Dear Becoming Ones,
It is Monday, again, and I am learning how to cultivate presence—how to sit with myself, even as I befriend my anxiety. I’m grateful for the virtual stages I’ve been on recently, since being on the road is not always kind to my severe anxiety. This week, I’ll be on another virtual stage with the Rev. Abby Mohaupt, PhD at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, where we’ll be talking about how liberating theologies disrupt the status quo. I hope you’ll consider joining us for this salon conversation.
In today’s meditation, I want to reflect on the importance of contemplation paired with action, and how walking through New York City has become for me a way of metabolizing trauma and suturing the wounds of collapse.
Paz, —RCE+
Monday Meditation
Contemplation and Action: Suturing the Wounds
“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” — James Baldwin
Walking the streets of New York City this week, I found my body teaching me something I had forgotten. Cross-lateral movement—the rhythm of one foot in front of the other, the swing of arms in harmony—began to feel like a melody. Trauma that had been locked in my body started to loosen. Pain metabolized. My partner often reminds me: pain only hurts on the way out. I am learning how true that is.
I didn’t know how much pain I carried until I stopped long enough to rest. Being on a digital hit list curated by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Foundation meant years of targeted harassment. The folds of violence I endured online became embodied wounds. They eroded my mental health. The catastrophic anxiety I feel is not just personal; it is structural. It comes from a polarized world, a culture addicted to domination, a society trained to destroy difference.
This is why contemplation matters. Not as withdrawal, not as a sedentary retreat from the world, but as the well we draw from so that we can act. Baldwin teaches us that telling the truth divides people—yet truth is what sets us free. Ta-Nehisi Coates tells us the painful truth of plunder, that violence is not accidental but scripted. Contemplation allows us to sit with this truth without numbing out, so that our action is rooted, not reactive.
Other wisdom teachers have echoed this across centuries:
The Desert Mothers and Fathers practiced silence not to flee the world but to discern how to love it more fiercely.
Howard Thurman urged us to anchor ourselves in the quiet center of being, so that we could resist racial violence with clarity and dignity.
Thích Nhất Hạnh taught walking meditation as a way of breathing peace into the ground beneath us.
Each one reminds us: contemplation without action is hollow, but action without contemplation is brittle. We need both.
Communities are not born from division; they are born in the crucible of fear, in the recognition that none of us can survive alone. When we come to see that we need each other’s stories, each other’s wisdom, we begin to suture the wounds that empire has torn into us.
This is what I’m learning: to tend my own garden, so I can join in repairing the world. To compost anger, pain, and frustration into soil for another possible future. To return to the Source, the well that never runs dry.
Today, I invite you into this work of self-compassion and breathing with the web of life. Contemplation is not escape—it is preparation. It is the practice that allows us to nurture conflict in generative ways, to repair the ruptures, to heal ourselves so that healing might ripple outward.
✨ Ritual Exhale:
Breathe in pain.
Breathe out release.
Breathe in anger.
Breathe out compost.
Breathe in division.
Breathe out repair.
Breathe in fear.
Breathe out compassion.
Closing Poem
Step by step,
the city hums beneath my feet.
Pain loosens,
anger composts,
grief becomes soil.
In the rhythm of walking,
I learn again:
my body is a prayer,
my breath is repair.
Reflection Questions for the Week:
Where is trauma lodged in your body, waiting for release?
What contemplative practice helps you metabolize grief or fear into care?
How might your contemplation this week fuel concrete acts of trust and repair in your community?