on the evolution of care
In its oldest roots, the word care means to call out, to yell. Even, to scream.
Where does a call spring from? Is it your belly? Your throat? Your feet pushing into the ground? The ancient use of the word also means to scream, a word that is even harsher than calling out or yelling. What happens to your body when you scream?
To call out, to yell: these are words of interruption. These are words that arch out across a moment of regular-ness or a moment of overwhelm and cut right through it. We call out, we yell, we scream and the vibration of sound moves across the babble of voices or the tightness of silence, cuts right through. For the old ones speaking these words-that-eventually-became-English, to care is to stop whatever is going on, forcefully, with what we always have available to us: the sound of our voice.
Histories of words are a form of poetry, not a moment of definition and fact. Academic articles in linguistic journals are still talking about theories, about best guesses. Poetry evokes rather than defines. Listen to how the stories I am going to tell land in your body. What wakes up in response?
Words are stories and as stories, they are alive. Each word carries with it all of the struggle and glory of the people who spoke and changed that word, across generations and across time. All stories, when treated in the right way, carry their own lineages, personalities and intentions. The way we respect a story is to listen with an open heart and mind for the story’s life to reveal itself. Then we listen for how our own life is impacted by the hearing. This is a relationship, this connection between story-word and our life. It is why the words we choose to use, consciously or unconsciously, are deeply impactful. It’s why, when not used with tender wakefulness, words can slip out of our mouths and bludgeon someone, even if we were just offhandedly tossing out a thought.
In its earliest times, in its most ancient memories, the word “care” meant something different than what it means today. To yell, to cry out… to scream. A visceral word, meaning a word of the organs, the deepest part of the body. It takes a lot of energy and intention to move something from the deepest inside, up and through to come out as a sound that demands a stop.
The histories of words are like the histories of river deltas. I live (more or less) 220 miles from the headwaters of the Mississippi. I say “more or less” because it’s settlers who put a pin in a spot and said, the river starts here! I have been taught that Anishinaabeg understandings of the river are less linear and more, well, fluid.
Wenji-maajiijiwang (From Where the Waters Start to Flow) – The Headwaters of the Mississippi River in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), by Charles Lippert and Jordan Engel
In this Anishinaabeg story of the river, each element has its own name, its own personality. These different personalities come together and then continue to shift and shape as each weaves together to become Misi-ziibi.
And then the river continues, responding to changes in the land, in the seasons, to where a beaver community has felled a grove of trees and created a pond or tributary, where a storm has direction-felled trees and stones and changes the edges of a bank. The river keeps shifting and changing and reshaping itself over generations, and when drawn together, as it is below on the left, the river’s memory across time shows up as a snake, as a pattern, as a dance across the land. The river, like all life, is a story and a memory of change.
From McLendon geosciences
These images are not theories. They are representations of someone listening to the land, to the weave of river bed, and drawing out what they have heard. The oldest memories might be faint, but they are still discernible in the landscape.
Language and culture shift in the same way. Hell, all evolution moves in the same way. That is not, though, the way evolution is most often taught. Instead, evolution is usually taught as a kind of progressive history where the most recent thing is the best thing and the oldest parts of the story are either forgotten or lifted up as a curiosity.
Evolution’s initial and tidy tree of life shows each new evolutionary arm obediently separating and becoming their own little isolated family. Certainly the way that I learned about it in school in the 1970s was all about humans being at the top - as in most advanced - each part separated from the other and all caught up in predator/prey kinds of competitive relationships. This image above is actually more progressive than what I ever learned because at least it includes plants as part of our family. My 1970s learning would shudder to imagine any kinship with a mushroom or oak.
This separation as the natural state is how European Christian lineages evolved over generations of empire. It’s the justification used for every kind of eugenic violence, whether through racism or gender essentialism or the idea that some bodies are normal while others have to be changed or hidden away. It’s not random that some of our beloveds get called apes or snakes as a way of code-shaming them as less evolved than “normal” humans. This family-tree-of-separation has been rooting into the bodies and minds of those of us who have lived close to it for a long time, along with the spoken and unspoken rules around who gets to belong to which part and why. Transactional, conditional belonging: the core of euro/christian practices of community.
In the early part of 2022, researchers in Bath offered a theory that shows evolution as something similar to the image of the river shown above; something that branches out and then weaves back and then goes off in another direction, then joins with another tributary and back again. Flowing, like all life does, in a random but clear pattern that responds to countless moments of information, impact and response. In this “new” theory, we evolve alongside all of our kin, the liver of muskie and fox and snake and human all remembering and informing each other of the chemical processes used in detox alongside the way an elm or nettle shares its version of chemical creation as it blows through the wind. We are all always learning from and alongside each other, shifting and changing and borrowing and becoming. And yes, those researchers in Bath are Euro-remembering indigenous ways of knowing. Prayer moment: along with the insight, may the research of remembering carry with it actions of accountability for the violence of 500+ years of extraction and destruction. The two pieces have to go together.
