Friday Care Package: Edges of Care
Week 1: Care as Interdependence
Friday Care Package
Edges of Care, Week 1: Care as Interdependence
“We are each other’s magnitude and bond.” —Gwendolyn Brooks
“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.” —Octavia E. Butler
“Fugitivity is a practice of leaning—into each other, into the in-between.” —Fred Moten
Dear Becoming Ones: I am learning, slowly and with trembling honesty, that I have been shaped by a world that taught me care meant offering, giving, extending, doing — but rarely receiving. When you grow up inside systems of supremacy, when your life is entangled with the church, the academy, the movement, you learn to be the strong one. You learn to be the one who holds the line. You learn to be the one who patches the wounds on everybody else’s bodies while ignoring the bleeding inside your own.
You learn to hide your need because need feels dangerous.
You learn to hide your loneliness because loneliness feels like failure.
You learn to hide your tenderness because tenderness feels like exposure.
But the truth is: care is not merely something we give outward — care is the courage to lean back.
To let the weight of your body rest.
To trust that someone — a friend, a lover, a community, a cat curled against your ribs — can hold some of your gravity without shattering.
Interdependence is the secret doorway to repair.
It’s the quiet insurgency against empire’s false gospel of self-sufficiency.
It’s the slow decolonizing of our nervous systems.
It’s the holy refusal to go alone.
I am learning that care is not a heroic performance.
Care is not martyrdom.
Care is not carrying everything until our bodies collapse.
Care is not being the person who never needs anything.
Care is the soft rebellion of saying: “I cannot live well without you.”
Not in a codependent way.
Not in a collapsing way.
But in the way trees share sugars through the fungal mycelium.
In the way starlings move in murmuration, reading each other’s micro-gestures.
In the way abolition work teaches us that liberation is always collective or it is not liberation at all.
Interdependence is not a weakness.
Interdependence is an abolitionist practice.
Interdependence is the end of empire living inside our bodies.
I am learning to let others care for me.
To surrender to help.
To receive tenderness.
To let the world hold me a little while.
This receiving is its own discipline.
Its own sobriety.
Its own metanoia.
Its own undoing of the impossible stories I inherited.
And I am wondering, with you, what becomes possible when we stop performing strength and begin practicing belonging.
Reflection Questions
Where in your life do you resist receiving care?
What part of your body tightens at the thought of leaning on another?
Who are the three people you could let in, even just 2% more?
What story about “strength” are you ready to compost?
What would interdependence look like in your community as an abolitionist practice?
Field Guide to Interdependence (Weekend Practice)
1. The 10% Lean
Choose one task, burden, fear, or responsibility you usually carry alone.
Ask one trusted person to hold 10% of it with you.
Just 10%.
Notice how your body responds.
2. The Receiving Ritual
When someone offers help, tenderness, affirmation, or presence, practice saying:
“Yes, thank you.”
Don’t deflect. Don’t shrink. Don’t explain.
Just receive.
3. Interbeing Walk
Take a slow walk and notice how your body belongs to everything around you —
the air, the leaves, the birds, the road, the sky.
Whisper: “I am not alone in the world.”
4. The Care Map
Draw a small map of the people, beings, and places that support your life.
Put yourself in the center.
Let lines branch outward.
This is your ecology of care.
Breathe into it.
Closing Benediction
May you remember that you were never meant to walk alone.
May the holy networks of tenderness rise up to meet you.
May your body feel the truth of belonging again.
May you lean and be leaned upon.
May you trust the quiet miracle of mutual care.
And may interdependence guide you into a world where repair is not a dream —
but a shared way of living.
Paz y ternura,
RCE+