🌿 Friday Care Package
The Conditions of Care: Learning to Love Ourselves into a New World
Epigraph
“To return to love, to stay in love, we have to choose love — again and again.”
— bell hooks, all about love
Dear Becoming Ones,
If the world feels too fast, too loud, too much — you are not alone. Our collective nervous system is frayed, vibrating with the static of fear and fatigue. In such times, care must become our refusal and our ritual. bell hooks reminds us that love is an action, never simply a feeling — a deliberate turning toward ourselves and others with gentleness and responsibility.
Self-care, in this sense, is not indulgence; it is a form of truth-telling. It says: I matter. My body matters. My breath matters. It is how we begin again.
Recent studies in the science of awe and wonder show what mystics have known all along — that awe regulates the nervous system, lowers inflammation, and restores a sense of connection. When we pause long enough to be astonished — by the pink streak of sunrise, by the cat curled at our feet, by the intricate pattern of a leaf — our physiology shifts. Heart rate slows. The stress response softens. The body remembers belonging.
Awe is a portal to self-care because it decentrers the ego’s frantic grasp and reattunes us to something larger. Wonder pulls us out of collapse and into communion. As psychologist Dacher Keltner writes, awe makes us more humble, more generous, and more deeply connected.
To practice awe is to practice love — to see and be seen by the world that holds us. bell hooks wrote that love is a practice of freedom. When we attend to wonder, we become free enough to love ourselves without condition, and from that soil, we can begin to love others well.
So today, I invite you to slow down. Let awe be your medicine. Let wonder be your prayer. Let love be your way of repair.
Field Guide to Care Practices
(For tending the conditions of love and wonder)
Pause for Awe
Step outside and find one small thing that takes your breath away — a shadow, a spider web, the sound of the wind. Let yourself feel that subtle shift: your body remembering that it belongs to something larger.
Practice the Art of Slowness
Move through your morning deliberately. Sip your coffee slowly. Listen to the world waking up. Slowness is how the nervous system relearns trust.
Nourish Your Body with Attention
Prepare one meal this weekend as ceremony. Chop, stir, taste — as if feeding someone you love. That someone is you.
Ground in the Senses
When anxiety rises, return to the body: feel your feet, your seat, your breath. Anchor in sensory awareness — it’s the nervous system’s first language of care.
Reclaim Rest as Resistance
Take a nap or lie down under the sky. Rest is how we resist the lie that worth comes from productivity. Rest is how we return to love.
Speak Tenderly to Yourself
Each morning, whisper: I am a living miracle. Awe is not only outside you — it is you.
Closing Benediction: A Blessing for Radical Care
May you learn to slow the breath of the world inside you.
May awe find you — in a beam of light, a stranger’s kindness, a moment of silence.
May you be astonished by your own resilience.
May care move through your hands like water,
washing over every harsh edge until only gentleness remains.
May your nervous system rest in love’s tempo — slow, steady, unafraid.
And may you know: loving yourself is the beginning of the world’s repair.
Let awe guide you home.
Paz y ternura,
—RCE+