Yesterday as I sat in one of what has been a series of the last classes of the year I told my cohort gathered there that each time I came to class it was miraculous because so many things, so many fucking things had to come together for me to sit with a group of people and hold rigor about creative practice and continuing on.
And I don’t take that lightly.
When I say I don’t take it lightly I mean that I marvel at the time I get to spend thinking, making, and imagining. What a gift.
And as we move into the darkest days of the year with the return of light coming just next week I wanted to write about some things that might deepen our possibility for the next solar cycle together. Today what is prescient is what a gift it is to live and how the culture of self-care cheapens that experience.
First hear me out, I am for people taking care. I am for care whether it is pop culture foamy bubble baths or organizing the garage to make/let yourself feel good. I am for care that looks like skipping school because you need to go outside and find mushrooms or care that looks like endless hours on the phone with the billing department.
However I have always cringed at the idea of self-care as an organizing principle. Here’s why, imagine we were in a moment of the world where the conditions of long seeded genocide burst forth into an acute moment where the amount of suffering was unfathomable. Imagine the people executing the pain and violence. Imagine the people experiencing the pain and violence first hand. Imagine the wider web of people connected to those people experiencing that pain and violence. Imagine the animals, the bodies of water, the orchards who experience that pain and violence. Imagine the wider world watching that pain and violence.
Now in this situation much care is needed. The levels of acuteness, the need for care, the modes of care are different. But what I see is that in this as in many other situations digging down into the idea of self and individual takes away from the potency of care and how great the need is for it.
In order to show for those who are most impacted, to offer them care we have to navigate that for ourselves. We need to do the things that allow us to remember what a gift it is to live and how that is also gift, a precious thing, for those who also live. And….we have to show for others. This is the recognition and devotion to the preciousness of this gift. We cannot separate this care.
I urge you as we move into the dark and then out of it in the next couple of weeks to sit in it. To let the overwhelming quality and weight of darkness inform you, a retreat into some dreaming kind of state where you can know and imagine this kind of care that includes the wide reaches. I encourage you to experience and enact care from there.
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A little plug for joining as a paid member, I have been writing a newsletter in some form or fashion for nearly 12 years. Many of you have been reading from the beginning! Thank you, what a gift to have your attention. And I’d like to go deeper, spend more time, open up the spools of the writing here and I need your support. Consider joining or gifting!
On that note, there will be another bookclub on January 10, 5:30-6:30 pm, The Creative Act by Rick Rubin….I know, I know everyone is reading it. Everyone has an opinion…so do I, let’s hear them!
I love this image of care. In Daisy Lee’s qigong class she often ended by holding those we knew needed extra care in a circle of light and imagining them fully capable of managing whatever comes there way. I tend to do it the way I learned, loving kindness, starting by holding myself in that circle, then holding loved ones, specifically in that circle, then widening that circle, and beginning to hold wider and wider groups, and tell him holding all of us in that circle. I really do think we have to solve these problems together.