I was surprised about the key experiences that surfaced for me. I traveled back to my childhood in Chelsea, NYC to the building I grew up in, where many of my gay and queer neighbors were dying of AIDS. I recalled how confused I felt that my spiritual tradition at the time, condemned gay relationships and through choked words and tears I shared how painful it was to see men who were dying, my neighbors and parents’ friends. Sometimes, they were in our apartment, to have a free and secret consultation with my father, a trained doctor from the Dominican Republic, confirm that they likely had symptoms of HIV.

It wasn’t until advanced studies on social justice in college and graduate school that I realized the injustice of systems and disregard for human dignity that often impacts the more marginalized. Back in the 80s, gay men, along with folks who were intravenous substance users, were dying of AIDS and as I often heard my parents say, “the government didn’t think they were important enough to care about”. I also saw my dad, who took great pride in being a doctor, struggle to pass his board exams because he had to learn English and study a whole new residency because he did not have the necessary credits to be a licensed M.D. in the United States. Dad did not become a “U.S.” doctor until I was 19, about twenty-five years after arriving here. My mother, who was a professor of pedagogy in the DR and outspoken about the dictatorship she left, imparted a very politicized view of what she believed true democracy and freedom were, none of which she thought were present in this country; the country she and my father decided to raise and build a family in.

Like many immigrant families, my parents struggled.

They struggled from isolation; not knowing the language.

They struggled with not knowing that racial and ethnic identity determined access and opportunity for them and their daughters.

They worried about money and they were not able to plan for their future.

My father was disabled in a car accident at 52; one year after he became an official M.D.

My mom became the main breadwinner at 58. We lived off her teacher’s assistant salary until she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years later, right after the birth of my first child.

And so many things that happened in between, like infidelity, emotional abuse, depression and the loss of many loved ones moving away or dying back home.

Why do I share these things here with you?

They are defining experiences that have been painful to heal from.

To name them, is to include them - to honor the inheritance of resilience in my blood lineage, to celebrate the strength and courage of those who shaped me and came before me.

But I don’t think my ancestors led me to this moment to continue carrying burdens.

I am here to be free. To live fully, to experience this world in all its essence, to protect it, to love it. And to offer all of these things to myself in return.

I know they would want me to refuse anything and everything that denied me of those things.

I want to live a life of ease and joy. One where I can rest, where struggle isn’t righteousness, where abundance is not shameful, where serving others also includes what is nourishing for me.

Where standing with the crucified does not mean I too, must crucify myself.

I choose life. I choose joy. I choose breath.

I want to grow old. I want work that sustains my livelihood, responsibilities and my spirit. I want activism that is not about sacrificing my body or boundaries.

I want deep, intimate connection with ancestors, with spirit, with kin, community, the earth.

I want sacred, energizing, nourishing love.

I want a future that is not one single destination, but a journey we build together, where we can all be who we really are.

The world needs us to be well too. The world needs us to look deeply at what we truly want. What feeds us, what nourishes us, what reminds us of who we really are.

Longing is a full-bodied pull toward one another and toward a future we cannot yet see. It is, as Prentis Hemphill reminds us, “an openness to learning what we do not yet know—an openness that may change us.”[1]

It’s taken me a while to realize that more than anything, I have always been longing for communities where care is shared and valued. I recognize this longing is connected to the women who raised me—their care was a generous gift shaped by their experiences, perhaps reflecting their own hopes to transform a world that demanded so much from them.

I am curious-who or what has taught you how to practice care?

Sometimes I feel grief when I sit with this question.

But underneath the grief there is still a residue of yearning.
A deeper desire perhaps for a kinder world, a more loving world, a world we can only reach together.

Where does that come from?

In my work, when I ask, “what do you long for?”, the answers are rarely abstract. They are grounded in the ordinary, shared textures of life: cleaner air, good and safe schools for our children, time with loved ones, time to rest. People speak of being outdoors and feeling the wind against their skin, of spaces to practice faith, of burying loved ones with dignity and celebrating ancestors with joy. They speak of loving who they want, retiring when their bodies ask for rest, and doing work that fills their hearts—not just their pockets.

Again and again, I discover the thread of care.

In my experience, it is often women who have reminded me not to lose sight of this deeply human desire to care for one another. Not because care belongs to women—care is not a gendered trait. Care is human. But patriarchy, colonization, and the structures of power that sustain them have trained us to gender and devalue the craft of care.

None of this is new.

And yet, for me the visibility of women like Ghislaine Maxwell or Kristi Noem sharpens a necessary truth: women are not exempt from participating in systems that harm other women. We recognize that our gender is often a target of discrimination, and we also understand that our identities include many intersections—some that make us vulnerable, and others that grant us privilege—affecting how we experience power.

