Monday Meditation: Tenacity
What capacity do we have for processes of intensification?
Photo taken outside of Verona, Italy after stopping on our way to Venice for me to catch my flight home. We were moving too fast and we spilled the coffee. We replaced the cup of coffee, because we were tenacious! Sometimes hard lessons can only be learned the hard way! June 2026
Monday Meditation: Tenacity
Dear Becoming Ones,
This week I have been sitting with a word: tenacity.
Not the tenacity of domination.
Not the tenacity of winning.
Not the tenacity demanded by hustle culture and the relentless machinery of capitalism.
Rather, the tenacity required to remain present—to ourselves, to one another, and to the possibility of another world.
Presence is not passive.
To remain present amid grief, uncertainty, violence, and exhaustion requires tremendous courage. It requires us to resist the temptation to numb ourselves, distract ourselves, or surrender ourselves to cynicism. Presence asks something of us. It asks us to stay.
I have been reading selections from The Philokalia, specifically Maximus the Confessor’s Four Hundred Chapters on Love. One passage stopped me in my tracks:
“Dispassion brings forth love; hope in God brings forth dispassion; endurance and patience bring forth hope; all-encompassing self-control brings forth these two; fear of God brings forth self-control; and faith in the Lord brings forth fear.”
I had to read it several times.
The sequence feels entirely backward from the assumptions of our age.
We often imagine love as the starting point. If only we loved more, we tell ourselves, everything would be different. Yet Maximus suggests that love is not the beginning but the fruit. Love emerges from dispassion—not indifference, but freedom from the compulsions that rule us. Dispassion emerges from hope. Hope emerges from endurance and patience. Endurance emerges from practices that cultivate steadiness. And all of it rests upon faith.
What if love is not simply an emotion?
What if love is an achievement of spiritual formation?
What if love is what becomes possible after we have learned how to remain present?
The more I sit with this passage, the more I hear it as a description of intensification.
Not intensity in the sense of acceleration. We have enough of that already.
Rather, intensification as depth.
A deepening capacity to stay with what is real.
A deepening capacity to remain in relationship.
A deepening capacity to hold contradiction without fleeing into certainty.
A deepening capacity to encounter another person without turning them into an enemy.
This kind of love is tenacious.
It refuses despair.
It refuses domination.
It refuses the logic that says violence is inevitable.
In a world organized around extraction, speed, and spectacle, perhaps presence itself becomes a counter-hegemonic practice. Perhaps patience becomes a form of resistance. Perhaps endurance becomes a way of nurturing futures that we cannot yet fully see.
The ancient traditions often carry wisdom that our contemporary world struggles to recognize. They remind us that transformation rarely arrives through force. More often, it arrives through cultivation.
Little by little.
Practice by practice.
Relationship by relationship.
This is how wisdom economies are formed.
This is how ecologies of mutual support emerge.
This is how trust becomes possible.
And trust, perhaps, is one of the most precious resources available to us in an age defined by suspicion and fragmentation.
As violent forms of capitalism continue to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions, many of us find ourselves wondering what comes next.
I do not know.
But I suspect another world will not emerge through domination.
It will emerge through tenacity.
Through people who continue to practice presence.
Through communities that continue to nurture mutual understanding.
Through those who refuse to surrender their capacity for love.
Tenacity is not stubbornness.
It is faithfulness to becoming.
It is remaining present long enough for love to deepen.
It is trusting that another possible world is already emerging among us, even when we cannot yet see it clearly.
Practice for the Week
Spend five minutes each day sitting quietly with this question:
What am I being invited to remain present to?
Notice what arises.
Notice what you want to avoid.
Notice what asks for your patience.
Then, take one small step toward remaining with it.
Not fixing it.
Not conquering it.
Simply remaining present.
Little by little.
With tenacity.
May we cultivate the endurance that gives birth to hope.
May we nurture the hope that gives birth to freedom.
May we discover the freedom that gives birth to love.
And may that love help us become capable of another possible world.
Have a wonderful week becoming attuned to presence, so that we nurture an alternative to violence.
Paz, —RCE+