✨ Tuesday Telegram: Lingering Light, Slowed Breath
pull up a seat and join me!
✨ Tuesday Telegram: Lingering Light, Slowed Breath
Dear Becoming Ones,
On this Tuesday, I am back at the Friendship Library—my requested books stacked beside me, my body settled just enough to write. Each time I venture out of the house, I manage between one and five pages. That feels like a small miracle. It is slow work. It is faithful work. It is the kind of writing that comes from listening to the body rather than disciplining it.
Normally, Mondays are for a meditation. Sometimes Tuesdays carry a Telegram. With so many new folks joining us, today felt like an invitation to hold both together:
a meditative beginning to the week,
and the persistent glow of Hanukkah light
as we edge toward the solstice.
This season asks something of us—not urgency, but attunement.
A dear comrade said to me a few weekends ago:
“You have to slow down enough to feel what must be felt.”
That sentence has stayed with me. It feels like a threshold teaching.
During these lingering days of wintry cold and restless wind, I light my Hanukkah candles just after sunset. I say the prayers slowly, deliberately, letting each syllable land. Each night, a new candle. Each night, more light—not because the darkness is defeated, but because we choose to respond to it with care.
I text my Jewish comrade. I send her a photo of my menorah.
Together, across distance, we share the Divine Light.
Together, we dare to hope for another possible world.
🕯️ From a Recent Dispatch
Unbelonging is not the only container that deserves interrogation. There are many. The violence of caste and the caste of violence create accelerating folds of unbelonging across entire populations—especially children and those coming of age in a world where artificial intelligence commodifies youth, speed, and disposability. These conditions do not simply shape economies; they shape nervous systems. Our attachment wounds move with us into every decision we make. If we do not address them, we risk reproducing the very violences we claim to oppose.
This is where Bracha Ettinger’s work has become a quiet companion for me. Her concept of the matrixial borderspace offers another way of understanding attachment—not as pathology, but as relational depth. Ettinger teaches us that subjectivity is not sealed or autonomous; it is co-emergent. We are formed with and through one another. Healing, then, is not isolationist self-mastery, but a practice of wit(h)nessing—being present to oneself and others without domination or erasure. This kind of repair does not deny wounds; it holds them in shared ethical space.
Unbelonging has been a close companion of mine for many years. It has followed me as I resettle here, among the hills and valleys of Western New York. And still, my primary attachment wound is healing—because I am healing. I change every day. Slowly. Imperfectly. With attention.
Unbelonging has not silenced me.
It has taught me where repair is required.
from my forthcoming project on Belonging & Freedom
Above, is a portion of my most recent dispatch—written just before this Telegram—where I turn toward feminist psychoanalytic thought and my own primary attachment wounds. I engage the work of Bracha Ettinger, whose matrixial theory offers a language for relationality, vulnerability, and ethical encounter beyond domination.
Ettinger’s work was recalled to me by a new colleague—someone you’ll meet soon on The Substack Show, launching early next year. This series will explore ethical masculinities: not inherited scripts of power, but DIY masculinities rooted in liberation, tenderness, accountability, and repair.
I am deeply excited about this work. It feels timely. It feels necessary. It feels like compost for futures we haven’t yet learned how to name.
🌑 Looking Ahead
On Sunday, I’ll write at the intersection of the longest night of the year and the persistent light of Hanukkah—darkness and devotion holding hands.
Before then, look for the Friday Care Package, as I bring this year’s sustained writing on care to a close. Next year, I’ll be turning my attention to a new word: possibility. I’ll be doing a deep dive into its lexicon—philosophical, spiritual, political, and poetic. I can’t wait to wander that terrain with you.
🔥 A Word of Refusal, A Word of Love
And before I go, let me say this plainly:
I am not your silence.
I will continue to speak against carceral logics in all their forms.
I am committed—daily—to unraveling from White Christian Supremacy,
not as performance, but as practice.
I am a peregrino,
on my way to another possible world.
Love is why we are here.
Let us build containers for universal solidarity,
not transactional charity shaped by capitalism’s scarcity.
Let us choose light—not because it is easy,
but because it is faithful.
With you,
always, —RCE+.