And none of us are immune to internalized misogyny. None of us are incapable of turning violence toward women who are different from us or turning that violence inward.

We see it in subtle and overt ways—when we decide who is respectable, when we judge bodies, when we quietly determine who is worthy of leadership and who is not, when we shame ourselves for the violence projected onto our bodies by other bodies.

And so the question remains.

It is a question I have asked many women who stand at the gate of institutions; protectors of lineages and movements:
What doors are you willing to open to truly stand in solidarity with all women? How will you allow yourself to be changed in the opening of those doors? How will you continue to care for the well-being of these women? How will you honor that their experience, their wisdom, their BEING, is enough?

Not just the women who share your race, culture, religion, or nation; who love who you love.
Not just women assigned female at birth.
Not just those who fit the narrow checklist of gender as defined by white supremacist patriarchy and colonial norms. It is easy to stand with those who are like us, or who WE believe are worthy and valuable.

But what does it mean to stand in solidarity with ALL women?

To answer this, we must examine the familiar contours of femininity—the boundaries that have been drawn for us and so often by us. We must ask: where do we silence one another? Who do we mirror, who do we value and who do we exclude? What is the cost of wielding our power to serve that which oppresses all of us?

Real solidarity demands discomfort. It asks us to sit with the intersectionality of women’s experiences and to question the categories that have shaped our understanding of gender, worth, and belonging, including the social-historical conditions that we are born into. This work is a practice of both activism and humility. It requires us to loosen our grip on inherited frameworks and to remain open to being changed by the injustices we witness.

Mikki Kendall writes that a solidarity that ignores lived realities “in favor of some idea that we can do better… cannot be ignored.” [2]

True solidarity is not aspirational alone—it is accountable to those who live with the consequences.

How do we hold those who shoulder our movements, who nourish the roots of collective struggle, who stand as sentinels at the world’s edges, who shield the fragile hope and wild dreams of futures not yet born?

I am continually moved by the women ancestors who, through their lives, have taught me to yearn for a collective tapestry of care—a vision woven by Black, Indigenous, and women of color, by queer and trans ancestors whose stories pulse with dedication to their communities. Women such as my mother and aunt, Nelly and Oneida Morrobel—two among nine siblings who crossed oceans to the US, leaving sisters behind yet binding them close with the lifelines of love: money, clothing, gifts sent across borders, reminders that distance cannot sever devotion. Their sacrifice is a treasure, their generosity a bridge, their hands ever reaching, ever nurturing.

And my mother-in-law, Sookee Son—her hands weathered by six days a week factory work—labored not only for her family’s needs, but for the dream of shelter, a home whose walls have embraced generations: her grandchildren and her daughter-in-law’s kin. Within its rooms, her presence echoes, a legacy built from sacrifice and love, a refuge that continues to hold many souls.

I am fed by dharma and black feminist ancestor scholars like bell hooks, and Audre Lorde, who insisted, in different ways, that care is transformative. It is a practice of survival, of resistance, and of collective becoming.

To long for a shared culture of care is to take that inheritance seriously.

It is to believe that beneath our grief is not just loss, but direction.
It is to trust that what I/we ache for—rest, dignity, joy, connection— to be seen.

To be-longing for what we imagine. To act on it.

It is to build toward a world where care is centered as HUMAN not woman.

It means not centering humans as the sole recipients of care.

It is to stand up against any violent act towards all women and beings, including those who have harmed us.

To stand up against violence of our planet and all its creations.

Care is not a luxury. I am reminded by Sister Audre Lorde that “if what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise is discounted as luxury, then we give up the core… of our power, our womaness” [our buddhaness] “we give up the future of our worlds” [3]

What would it be like to live in futures of mutual care communities?

Who are the women/humans/other than human/ beings, who have taught you how to practice care?

[1] Hemphill, P. (2025). What it takes to heal: How transforming ourselves can change the world. Random House.

[2] Kendall, M. (2020). Hood feminism: Notes from the women white feminists forgot. Bloomsbury Publishing.

[3] Lorde, A. (2012). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing press

.

A neighborhood emergency rapid response training for ICE.

A training for college students on how to have contentious dialogues .

The overwhelm and anxieties of how to survive in this world from my teenage almost adult sons.

Questions, conditions, and suffering, shaped by collapse—political, ecological, economical, relational—AND by care. The community’s care, the world’s care, my care.

The desire to respond without hardening or turning away. The intention to do something.

The reflex, especially in justice-oriented spaces, is to reach for certainty. A plan. A strategy. A position. The right words.

