Saturday's Substack
Free Write: Turning Toward the Hyper Local in an Age of Collapse
Saturday’s Substack
Free Write: Turning Toward the Hyper Local in an Age of Collapse
Epigraph
“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
— James Baldwin
“We want to live in the world that our love creates.”
— Fred Moten
“A border is a wound where other worlds are born.”
— Gloria Anzaldúa
“The struggle is really about allowing ourselves to be honest about who we are, and imagining a future where we can be free.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
Dear Becoming Ones,
I am mindful that today is Small Business Saturday—a kind of high holy day in the liturgy of the Free Market. And here I am, holding Baldwin’s wisdom close: The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.
This feels like the spiritual architecture of the hyper local.
It feels like a map for the vow of poverty I am stepping into.
It feels like a threshold into a world made by love, as Moten reminds us.
Today my body is tugged by questions that feel both ancient and now:
How do we support the hyper local when so many of our people live in poverty?
What does consumption mean in an age of collapse?
What does the underside of history ask of us right now?
The politics of consumption—what we buy, from whom, and why—have become sharper this year. As I take steps toward my vow of poverty, I feel in my bones that this vow is not about scarcity or deprivation. It’s about clarity. Humility. A refusal to believe that safety can be purchased. A turning toward our community’s charism: reconciliation as shared life, shared breath, shared becoming.
This free write is my attempt to name the contours of that turning.
On Consumption and the Hyper Local
I keep returning to a few simple but unsettling questions:
What do we consume? Why? From whom?
These questions shape the hyper local because they reveal the ecosystem we’re participating in—whether we know it or not.
Lately, I’ve been trading and bartering. Relying on neighbors. Letting myself be held in the soft net of interdependence. Coates whispers here about honesty and freedom—we cannot be free unless we tell the truth about our needs, our limits, our hunger for belonging.
Learning to ask for help has been its own pilgrimage.
On the other side of pride is a doorway.
On the other side of that doorway is community.
And on the other side of community is repair.
When we learn to ask for help, we disrupt the colonial story that says we must stand alone. We create small borderlands—Anzaldúan wounds where other worlds are born—worlds where mutuality is not the exception but the ethic.
The Tension of Sabbath and Survival
As I sit in the blessing of Sabbath rest, I’m mindful that not everyone can slow down. Many are wondering where their next meal will come from. Holding that tension—privilege and hunger, contemplation and urgency—is part of my vow.
To hold discernment with fierce tenderness is to stay loyal to the underside of history, to the ancestors and elders who survived without institutions ever granting them safety. It is to practice humility without collapsing into guilt. It is to see clearly without looking away.
On Land, Institutions, and the Quiet Violence of Collapse
Baldwin and Coates travel with me here. Their clarity cuts through the fog. Their love cuts, too.
As I imagine a return to the land, I also see how the land around me is held by white-serving institutions that hoard wealth, hoard property, hoard possibility. The culture inside these institutions—violence, greed, extraction—shapes decisions that reshape the commons.
Take our local pharmacy.
A lifeline for elders, students, chronically ill neighbors.
Closed now.
A casualty of upstream decisions made in boardrooms where the community is abstract and the bottom line is holy.
Now students without cars wonder where they will get their medications.
Now elders wonder how they will manage.
Now we all feel the ground shift beneath us.
Collapse is not always explosive.
Sometimes it is slow.
Sometimes it is quiet.
Sometimes it is the accumulation of a thousand tiny decisions.
The Only Way Forward
As Moten teaches us, we want to live in the world that our love creates.
And that world is not built through consumption.
It is built through relationship.
Through interdependence.
Through the willingness to unlearn colonial logic and remember that we belong to one another.
The divide-and-conquer machinery of empire cannot save us. It can only deepen our wounds. The way forward is a turn toward one another—with honesty, with humility, with a politics of belonging that emerges from the hyper local outward.
So I ask myself—and I ask you:
How might we turn toward one another in this moment?
How might radical self-inquiry soften our defenses and widen our capacity for repair?
How might our inner work become the soil for our interpersonal work?
I keep returning to the truth: the way is made by walking.
I am a pilgrim on the way—un peregrino—learning to walk with humility, even with privilege, even in the ruins of empire. My vow is to repair myself so that I can repair the world. Love as action. Repair as practice.
A Final Imagination
Can we imagine another possible world right now?
A world born from borderlands?
A world shaped by love?
A world where joy slips through the cracks and refuses to be contained?
If joy does indeed come in the morning, may yours arrive like a wild and exuberant dawn.
And may each of us—in collapse, in community, in the hyper local—be faithful in the small things.