April Asides
Time to Care
Care, can we ever get enough of it? What is care? Is it time taken, given, lived? Is it space? How? Care supports, gives, frees, constrains, holds and carries. As with gravity, while drawing us home care allows us to rise. It shows up as actions of the heart that show up as attention. At the center of anything worth doing and anything worth saying, thinking, touching, moving, and feeling, we find care.
Care takes time but it also gives time back. When we give the time to care, we notice more, our relationships flourish because we step into a direct engagement with the object of care and in that moment time steps out of its cultural meter and opens up to its creative unfolding. It can breathe. For those of us who move, that unfolding could be the time it takes for water to pour. Step into that particular attentional care and you have now entered a new world of possibilities. That level ties us to our earth, and we understand the physicality of “her” care. We are freed into the physicality of a “physics of care” and the engaged architecture of all movement – we now surf the waves of its grace.
Care is what builds a strong CORE within any relationship and of any practice! At its best, care is what gets given. Although like many things, it is not simply one thing, unblemished and only of the good, because it may also be transactional - offered, procured, or demanded. Often care and attention are confused, because where there is attention, there is at least the affect of care, although the object of care may not be what is being attended to. The close tie between attention and care means It lives on the many shelves of our supermarkets, pharmacies and beauty supply stores yelling at us to purchase it in a material form.
Setting these forms of adulterated care aside for the moment, I’d like to return to the simplest form of care, the care that keeps us alive: the care that takes joy in a flower and leaves it where it lives, the offering of a glass of water to lips, perhaps yours, that long for it. Care shapes our relationship to our life and our living. I wonder, what gets left out of our actions of care? What would be different if they didn’t?
Taking Care. Who and what gets cared for?
There is a politics of care that is shaped by our cultural conditioning, our economic and social interests, and by our human exceptionalism. Some things, places, beings, events get cared for, others don’t. Indeed, there is no neutrality in caring as is pointed out in the work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa in her text, Matters of Care. The same is issue exists with our attention Turning toward one thing means not turning toward another. Recognizing the complexity of this situation means taking care of caring, not allowing it to be simply shaped by cultural assumptions.
What I see is a situation in which we are bound to fail. Do we dare to look at our failures squarely on? Do we dare to see and acknowledge the uncared for? They are everywhere, among us as humans, around us as beings of other forms, within us, living without us, and as the unliving, things, places, spaces, and times. Is there a practice we can unfold into that could help us with this task of caring anew, differently, and simply because we can? Do you have one? Can you dream one up and practice it to see if it works? Let’s be in conversation with care. Let’s discover it anew. Send your scores, practices and ideas to nita@nitalittle.com. I would love to read them, and share them.
Do you have a “care beef”? Where do you see care misdirected or misunderstood?
My beef is that people steal from places, taking a stone or a flower – presuming beauty is for them. I ask people to leave the beauties of the world where they find them. Don’t take them home – that stone, that flower. Please leave things where they are. Let these small beauties enhance the places where they are found. Allow the beauty of things to belong to places, not people, no matter how obscure.
Excerpt from Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter
