Dear Substack Community: Many of you have been with me since I started my newsletter before it grew to 19,000+ people. Thank you for being here with me. As you know, I’ve always built in public and been transparent about my lived experience. Many of you who support my scholarship and activism do so because I am willing to tell the painful truth of myself and what I witness. Many of you have followed me over the last 10 years bearing witness to me making a way out of no way, which is what Womanism has taught me to do. I’ve had other thought leaders guide me on my joinery of becoming, and now I find myself in rural America pastoring a small independent church. I was hired to take the church to the future, and as someone who has been working in futures thought their whole life, I have some ideas about what the church could look like. Since finishing my PhD I have been building spiritual community through the process of accompaniment. It’s what I see modeled in the life of Jesus, so I am attempting to footprint that here in Alfred and beyond.
Our Collective Becoming is a place where contemplation and action come together—where we weave our fractured stories into fields of belonging, practice wisdom that refuses to be tamed, and reimagine futures born from care, courage, and awe.
Here, we honor both the silence that listens and the speech that liberates.
Here, we know that wisdom is not hoarded in institutions, but grown in the soil of lived experience, shared breath, and collective memory.
Through the lens of Narrative Intelligence, we will attend to the stories we inherit, interrogate the stories that bind us, and co-create the stories that set us free.
Our Collective Becoming is a space for:
Sacred Disruption: unlearning what no longer serves our spirits or our communities.
Kinmaking: forging interdependent networks of care, across lines of difference and longing.
Storyweaving: gathering the golden threads of truth, grief, wonder, and resistance into tapestries of new worlds.
This is not a movement of perfection, but of presence.
This is not a marketplace of opinions, but a garden of practice.
Together, we will footprint a Wisdom Economy—one that values attention over consumption, communion over conquest, and mystery over mastery.
This is an unfinished ascent.
And we are climbing it together.
Speaking of The Unfinished Ascent, I’m really thrilled to share with you that in collaboration with the Dean of Libraries at Alfred University, Brian T. Sullivan, we are launching (hopefully) a new podcast this fall!
Brian was the only person who reached out to me about I wrote my Saturday Substack about how I was treated by the one private university here in Alfred. To this day, Brian consistently shows up curious and asks hard questions. We are building trust together by meeting at a neutral spot and learning to do life together and committing together to a shared practice of listening with one another, and hearing each other into speech. Brian is a 9 on the Enneagram; I am a 5. So, we even share similar registers of language to understand each other better! Brian has been a gift in the Derridian since. I actually prayed for friends, and I am seeing them emerge.
SQM (socialist queer mom) is my best friend here. She keeps me afloat and reminds me that I am responding to something larger than I am. SQM feeds me and nurtures me and reminds me that Erin and I are doing something tangible here in Alfred.
These relationships that buoy me are the spiritual anchors that nurture my soul and my becoming—holding me when the waters are rough, witnessing me when the path is unclear, and reminding me that becoming is not a solitary act but a shared unfolding. In a world that often prizes rugged individualism, these anchors teach me again and again that true strength is relational, that healing is collective, and that hope is something we braid together, strand by strand, story by story.
So, on this Saturday Substack, I want to spend time with you thinking about repairing ourselves, so that we can repair the world. How might we do that with our own complex stories?
How might we begin tending to the fractures within us—the betrayals, the longings, the forgotten dreams—so that we can meet the world’s wounds with something more honest than urgency, something more enduring than despair?
How might we learn to hold our complex, unfinished stories with tenderness, so that we no longer demand simplicity from ourselves or from one another?
If the world is aching for repair, perhaps our first act of mending is to sit with our own threads: the tangled, the frayed, the golden.
What part of your story is still asking to be seen with wonder rather than judgment?
Where have you tried to cut away complexity when what was needed was deeper listening?
What small act of repair—toward yourself—could ripple outward into the collective today?
✨ Reflective Practice:
Tending the Threads of Your Story
Find a quiet place—even just a few breaths of stillness will do.
Close your eyes and imagine your life as a tapestry: woven with bright colors, frayed edges, torn places, knots where threads have tangled, and patches stitched in by love. See it. Feel its weight. Notice its beauty and its brokenness.
Then, reflect or journal with these prompts:
Identify one thread—a memory, a truth, a part of yourself—that you often overlook or wish away.
What would it mean to hold this thread with tenderness instead of shame?
Name a place of mending—a relationship, a dream, a part of your story—where you have already begun the work of repair, even if it feels incomplete.
What does this reveal about your capacity to heal?
Set an intention for the coming week:
How might you honor the complexity of your own tapestry—and by doing so, widen your heart’s ability to honor others?
Blessing for the Journey:
May you know that your unraveling is not your undoing.
May you trust that the frayed edges are invitations, not failures.
May you remember: every act of repair you offer yourself is a gift to the whole world.
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