🕯️ Monday Meditation: Returning by Way of the Fugitive Path
🕯️ Monday Meditation: Returning by Way of the Fugitive Path
Dear Becoming Ones—
I am back at Monday.
Somewhere between Peoria, Illinois and Chicago, Illinois, on the final stretch of this pilgrimage of repair—a cross-country train journey tracing the fragile, stubborn threads of belonging and freedom—I sit down to write because I need to begin again.
I need contemplation.
🌿 When There Is No Map for the Soul
I have not known where to go
for the kind of quiet my body has been asking for.
I have not known
what resources might help me soften—
to self-soothe, to come back into myself,
to remember that I am, in fact, still here.
Medicine does only so much.
And still—
I take it.
Not as surrender,
but as one tool among many.
Because I am learning this:
no single system will save us.
Not religion.
Not medicine.
Not theory.
And certainly not a world that confuses control for care.
So I gather what I can:
🎧 music
🤲 silence
📵 putting the phone down
🍲 eating with strangers
🌬️ breathing again, slowly
🪶 learning how to be with one another
Even now.
Especially now.
In a world that feels sharpened by violence.
🪡 Suturing What We Did Not Break (But Must Repair)
An 80-year-old librarian once told me:
“The world is as bad as it is.”
I didn’t want to believe her.
But I think she was telling me the truth that hurts to hold:
The world is as bad as it is—
and still, it is ours to tend.
Gloria Anzaldúa teaches us that we must suture the wounds—
not from a place of distance,
but from within the borderlands themselves.
From within the rupture.
From within the crossings.
This is not clean work.
This is not abstract work.
This is the work of proximity—
of choosing to remain in relation
when everything in us wants to flee.
And yet—
fleeing, too, has its wisdom.
🚆 Fugitivity as Method, as Prayer
I have moved through this country as a fugitive.
Not running away—
but moving along the underside of things.
Listening.
Not announcing myself.
Letting the world reveal itself
in fragments, in glances, in shared meals.
Fred Moten whispers here:
that fugitivity is not escape,
but a refusal to be fully captured
by the terms of a violent world.
And so I traveled:
🍽️ eating with strangers
🌿 sharing herbs across tables
🪑 sitting beside those whose names I may never know again
Some did not know who I was.
Some did.
One woman, surprised—
“You’re Trans?”
As if my being could be held
within her expectation.
And I moved quietly through that moment.
Sometimes seen.
Sometimes mis-seen.
Sometimes not seen at all.
And in that in-between—
I found a strange kind of safety.
A fugitive grace.
🌄 Witnessing: The Beautiful and the Terrible
This journey has been everything.
Tragic.
Beautiful.
And everything in between.
I have:
🌙 broken Ramadan fast with beloveds
👶 witnessed a calf being born in the mountains—new life, slick and trembling, welcomed by the tongue of its mother
🏜️ carried dirt from Chimayó, hoping the land might remember me back into wholeness
🚔 seen the expanse of the police state stretch across this country like an unspoken rule
Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that place holds memory.
And this land—
this land remembers everything.
The births.
The violence.
The crossings.
The silences.
And now—
so do I.
🌌 The Dark Forest & The Return
There have been moments on this journey
where I have felt myself moving through a dark forest.
Not lost—
but unmoored.
Held only by the thin threads of practice:
breath
attention
small acts of trust
And now, at the edge of this pilgrimage,
I return.
Not to certainty.
But to meditation.
To the slow inhale—
and the slower exhale.
To the quiet insistence that I can begin again.
💛 Practicing the Uncontrolling Love
My coming and going—
this movement across geographies and selves—
is part of the work.
The work of our collective becoming.
I have leaned into the strangeness
of loving the stranger.
And in doing so,
I have become one.
To others.
To myself.
So today, I return to what remains:
🕯️ breath
🕊️ attention
🌱 the smallest gestures of care
And I will practice—again—
what I am still learning to trust:
an uncontrolling Love
that does not dominate,
does not coerce,
does not disappear in the face of violence—
but stays.
And sutures.
And breathes.
🌬️ A Gentle Turning (for you, for us)
Today, if you can:
Pause.
Notice your breath.
Ask yourself—
✨ What kind of turning do I need right now?
✨ Where is repair asking something small of me?
✨ Who might I become a neighbor to—today?
We do not need to fix the whole world.
But we are responsible
for the threads we touch.
With you, in the crossing—
in fugitivity, in repair, in becoming—
RCE+