best thing we could do right now in the face of such devastation.
Paz, —RCE+