Monday Meditation: On Practice, Adoption, and the Small Things 🌿
...this is all the miracle...
Monday Meditation: On Practice, Adoption, and the Small Things 🌿
Dear Becoming Ones,
Each Monday, I sit down to write this meditation.
It is the slowest thing I do all week.
The most deliberate.
Alongside the Friday Care Package, it asks something of me—attention, tenderness, a willingness to turn inward before I turn outward.
I have been sitting with the word practice for years now.
Not performance.
Not productivity.
Practice. 🕊️
I come out of the academy—trained to analyze, to produce, to critique. My days are often spent in contemplation and conversation: with texts, with communities, with my own interior weather. But beneath all that thinking, I have been quietly searching for something that could be mine.
A practice that is not extracted from me.
A practice that sustains me.
This morning, I had the honor of sitting for a long visit with my teacher’s father, Ben. There is something about elders. Something about the way they narrate a life without spectacle. Ben did not complain—not once—about beginning work at five years old. He did not complain about living paycheck to paycheck. He did not narrate himself as a victim of his circumstances.
He simply told the story.
And in what he did not say, I heard a theology.
An apophatic faith. 🌑
A quiet fidelity.
It echoed something my teacher once told me nearly twenty years ago:
“Be faithful in the small things.”
I did not understand that sentence then. I am only beginning to understand it now.
We are out of practice—with ourselves and with each other. We know how to scroll. We know how to perform. We know how to signal. But do we know how to stay? Do we know how to listen to what is not being said? Do we know how to adopt one another into a shared common life?
Because that, I am increasingly convinced, is the practice that might save us.
Adoption. 🤲🏽
Not as charity.
Not as saviorism.
But as mutual belonging.
First, we turn toward one another.
Then, we begin to adopt one another.
We say: Your survival is bound up with mine.
We say: Your story matters to my becoming.
We say: Let us share a common life.
This is how we begin to suture the wounds of this land and its people—not through abstraction, but through practice. Through repetition. Through showing up on Mondays. Through writing. Through meals. Through breath.
Practice is a skill developed over time and with intention.
Practice is fidelity to the small things.
Practice is refusing the lie that only the spectacular matters.
Mondays, for me, are a sustained attempt at practice. Writing as contemplation. Writing as devotion. Writing as a way of turning toward you.
And I confess: I am afraid. I am afraid that if we do not begin to turn toward each other—really turn—we may not survive ourselves. Our isolation. Our suspicion. Our inherited violences. 😔
But when we attune ourselves to the practices of becoming—when we orient toward one another as kin rather than competitors—something softens. Something opens.
We begin to find our way back.
So today, I want to invite you into imagination. ✨
What is one practice you could embody?
Not a grand reinvention.
Not a total overhaul of your life.
Start small.
Maybe your practice is five minutes of breath awareness.
Maybe it is a weekly phone call to an elder.
Maybe it is cooking one meal and inviting someone to the table.
Maybe it is simply placing your hand on your chest and remembering: Breath is a miracle.
Even tending your breath is a sustained meditative act. 🌬️
Start there.
Be faithful in the small things.
That is how we adopt ourselves.
That is how we adopt each other.
That is how we practice becoming human again.
Paz,
Roberto 🌿