I was at a union meeting for public university professors this week and they said “This is a time for action”.

I don’t necessarily disagree.

But accompanying others keeps teaching me something else:
pausing to act is not a failure of responsibility.
The pause is often the ground from which a truer response can emerge.

Bearing witness to suffering takes open , non judgmental attention, courage , and a willingness to be with vulnerability. Compassionate action as Roshi Joan Halifax teaches, emerges from our grounded, regulated capacity to consider what will best serve1.

And accompanying others, showing up to their/our suffering does not have to be joyless.

Some of the most enduring lessons I’ve received about resilience and moral courage came not from strategy, theory or Zen, but from unbounded joy practiced in community.

I think of Tía Niurca.

She was the tallest member of my family—five-foot-ten, brown sugar–skinned, graceful and LOUD. When she entered a room, it reorganized itself. Not because she demanded attention, but because she was there to feed you, love you and make you laugh.

She danced while she cooked. Always. Music playing, hips moving, hands busy. Lips narrating a story of fulanita- the neighbor, a cousin, or the colmado owner who sold her ice. To visit or be paid a visit by Tia Niurca was never just about food, her hours of cooking and chatting —it was a gathering. A declaration that no one eats alone. A way of saying: we are here together!

She loved and doted on you with a fierceness that made you feel claimed. And she would cuss you out with that same fierceness if you hurt one of her sisters, or her nieces, or her nephews. There was no contradiction there. Tenderness and protection lived in the same body.

That body that survived breast cancer and divorce. That body that lived through the death of her parents, and five of her siblings. That body that barely had her basic needs met as an immigrant woman in care labor in NYC.

Watching her, I learned something essential long before I had language for it:

Joy is not separate from justice. Joy is freedom.

Joy is what sustains people who know what they are up against.
Joy is how community remembers itself when systems fail.
Joy is how care becomes durable.

Joy is how we imagine something else for ourselves, our loved ones and our world.

In times like these, joy is often dismissed as indulgent or naïve—as if seriousness requires austerity. But that misunderstands joy’s role in our lives, in our practice and in our movements. Unbounded joy is not escapism. It is resistance to despair. It is a refusal to let fear, anger and violence be the only organizing forces in our lives.

Joy is to trust that joy is in itself, is also a practice. That collective movements also comes from intimacy with joy—from bodies gathered in kitchens, from shared meals, from music and movement and laughter that refuse erasure.

From not ranking grief over joy.

Perhaps this moment is for allowing intimacy with the irreparable and finding joy anyway.

We may not know what comes next.
We may not know how to fix what is breaking.

What we do know is how to gather.
We know how to protect one another.
We know how to feed people and dance with them and stand up for them.

In intimacy with community comes response. In joy with community comes courageous and compassionate action.

Together we breathe.
Together we eat and dance.
Together we know joy.

Together we stand.

Unbounded joy is not a detour from the work.
It is one of the ways the work continues.

Para mi querida Tia Niurca: “Debí tirar más fotos de cuando te tuve..Debí darte más besos y abrazos las veces que pude” Debi tirar mas fotos- Bad Bunny. Gracias por querernos, cuidarnos y por alimentarnos con su grande corazon!

For my dear Aunt Niurca: “I should have taken more photos of when I had you... I should have given you more kisses and hugs whenever I could.” Debi tirar mas fotos- Bad Bunny Thank you for loving us, taking care of us, and feeding us with your big heart!

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Presence

I dreamt that I was with Joe at a dissertation defense of an old classmate. It had the strange ordinariness that dreams often carry—conference-room light, the familiar cadence of academic seriousness, the feeling of having arrived somewhere important without remembering how I got there.

“How the hell are you, Joe?” I said, laughing with joy.

“Dead,” he replied, with the sly, mischievous squint he always met his students with when he was about to push us into deeper inquiry.

I miss Joe.

I loved Joe for many reasons: for his brilliant mind, for his generosity, for his humor. He taught me so much of what I needed to know about who I wanted to be—as a scholar, as a teacher, as a person trying to live with integrity in the world. But the most important lesson he taught me had very little to do with theory, argument, or achievement.

What Joe taught me—again and again, sometimes gently and sometimes relentlessly—was that right here, in this moment, who I was and how I perceived and engaged the world was already enough. The questions I asked, what my attention was drawn to, the way I listened, the way I hesitated, the way I noticed—this was the work. Not later. Not after I figured it out. Not once I became someone more legitimate, more accomplished, more certain.

Right here.

It is a deceptively simple teaching. And a difficult one.

