Saturday Free Write — Daily Metanoia, Daily Repair
“Transformation is not a destination. It is a return to what we already carry.”
Saturday Free Write — Daily Metanoia, Daily Repair
“Transformation is not a destination. It is a return to what we already carry.”
— Adapted from Shawn A. Ginwright, The Four Pivots
Today, I walked.
A simple walk.
A gesture of repair.
A practice of metanoia — turning toward myself, turning toward the world I want to help shape.
Over a decade ago, my therapist taught me that cross-lateral movement composts trauma. It reminds the nervous system that there are other ways to move, other ways to exist beyond collapse or vigilance. The body remembers how to arrive gently. So I stepped out into the soft mist — that thin-veil weather where sky feels close and every breath becomes a quiet prayer.
Saturdays are becoming a day of slow presence for me.
I walked with a friend to the newly opened Kindred Collective here in Alfred — a threshold place of calm living and sacred curiosity. A place where the Western religious imagination meets something older and more porous. There’s a small couch and table in the corner, waiting for me on days when the Hull House walls hold too much of yesterday’s stories. These are the small altars where repair actually happens.
I’ve been spending more time on the catio again — prayer among cats, icons, and the soft hum of the wind through the branches. The more-than-human world teaching me to listen. I forget how holy noticing is until I remember.
Walking shifts perspective. Movement rearranges the story we tell about who we are becoming. When the frame widens, we see that the horizon was always there — we had only been looking down. Perspective shift! Poetry helps my perspective shift! I’m grateful to Jacky Power and the Therapeutic Poet for that!
I’m reading The Apothecary of Belonging slowly — in doses I can metabolize. There was a time when my PhD required thousands of pages a month, year after year, until eventually my body said enough. The capacity to read simply vanished, even as I wrote books. Trauma is strange that way.
So now I listen.
Audiobooks. Podcasts.
But mostly — I listen to myself.
Listening is difficult work. Perhaps the most needed skill in this age of volatility and grief. Listening is how we repair. Listening is metanoia.
The suffering in our world — some of it acute, some of it ambient — invites us to slow down enough to feel again. Feeling reconnects us to belonging. And belonging always carries responsibility.
This week, I found myself returning to a book from my Narrative Healing Coach, Liz Morrison, who sent me Shawn A. Ginwright’s The Four Pivots. He names four movements for transformation:
From enforced individualism to beloved community
From dominance to shared power
From transaction to relationship
From problem-solving to possibility-building
The grind is not just a schedule — it is a worldview. One that deadens us. One that conditions us to live out of scarcity, urgency, extraction, and exhaustion.
The pivot — the turn — is a return to the underside of the world:
To the dispossessed, the exiled, the erased.
To those carrying the weight of racial capitalism in their bodies.
To the places where the world’s wounds remain open and unacknowledged.
To care for the underside is to practice the divine work of suturing the torn edges of the world.
This is the ecology of repair:
I begin with myself.
Then my household.
Then my relationships.
Then the community.
Then the world.
If everything belongs — as Richard Rohr writes — then we are not inventing something new. We are remembering something ancient.
Tables. Shared meals. Slow presence. Love made material.
Capitalism thrives on hoarding and separation.
Repair thrives on distribution and care.
So we must ask — quietly, tenderly:
Can we return to ourselves in this moment?
Can we return to each other?
Can we live as though everything belongs?
Today, the walk was small.
The mist was gentle.
And yet — something shifted.
Metanoia rarely arrives with thunder.
Sometimes it is just the soft decision to keep walking.
Paz, —RCE+
Reflection Prompts for Your Own Becoming
Where is your body asking you to slow down?
What small practice of repair is available to you today?
Where might you pivot from transaction to relationship?
Who is inviting you to listen — deeply, without rushing?
Benediction
May you walk gently today.
May your breath remember itself.
May listening be your prayer.
May your becoming unfold at the pace of trust.
And may repair begin — softly — inside you.