Monday Meditation: Anchors in the Liminal
A meditation on trains, knitting, breath, and the slow work of belonging
Monday Meditation
Anchors in the Liminal
A meditation on trains, knitting, breath, and the slow work of belonging
Dear Becoming Ones,
I started writing a Monday Meditation because nothing I could find felt honest enough for the moment we are living in.
Some offerings were too religious in the narrow sense.
Some were too dogmatic.
Some were so polished they felt disconnected from the trembling of ordinary life.
None of them quite met what my senses were needing.
So I began writing a meditation for myself.
At first it was simple—just a few words to steady the week. Then I began adding small things I needed to survive:
little mantras,
fragments of breath,
quiet reminders that I could keep going.
And today, arriving in Peoria, Illinois, here in the Heartland, where I will soon sit down to eat with strangers and friends alike, I find myself doing the same thing again.
Writing something I need.
🚆 The Train as a Liminal Chapel
For the last four weeks I have been traveling by train, conducting what I’ve come to call a fugitive auto-ethnography of belonging and freedom.
The train has become its own kind of meditation hall.
Something about the rhythm of it—the rocking at night, the ritual of communal seating at meals, the quiet passing of landscapes—creates a space where life feels temporarily workable.
Doable.
Possible.
On the train, I remember something that James Baldwin once insisted:
“Nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Movement through landscape invites us to face ourselves.
And perhaps that is why trains feel sacred.
They refuse the illusion of permanence.
They remind us that life is always moving.
🧶 The Small Arm
Meditation today arrived in a simple moment.
Across from me sat a new friend, quietly knitting.
She was making a baby sweater.
She was working on the arm.
A tiny arm.
Something about watching that small sleeve slowly take shape felt like witnessing hope made visible.
Loop by loop.
Thread by thread.
Care accumulating into form.
Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that the struggle for life in this country has always been lived in fragile bodies. And yet bodies continue to make beauty.
Knitting is a kind of theology.
A quiet declaration that life is still worth preparing for.
🌵 Desert Memory
Last Monday’s meditation was different.
My host drove me into the desert outside Albuquerque.
We visited a monastery and wandered through the quiet art and sacred geometry of the Southwest.
New Mexico holds a special place in my story.
It was there I first learned to snow ski—back before snowboarding was even a thing.
Taos.
Ancient land.
Ancestral winds moving through canyon walls.
I didn’t make it there this trip.
But I will return.
In December.
During what I’m calling The Liminal Last Week of 2026.
🫖 The Atole Gathering
This December I will host something new:
The Atole Gathering
A Ritual of Nourishment, Story, and Turning Toward One Another
A 90-minute narrative experience in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
At the end of the year we will gather to warm our bodies and tell the truth about the year behind us.
Atole—slow, warm, ancestral—will become the ritual center.
Not as performance.
But as nourishment.
Come as you are:
Exhausted from the year.
Carrying grief.
Still hoping for something better.
We will drink together.
Tell stories together.
Imagine together what forms of life might actually sustain us.
🌒 Cycles Matter
The reason I mention the Atole Gathering today is simple:
We need to remember the cycles of time.
The weather has been erratic.
The political climate feels unstable.
The cultural ground beneath us continues to shift.
Many of us—especially those healing from complex trauma and chronic stress—need something that resembles stability.
Predictability.
Containers.
Spaces where stories can be held without collapsing.
Meditation can be one such container.
Perhaps not a solution.
But an anchor.
🧘🏽 The Accidental Yogis
Something funny has been happening during this pilgrimage.
I keep running into yogis.
Everywhere.
On trains.
In coffee shops.
At gatherings.
Which probably means the universe is telling me something I have known for a long time:
I need to start a yoga practice.
I am human.
And like many humans, I am sometimes so smart I am dumb.
🌬 Breath as Improvisation
Meditation is a form of devotion.
Not devotion in the sense of rigid religion, but devotion as attention.
Theopoet Rubem Alves taught that theology should not try to capture God but instead awaken the senses to divine presence.
Meditation does something similar.
It trains the body to notice.
To breathe.
To stay.
Gloria Anzaldúa wrote that the borderlands require us to develop a new consciousness—one capable of holding contradiction without collapsing.
Meditation is exactly that practice.
Breath after breath.
An improvisation with life.
🌲 Entering the Dark Forest
Perhaps Monday can become something different for us.
Not merely the start of another week.
But a threshold.
A moment when we step into what mythologist Martin Shaw calls the dark forest of transformation.
There we discover something strange about ourselves:
We are both animal and spirit.
Half wolf.
Half human.
We enter the forest uncertain.
But if we stay long enough, we emerge changed.
🕯 A Small Practice for This Week
If you need something simple to hold onto this week, try this:
Pause for one minute.
Breathe slowly.
Notice something small around you:
A cup of coffee.
A piece of thread.
A tiny knitted sleeve.
Let that small thing become your meditation.
Because stability rarely arrives as a grand revelation.
More often it arrives quietly—
like knitting.
like breath.
like the steady rhythm of a train moving through the night.
🌱 Closing Blessing
May Monday become a small anchor for you.
May breath return you to your body.
May story return you to one another.
And may we keep trusting—despite everything—that something possible is still trying to be born among us.
Let us keep practicing.
Let us keep improvising.
Let us keep turning toward one another.
With care,
Roberto Che Espinoza