Each of us, when we were moving from egg and sperm to a body ready to be born, remembers the life forms we were for the generations before. This is one of the things we mean when we say that we are our ancestors. Our earliest life begins at the headwaters where cellular membrane meets cellular membrane and then we start to wind our way down and through, until we become, during those last stages, the shape that our ancestors have loved forward. We must first move through fish and salamander and chicken and bird before we become ape and human.
In the image above, each of us, these different kinds of people, are at about 1/10th of the way through our fetal development process. We each look like a tadpole with other bits attached. For us humans, that stage is around three weeks. Rabbit’s vary but they all tend to be pregnant for about a month and so that tadpole moment is probably around three days.
There are many forms of bodywork, including multiple forms of craniosacral therapy, that teach us to sense these different embryological stages as they are remembered by the body. Jaap van der Waal, a Dutch embryologist, has been building and teaching how to sense and remember this embryological state, this first world of being, as part of supporting our bodies to remember what it is to belong. These same stories of emergence show up in many other cultural ways of knowing*, including Tibetan scholars in the 1300s who named embryology as “the fish stage.”
Cognitively or not, our bodies remember who we were before and across time. This memory is not just a whiff of an idea, it is baked into our DNA. It is a living thing; bone memory from collagen-fish-life to gravity-bearing life provides the layers of wisdom that support your bone to repair itself into its same shape after it has been broken. Each evolutionary shift holds within itself every moment that happened before, a collective generational chatter that weaves back and forth between lessons. These ancient times are not gone, they are just deeply embedded and are constantly whispering to the present moment. Even the oldest ones, while faint, are discernible if we listen.
The exact same process is here, in every word-story we speak. The past spirit-stories are here, waiting for us to hear them, to let them in.
Even if your people have only spoken English for a few generations or English is not the first language you learned to speak, you still dance with the spirits and memories of any language each time you speak it. Even when this is a form of violence through forced assimilation, it is possible to make friends with the spirits in a word and let that word shape itself around the liberation of your tongue. This happens every day and so English is constantly changing. Finsta. Flex. Turnt. Spanglish. Creole. ABE. Liberation, power, culture, authority, story, home. Thank you for adding new life to words that have often got lost over the last 1500 years.
In 2022, the word “care” is defined as a kind of distanced form of regard or even something less alive, “the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something.” It’s a practical word, for sure, and it’s a word that still works to get at the things that want to be done. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha unpacks the word into a space of liberation with their book, Care Work. Their book is a way of transforming the violence-meanings that many present-day definitions of the word carry: some kind of responsibility or burden, a process devoid of sovereignty and choice for those on the receiving end of care.
How we do care is different from how we are care. It’s different from living in relationship to, well, relationships as being the center of our lives and care as the aliveness of attending to those relationships.
And so the word, in its oldest sense, is the clear articulation of a scream, a shout that interrupts whatever is going so the rest of the collective can pay attention to what is happening.
Many years ago, I asked one of my teacher-friends if I could call them to check in during a hard life situation. My friend told me that if I ever feel the instinct, the urge to reach out to them for whatever reason, that I should just reach out. It’s their job, they said, to then respond with whatever is true for them at that moment and out of this builds the shape of relationship. They would rather know that I am living and responding to the truth of my life rather than anticipating what I think is or isn’t wanted and needed by them.
That offering from my teacher-friend has taught me, again and again, in the 15 or so years since she first said it to me. It’s helped unpack early training around the word care: the expected anticipation of what is or isn’t needed/wanted from those around me, all wrapped up with anxiety around getting it right. I, like most of you, have spent a lot of time losing that clear sense of instinct and desire through privileging anticipating what I THINK you need, without ever asking for your input or consent. For many of us, that gap between our own instincts/desires and the people around us has been shaped by histories and present-moment truths of violence, as well as by the subtle shaping of conditional belonging.
In its ancient roots, care was clear. Feel that instinct and start to yell, begin to scream. What happens on the other side of that moment of interruption is about who is there and who is not there and how they all respond at the moment. And we learn by their response - or lack of it - and that keeps building relationship and trust. The ancient ones wanted to make sure that when it was needed, someone screamed. This is the oldest feeling of care: being a part of a web of relationships, with all living beings, and noticing when something is off-balance, not right, or in danger. And then we scream. The oldest feeling of care is knowing that, if something is not right, unsettled or dangerous in your life, someone else will notice and they, too, will scream.
As generations passed, the people who lived the story-word “care” listened and noticed that sometimes there is something in the way of our scream/yell when a scream/yell is desperately needed. And so the story-word grew, sending out little branches to add new words and new meaning.
And the story-words that grew next were sounds that mean to lament.
To grieve.
So the ancestor-evolution of the word goes like this: from call out to lament to grief. This is what it is to care.
That sentence says it all, doesn’t it? What gets in the way of our ability to scream in a moment when a scream is necessary, to call out for help, to yell for attention, to attend to a moment of need? What is in the way are the things still tight-held in our tissues; those things we don’t know how to let go of.
To grieve.
And the branches kept splitting because the story-word, the spirit of the word “care” moved alongside the activation of nervous systems and the confusion of cultures and experiences of harm-never-healed and the word continued to split in multiple directions, becoming the words for being anxious or solicitous. Becoming words for complaining and in the Dutch and German people-spaces, becoming words for stingy and scarce.
