This track includes ten minutes of meditation practice; if that feels like a lot to you, maybe start at the beginning!
Turn on the TV, get comfy, and play this track after you’ve watched the episode: Death in Bloom (Season Two, Episode Seventeen).
P.S. If you’re curious, here you can find out why I started this project.
Recording Transcript (Meditation Begins at 5:05)
Hello again, adventurer!
It is good to be with you. And I promise to try not to put soda and pizza into all your crevices and accidentally set you on fire. Instead, I hope you can “lay down beautiful buddy,” or sit down, or stand up and pace, or whatever your want, and that together, we can find ourselves a bit more care. For ourselves and for the world we share.
Sometimes we give a lot of care to something only for it to get chomped up by one of our friends. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I actually think that offering care to the plants of the earth that sustain us is a very worthwhile use of our care. Maybe even worthy of going to the land of the dead and back.
At the same time, it helps to know what the stakes are of a choice we make on behalf of someone else. It sucks when people are trying to eat your flesh over what you believe to be protecting an incredibly important promise, but it turns out just to be your friend’s snack.
And people abuse our care all the time. Or mislead us, intentionally or otherwise, into doing what they want. (And to be honest, for as lovable as she is, PB seems to be really comfortable controlling the people around her.)
I could be wrong, but I really think that even in situations where our care is not received with the value it deserves, that doesn’t always mean we shouldn’t give it.
It maybe means we should offer ourselves more care, to consider whether someone has earned enough trust to be worthy of a certain kind of care, to ask better questions about why people want the things they do from us, how important it is and what they intend to do with the care we extend. But holding a spirit of abundance when thinking about care seems to me to be a pretty good idea.
Because you never know when someone else’s care might save your ass. Simply name dropping Peppermint Butler might be enough to get you what you want. And community networks of care really do save people all the time. Even if it can be scary to be entangled in a web of reciprocity where someone might ask for our flesh in exchange for a favor.
It’s hard to owe things to each other. It’s hard to know what we owe to each other, and what we owe to ourselves. It’s hard to feel like the care you give is taken for granted, and it’s hard to feel like you don’t have the care you need when you need it. It’s hard to forget who you are. And it’s hard to know how to make all these decisions - about what to do, about who to care about, about how much you ought to care, or what you care is worth, and about what means what to who.
But I think it’s a little simpler if we see care as something that grows when it’s given away, even if it’s given poorly and inconsistently. It helps if we think about care as something that naturally flows out of us, that helps us to discover who we are. I’m not suggesting that you just do everything for everyone, that you sacrifice yourself in making everyone happy, or that you risk death just so your friend can have a snack or a new hairdo. I actually really really don’t think you should do that. Because I think that would be really uncaring to you. And you are also a person who deserves care.
But I also think it’s important that we remember that we aren’t responsible for what other people do with the care that we give. Some people will really honor and reciprocate it, and that’s amazing, and those are trustworthy people who probably easily give care right back to us. Other people might take our care for granted, or objectify it, or objectify us, seeing us as “only good for” what we can give to them. Those people also have things that are amazing about them, I’m sure, but are probably suffering from a mindset that imagines that care is something that’s in short supply, that it’s something that needs to be grabbed up and hoarded. And ironically, what they need is probably more care to understand what they can give, and how good it can feel to give. But it isn’t your singular responsibility to insist that people care about your care in the “right way.” Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. And it’s good for that to influence how you prioritize your time and energy, and who you want to give more care to in each moment. But don’t let it stop you from caring.
Sometimes an adventure to the land of the dead is worth it for its own reasons. For a well-timed, very funny fart joke.
We can’t control the fate of the world, or, if you’re like me, of every plant we try to protect. But we can continue to care.
And we can practice caring.
“So you wanna hop in my paunch and I’ll stretch us down?”
