Dear Becoming Ones,
I’m writing to you from Belfast—a city layered with story, scar, and a fierce kind of beauty. I’ve been here just a short while, but already the land has pierced me with its truths. There’s a weight in the air, like breath held just beneath the surface, and it reminds me of what it feels like to carry unspoken stories in the body. Belfast has been an unexpected mirror, showing me how patriarchal violence—structural, familial, national—has shaped me from my earliest memories.
Violence has never just been something out there. It lives in the language we inherit, in how we’re taught to argue, dominate, win. It lives in our silences too. I wasn’t taught how to argue without violence—I was taught to survive, to reflect what I saw, to sharpen my tongue as a blade. But here, I’m learning again to listen. Not just with my ears, but with my skin, my breath, my presence.
As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us,
“Let us be the healing of the wound.”
But healing begins in truth-telling. In sitting with the stories, not turning away.
Last night, I met two women who came of age during the Troubles. They didn’t tell me their whole lives, but what they did say was enough: Religion has been a problem. And I couldn’t agree more. I’ve long wrestled with how theology—so often twisted by empire and purity—has been used as a weapon rather than a balm.
I’ve traveled to conflict zones to learn about repair. It is slow work. Sinuous. Often without a neat ending. But it is the work of the people. It is the work of those most often overlooked—the women who keep the stories, the children who make eye contact, the elders who refuse to forget.
There are echoes here of the U.S. I know too well. We are living through our own long Trouble. We know, intimately, that Bloody Sundays are not relics of the past. Gunfire could rain down in any city—on any ordinary day. That is the legacy of a nation built on the myth of redemptive violence.
So what do we do?
We take watch.
We put care into everything we do.
We tell the truth.
We hold one another accountable.
We listen with our five senses, which is to say—we listen with our whole being.
John O’Donohue once wrote,
“When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in a fresh and vital way.”
Beauty isn’t always soft. Sometimes beauty looks like an old woman who still refuses to speak because the wound is too deep. Sometimes it’s in the voice that does finally speak, trembling and defiant. Beauty, in this sense, is what happens when we risk turning toward one another.
adrienne maree brown writes:
“We are in an imagination battle. We are transforming the future.”
If that’s true—and I believe it is—then our stories are tools of transformation. They are blueprints for repair. And deep listening is our sacred task.
Last night, I had the sacred honor of sharing my story at the original tenx9 Belfast. It felt like planting a seed in soil I didn’t know I needed. As a treat, here it is. May it stir something in you.
With tenderness from a land of ache and hope,
-RCE+
