🪶 Coffee & Sativa | Conjuring Other Possible Worlds
“We must dream the world anew before we can live into it.”
— Audre Lorde
I am writing today from rural New Hampshire, where the maples are just beginning to blush and the wind smells faintly of rain and soil. I am here at Birch and Raven Farm, eating and dreaming with friends, learning again what it means to inhabit the slow work of becoming.
When I arrived, I spoke the truth aloud to Beth: I am not okay. There’s a strange freedom in naming what is so often hidden. We’ve spent our days thinking, cooking, and — perhaps most importantly — conjuring. Yes, conjuring. Because imagining other possible worlds is not a luxury now; it is a necessity. The old world is crumbling under the weight of its own illusions, and maybe, just maybe, this collapse is the soil from which something more whole, more just, more tender might take root.
I find myself needing to breathe. To meditate. To envision the life I long to live. For as long as I can remember, I have carried a vision of multiple homes, scattered across geographies, filled with chosen kin — a queer family that resists the narrow logics of hetero- and homonormativity. I am still learning what it means to relate outside of systems that demand hyper-individualism and assimilation just to be legible. I have never wanted to be legible. I want to belong. And belonging, I’m learning, has nothing to do with being intelligible to the dominant order.
The truth is, I have been living with catastrophic anxiety and insatiable grief since Charlottesville. The trauma of that day and the harassment that followed lodged themselves deep in my body. But this week, with a small adjustment in medication, the fog has lifted. The sharp edges of my panic have softened. I feel a little more myself. I’m deeply grateful — to my doctors, to my friends, to the community that has carried me. And yet, I am also frustrated that it took things falling apart for this change to come.
But maybe that’s the lesson. As Pema Chödrön reminds us, when things fall apart, the groundlessness itself can become a threshold. Collapse can be a teacher. It can become the doorway to transformation.
I am committed to the work of social repair, but I know that repair must begin within. I have always built in public because I believe that showing up — vulnerably, imperfectly — matters. And I want to keep showing up not just with passion, but with integrity.
Because here is the truth I keep circling back to:
If God is becoming, then collapse is not the enemy of God — it is the condition for God’s next breath.
The cannibalism of capitalism rages on, devouring our days and our dreams. But we do not have to feed it. We can compost our rage into lovingkindness. We can repurpose our anger into acts of care. We can learn, together, to breathe again — and in doing so, to become who we are called to be in this fragile, urgent, beautiful moment.
Let us conjure.
Let us build.
Let us become.
🌬️ Ritual Exhale
Close your eyes.
Let the weight of collapse — personal, political, planetary — rest gently on the surface of your breath.
Inhale the truth: We are not meant to bear this alone.
Exhale the lie: I must have it all together.
Breathe again.
Inhale the wild possibility that even now, life is becoming.
Exhale the fear that tells you it is too late.
With each breath, imagine the composting of anger into tenderness, of despair into dreaming.
With each breath, feel the ground beneath you — cracked but alive — pulsing with the promise of another possible world.
🌱 Reflection Questions for the Becoming
Where in your life are things “falling apart,” and how might that collapse be an invitation to transformation rather than a threat?
What would it look like for you to conjure a different future — one not built on dominance, extraction, or legibility, but on belonging, care, and kinship?
How might you practice composting your anger and grief into acts of lovingkindness this week?
Who are the people, places, and practices that help you breathe deeply and imagine more than survival?
What might it mean, in this season, to show up with integrity — not just passion — for the work of repair?