Dear Becoming Ones,
It’s Saturday, and I’ve sat down once again — coffee in hand, sativa swirling around my breath — to do what I call my free write. A small ritual of improvisation, where the words come as they are: sometimes inflammatory, sometimes prophetic, other times contemplative, reflective — always alive.
Richard Rohr says, “Everything belongs,” and I believe that — I do. This is a season of deep resettling here in exile, here in Alfred, NY, where the hills feel like the soft bones of an ancient dream. I am tending my space — my home, my altar, my inner terrain. And in this tending, a deeper awareness blooms: I need more time alone than I ever knew.
I am a Five on the Enneagram, winged by Four — the Mystic, the Observer, the deep Diver into the currents beneath things. The Enneagram has been, for me, an anxiety wisdom tool, a mirror and a map. I met it back during my Clinical Pastoral Education residency in Chicago — a year of waking up, of asking better questions, of whispering to the God I no longer knew how to name. That year, I embraced agnosticism as an orientation — a fierce I don’t know! that felt more honest than any dogma.
I’ve never believed we hold the epistemological capacity to know whether there is a God or not. This is why the Way of Jesus is a way stitched together by faith and doubt, by shadows and trust — a forever unraveling. That year in residency, everything I thought I was came undone, and something truer cracked through. It was then I knew I was called to doctoral work — to wander the wilderness of ideas. Seven years in the PhD program: seven years far from the nest Nancy Elizabeth Bedford made for me.
One of the best gifts Nancy gave me was her fierce love that kicked me out of that nest. Sent me wandering to find my own wings. And now, here I am: returned to the first teachings, to the 4th Way, to the forever Becoming that is my truest home.
In this resettling, I write to my trinity — three women who have shaped me for decades — confessing the ways I’ve been socialized by violence, how I’ve been made violent, conditioned into systems of power that accelerate harm against me and those I hold dear. These moments of confession are a compost for my next book on belonging and freedom. I’ve been writing something — anything — every day. And when I read those words back? They don’t suck. That, my friends, is a small miracle.
I’ve been back on the podcast scene — carefully, slowly — offering my “yes” only where I feel resonance. I have studio space now, tucked in a village called Friendship — how fitting — where a small community holds me as I nurture another possible world. I hope, come early or mid-fall, I’ll have an announcement about a new project that runs alongside my book — a new branch of this ever-growing tree. Stay tuned. Things are rumbling under the soil.
I am learning to be faithful in the small things. The everydayness of what is and what is yet to bloom. It’s been hot here in Alfred. Few have air conditioning. As climate grief unfurls its rough edges, we are discovering this place might be resilient ground. This knowing calls me back to the land. Back to feeling the earth beneath these tired feet. To body the earth that bodies me.
Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us: “All things are ensouled.” A whisper of animism, an ancient echo. St. Francis knew this too — the wild kinship, the creaturely solidarity. Yet the ensoulment of all things has been policed out of our collective imagination. But what if we returned to that wonder? To the waking dream of another possible world?
Aristotle wrote, “Hope is a waking dream.” So let us dare to dream with our eyes open. Let us practice hoping — not as sentimentality, but as feral faith. Let us nurture our creaturely attitude, that tender place where we can hold both our roundedness and our wildness. We need both the tame and the untamed now. Both the rooted and the feral.
I am here, Becoming One — with you — in this everydayness of hope and grief, of tending and tearing, of wild dreams and small faithfulness. Let us keep dreaming the waking dream. Let us belong wildly. Let us become free.
With love and wonder,
—RCE+