Monday Meditation — Our Collective Becoming
President’s Day
Monday Meditation — Our Collective Becoming
President’s Day
Dear Becoming Ones,
Today the nation remembers presidents.
Power. Office. Authority.
But last night, I witnessed something else.
Twenty-two strangers gathered around a virtual table — not to debate, not to persuade, not to perform — but to turntoward one another.
And something holy happened.
No one solved the world.
No one saved democracy.
No one won.
We listened.
We stayed.
We heard. 🕯️
I keep returning to a word that has been stalking me across traditions:
Metanoia — in Greek Christianity
Teshuvah — in Jewish practice
Both mean to turn. Not intellectually. Not abstractly.
To turn your body. Your face. Your life.
Empire translated the word into “repentance,”
because systems of domination prefer guilt to relationship.
But Jesus — a Jew under occupation — was not founding a religion of private apology.
He was inviting people into a shared practice of repair.
Howard Thurman called this the religion of Jesus:
not belief as possession,
but orientation as liberation.
To turn toward the one you were taught to fear.
To turn toward the neighbor history told you to dominate.
To turn toward the part of yourself exile made you abandon.
Repair begins there.
🧭 We are living in a time that trains us to turn away:
scroll past
mute
block
brand
perform
survive alone
The market rewards distance.
Whiteness rewards innocence.
Empire rewards forgetting.
But the human nervous system — and maybe the soul — only heals in proximity.
Last night was a rehearsal for another possible world.
No grand program.
No savior complex.
Just a fragile, radical experiment:
Can we practice staying?
🌾
I wonder if becoming looks less like agreement
and more like flocking.
Birds do not vote before they move.
They attune.
They feel micro-movements in the bodies around them.
They risk rhythm.
What if community is not consensus
but synchronization?
What if repair is not ideology
but practice?
What if love is a skill we relearn together?
💭
So today, pause.
Before the news.
Before the outrage.
Before the next necessary argument.
Take one slow breath.
Imagine one person you have learned to turn away from —
socially, politically, emotionally, spiritually.
Do not solve them.
Do not fix them.
Just imagine turning your face toward them.
This is where another world begins:
not in conquest, but in orientation.
We will practice slowly.
We will fail often.
We will keep turning anyway.
Because history has shown us what happens when we refuse each other —
and I refuse to inherit that future without resistance.
✍🏽
Your practice today:
Pause. Imagine what repair could look like in one small relationship.
Then take one material step toward it.
Even a message.
Even a breath.
Even a willingness.
Start there.
—
We are not asked to be perfect people.
We are asked to become a people who can turn.
With you in the work of becoming,
RCE+