Pause here. Bring into your memory a moment - or multiple moments - when care was needed - by you or someone else - and what rose in your body, in their body, was a complaint or anxiety, was the feeling that there was not enough… of something: time, attention, cash. Bring the feeling of those things in to your body, truly invite them in, these word-spirits that emerged between the time of the clear scream and the time of care-as-provision-of-services.
What do you notice? What is familiar in this, what is not? Say what you notice out loud. Write it down. Share it with someone else.
These are the spirits of these story-words that are rising up in your memory.
Notice if there are other memories, other spirits to listen to: a moment when the call out, the shout that something needs to change, something is needed was clear and without a speck of baggage. If you have that memory of care, then you are listening to the oldest story-word, the ancient ones that are still here, still discernible on the landscape.
The more generations your people have spoken English, the more likely all of those spirits are crowded in you, along with the others. Culture, or a community’s collective agreement on the best way to survive (thank you, John Mohawk) is how we learn to listen to these story-words, to look for some spirits embedded in a word’s letters and to not see the others. And so care becomes the services we provide and many of us have forgotten the simple exhale of a scream that says, right now, more than anything, we have to stop.
As I write this, the feeling that rises up in me is grief, so much grief. I am imagining the generations of people who lived these words into different stories, from trusting that someone would notice if they had disappeared and would call out for the attention needed to bring them back in…. to then the people who feel anxious and overwhelmed when there is a need. The people who worry that there will not be enough attention for their pain, who have learned to gather attention to them like water in a time of the heaviest drought, focusing on their own survival and forgetting the thirst of those around them.
I dream them, listen for them, and what wells up is grief.
It is good for the old ones who are trapped in these story-words, lost in one part of time and disconnected from the rest, to feel us grieve for them.
And so I pause, like this, and listen.
Each word carries all of its story-memories in the same way that our bodies carry the memory of fish and bird and monkey, as well as algae and elm and baobab. In the same way that each river bed carries the memory of stop and start and bend again. The headwaters come from multiple spaces, weaving together with different personalities and intentions. Our work is to listen, from our deepest insides, and to instinct-scream and strategy-call-out when one of us are there, on the sides, suffering. This is true when the suffering is neighbor and friend, as well as stranger, as well as elm and ash and pond and river.
One of my friends often asks, as a kind of prayer, what would it take for each one of us to leave our homes and say no more, no more, no more. No more participating in any system, any practice that denies the aliveness of another, even if we ourselves are safe and warm inside. It’s taken me years of listening to him to realize that the question he is asking, really asking, is what will it take for each one of us, for me, to care, deeply care as a way of being, not as a prethought action or responsibility.
And so we listen for the scream, on our deepest inside, or for the one that comes echoing from the other side of the window.
*****
I started deep-listening to the word “care” in preparation for an event I was invited to participate in on racial covenants in Minneapolis. As I was getting ready, two things kept running through my heart/thoughts: the land did not consent to these racial covenants and we are all coming to this event because we care. That led to just listening to the word “care” along with listening to the land as preparation.
After the event, the word “care” still kept running through me and then a few days ago, the father of someone I care deeply about, whose grandchildren are some of the children I have life-committed to, began to pass. I watched/participated as a whole web of love and action responded to him, to his partner, to the web of children and grandchildren nearby. It began with a call, a yell through text at 10:30 in the morning, just a text-call before any real details were known. Throughout the day, the collective body of love around this man turned itself on, even when there wasn’t a lot to do. And this brought me another sensing into the word, the way that care is not an action, although it can inspire action, but is a way of being, a series of relationships. There is nothing new about that. It’s what every conversation about mutual aid and collective care implies. So I write this piece with those memories moving through my personal use of this story-word of “care.” Gratitude to JustDeeds and with deep love for Larry Schaefer and the family and kin who surround him.
As the final note, I am posting this on the National Day of Remembrance for US Indian Boarding Schools - or Orange Shirt Day, September 30 (yeah, it says the 29th up top but I started laying it out yesterday). There were 16 Indian boarding schools in Minnesota where I live. Do you know where they were near your home and who was forced there? There are many beloveds in my life who were directly impacted by these schools - either by being forced to attend or being raised by those who did. I was already a child in school myself when forced attendance was finally ended, even as many kept running after that, even as some are still running today. I end this piece with this because it took many many many generations of yelling, calling out and screaming before this shape of forced removal was ended. It took that long because of the frozen-ness, and violence, of those who have lost the oldest meaning of care and therefore had and have forgotten how to listen. Consider giving to the Boarding School Healing Alliance today.
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*Slight warning, some of the language of this research piece names historical ableist ideologies without interrupting them.
All of the linguistic histories in this piece come from etymonline.com. I read lots of etymological texts (the histories of words) as a kind of culture work, and then I listen. Nothing I am writing above intends to be part of an academic discussion of the word care. I know that every academic discipline is a container of disagreement over what a thing is or isn’t. This is just a conversation that arises from listening to the story in the word.