We live inside structures that train us to believe that meaning is deferred—that clarity will come after the next credential, the next book, the next stage, the next crisis. We are rewarded for speed, for articulation, for mastery. Even our spiritual and political lives can become sites of performance, places where we demonstrate knowledge rather than cultivate awareness of complexity and nuance of the reality of the world we live in.

Joe was uninterested in status quo and performance. He was deeply serious, but never solemn. His humor was not a distraction from rigor; it was part of it. He understood that inquiry requires a kind of looseness, a willingness to be undone by the question itself. He did not ask us to become someone else in order to think well. He asked us to pay attention to who we already were.

This attention—to the present moment, to one’s own orientation, to the quality of engagement rather than its outcome—has stayed with me far longer than any particular framework or text. It has shaped how I teach, how I listen, how I move through rooms, how I sit with uncertainty. It has also shaped how I grieve.

Perhaps that is why Joe appeared to me in a dream not as a memory, but as a presence. Still teaching. Still smiling. Still refusing to let me locate meaning somewhere else.

Showing up, I am learning, is not an act of willpower. It is a practice of return. A return to the body. A return to attention. A return to what is actually happening rather than what we think should be happening. It is an ethical stance as much as a personal one—one that asks us to meet each other without pretense, without rushing toward resolution.

This matters now more than ever. We are overwhelmed by information, by urgency, by demands to respond immediately and decisively. There is so much pressure to know what we think, to take a position, to say something smart. But depth rarely arrives on command. It emerges from sustained presence, from staying with the question long enough to be changed by it.

This space—this Substack—exists as a practice of that staying,

It is not a place for hot takes or finished answers. It is a place for reflection, for slow thinking, for attending to what is already here. It is an experiment in showing up without knowing exactly what will come next—practicing not knowing as an opening rather than a lack1. It is a space for bearing witness to lived experience, structural violence, collective grief, and enduring resistance, and for letting what we see together shape how we move in the world.

This Substack is interested in how the personal and the political meet as sites of relationship, responsibility, and power, and how that meeting can become fertile ground for shared humanity, solidarity, and sustained compassionate action. Practicing presence here is not passive; it is a movement and spiritual discipline—learning to stay, to listen across differences, to be accountable to history and to one another, and to act without bypassing complexity. Writing, for me, has always been a way of listening—of finding out what I think by giving attention to what wants to be said, and allowing that listening to inform how I show up in collective struggle.

Mostly, I am interested in the quiet, radical possibility that this moment—imperfect, unfinished, unresolved—is enough to begin.

Joe knew that. Or perhaps he was always trying to get us to know it for ourselves.

In the dream, he did not offer advice or reassurance. He did not tell me what to do next. He simply looked at me, amused, attentive, fully there. As if to say: this is it. This is the place. This is where the work happens.

So I am here.

Showing up.

Right here.

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This space is a practice of attention.

I am a Zen chaplain, teacher, and scholar of social justice, power, and leadership; but at the core I am a justice seeker. The call to leave behind a more just world, has been a steady undertow in my life, pulling me toward attention, accountability, and action even when ease would be simpler. My work has been shaped by classrooms, communities, and contemplative traditions that insist transformation begins not with certainty, but with presence. Again and again, I have learned that how we show up—how we listen, where we place our attention, what we are willing to stay with—matters as much as what we do.

Showing Up Right Here is a place for slow thinking and honest inquiry. It is rooted in the belief that personal transformation and social change are not separate projects, but deeply intertwined ones. Justice work, like spiritual practice, asks us to examine power without collapsing into blame, to act without bypassing grief, and to cultivate agency without losing humility.

Here, I write at the intersection of contemplative practice and public life—drawing on Zen practice and chaplaincy, feminist and critical scholarship, years of teaching and facilitation, and my own lived experience within systems shaped by power, inequity, and resistance. This writing is rooted in spiritual work, movement work and collective struggle, and offered not as answers but as companions: questions to sit with, practices to return to, and invitations to notice what is already present—and what is being asked of us now.

I aspire for this space to be intentional and accountable; to doubt when our spiritual and political lives become sites of performance, to ask: “what else is here?” To not turn away from complexity and tensions in our ideologies, practices and actions. This space is an experiment in staying honest, grounded, and oriented toward transformation rather than spectacle.

Each month, I will also honor an ancestor—by blood or by chosen lineage—as a way of remembering that we cannot be here without those who came before us. Teachers, elders, thinkers, activists, family and friends. Those who shaped the ground we stand on, often without recognition. This practice is both personal and political: a refusal of isolation, a commitment to lineage and justice, and an acknowledgment that our agency is always relational.

My hope is to support others in their own capacity for transformation and agency—to show up more fully to themselves, to one another, and to the work of justice in the world.

Right here is enough to begin.

Nothing is missing.

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