🌿 Friday Care Package | The Wisdom of Care in Fast-Changing Days
stepping into the wisdom economy of care
🌿 Friday Care Package | The Wisdom of Care in Fast-Changing Days
“Caring is the antithesis of domination.” — Joan Tronto
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” — Audre Lorde
Dear Becoming Ones,
The world is moving faster than our nervous systems can metabolize. Each headline, each shift, each heartbreak asks something of us that our souls aren’t sure they can keep giving. And yet—amid all this acceleration—care remains a slow technology. It reminds us that tending is resistance. That gentleness is not weakness. That repair begins in the body.
Socrates said that wisdom begins in wonder. I wonder, then, if wisdom stays alive through care. The wonder of caring for oneself—not as a privatized retreat but as an ecological act—teaches us to befriend our inner wilderness. When we learn to listen to the soft pulse of our own exhaustion, we begin to practice what Michael McRay calls the Wild Way: traveling through the dark forest not as escape, but as initiation.
bell hooks taught us that love is a verb—an ethic of care. To love ourselves with radiant tenderness is not narcissism; it is rehearsal for justice. When we tend our small griefs, our frayed nerves, our sleepless nights, we participate in repair. We compost despair into belonging.
María Lugones reminds us that care is a world-traveling practice, a crossing of borders with humility and playfulness. What if the first border we cross is the one between self and self? What if tending our own becoming is how we learn to build bridges toward each other?
The wisdom economy—what I like to imagine as an exchange rooted in wonder, reciprocity, and repair—flourishes when care is the common currency. It refuses extraction. It resists the logics of burnout and accumulation. It measures wealth in gestures of attention, in the slow work of healing our relationships and our bodies.
So today, I’m practicing care as a radical intervention. Drinking water slowly. Walking barefoot on the cold ground. Texting a friend not to perform connection but to embody it. The work of care is the work of worldmaking.
May we each find our own wild way through the dark forest.
May we beam love so radiant that it lights the path for another.
🌀 Ritual Exhale:
Place a hand over your heart.
Whisper: “I am worthy of care.”
Breathe in wonder.
Breathe out wisdom.
🌾 Field Guide to Care Practices
A few antidotal gestures for these fast-changing days.
1. Tend the body.
Touch your pulse. Drink water with reverence. Stretch in small, prayerful movements. The body is the first altar of care.
2. Practice slowness.
Refuse the rush. Stir your coffee slowly. Let silence speak. Slow time is resistance to empire’s pace.
3. Listen without fixing.
Whether to yourself or another, practice the discipline of deep listening. Listening is not problem-solving—it’s presence.
4. Nurture your dark forest.
Not all healing happens in the light. Let the quiet, unseen parts of you breathe. Trust the compost. Growth is happening there.
5. Reclaim ordinary wonder.
Notice the way morning light falls across your table. Wonder is the first act of wisdom, and wisdom is a form of care.
6. Bridge toward others.
Send a message of gratitude. Share food. Hold space for a story that isn’t yours. Care collapses distance and creates belonging.
7. Rest as rebellion.
Rest is not withdrawal—it’s preparation. Every nap, every stillness, every unhurried hour is a small act of collective repair.
✨ From the Field Guide to Repair
This Care Package is part of an ongoing series exploring how tending ourselves and each other becomes a practice of liberation, repair, and becoming.
🕊️ Written from Nashville, TN — where care takes the shape of slow mornings, local bread, and the courage to keep wondering.