Friday Care Package
The Care That Remains in Collapse
Dear Substack Community: It is Friday, again, and as I reconstruct my days for more writing, I”m also discerning when to send the Friday Care Package out. Since today is the Solstice and we are having a Solstice Gathering, I thought I’d send this out just before the ritual starts, so that we can both be engaged in the work of soul care this weekend. I’ll also go offline for 24 hours to spend time in real life with the folks around me, instead of being tethered to a device all the time!
I invite you to take a breath, and consider what I have written!
Paz, —RCE+
Friday Care Package: The Care That Remains in Collapse
Dear beloved community,
Collapse is not a metaphor for me. It’s a condition. A slow ache. A cracking open. A whisper and a wound. For many of us, collapse has become our habitat. Not just ecological or political—though those are real—but emotional, spiritual, creaturely. We live in the shadow of systems that extract more than they ever offer, that name us disposable unless we assimilate to their terms. And still, we care.
Care, to borrow from Jacob Erickson, is creaturely. It’s not an act of charity or sentiment. It’s a shared respiration between beings, human and more-than-human, who know the weight of precarity and still offer one another warmth, attention, breath. Jacob’s work reminds us that care is a queer economy—inefficient by capitalist standards, but abundant by the logic of interdependence. He writes of animals and ecosystems as agents of care, as those who co-create worlds through tenderness, risk, and fidelity.
In this moment—when so much feels like it is unraveling—I return to this:
Care is not what we do after collapse. Care is how we survive it.
Care is collapse’s twin, its echo, its balm.
I think often of the deer who visit our yard, their soft steps a reminder that life adapts. I think of the bees who persist in the clover, the fungal threads beneath the soil binding one tree’s breath to another’s survival. I think of the creatures who do not ask for permission to belong—they just are. Their presence instructs me.
We live in a time when the dominant economies will not save us. But care will.
Not as a product. Not as a performance. But as a practice.
Hyperlocal. Improvised. Restorative. Slow.
And so I offer this week’s care practice to you:
Let one creature teach you how to care differently.
Maybe it’s your dog, or the mourning dove nesting near your porch. Maybe it’s a spider spinning a web in the corner of your window. Watch. Witness. Learn the rhythms of non-human care. And then, mirror it. Let your love be feral, faithful, and quietly revolutionary.
Ritual:
Find a small patch of ground—grass, dirt, floor, doesn’t matter.
Sit or kneel.
Place your hands palms-down and whisper, “I belong to the care that remains.”
Breathe three times, slow and deep.
Say thank you to the creatures, even if you can’t name them.
Rise with reverence.
Reflection Question:
What part of me has collapsed—and what care is asking to emerge from that breaking?
Thank you for being in this ongoing story with me. I write not to offer answers, but to create a common field where we can breathe and become, together.
In breath and wild fidelity,
—RCE+