Part journal entry, part ethnography, part poetry, this hybrid post is one element in an imagined series of thoughts on care, its manifestations and implications. For a recording of this post, see my Substack.

Local/Global Communities of Care is on Thursday 9th March, an evening of short readings and films by women and gender-variant filmmakers, both local and global, which explore anti-capitalist practices of care, repair, and solidarity across human and non-human worlds.

Care sustains life. Care is a response to suffering. Care is compassion and empathy, kindness and pity, it is vulnerability, dependency and intimacy.

Care cannot be saved, paused, stored and accessed asynchronously. Care is not digital, it happens offline. Care is in the moment, care is now. Care is hope.

When my grandmother died, my mother was on her way to a wedding with the flowers for the reception. She phoned me from the motorway.

‘Are you still going?’ I asked.

‘Well, yes.’ Mother seemed surprised that I’d asked and carried on with her journey.

Was that callousness or triage? Such as could be saved in the present moment.

* * *

The noun care is from Old English caru, caeru – ‘sorrow, anxiety, grief,’ and ‘burdens of mind; serious mental attention.’ In late Old English care also signifies ‘concern, anxiety caused by the apprehension of evil or the weight of many burdens,’ from proto-Germanic *karo ‘lament, grief, care.’

Also from Old Saxon kara ‘sorrow.’

The meaning ‘charge, oversight, attention or heed with a view to safety or protection’ is attested from 1400.

The verb care is from Old English carian, caerian, ‘be anxious or solicitous; grief; feel concern or interest,’ from proto Germanic *karo ‘lament,’ hence ‘grief, care.’ (source also of Old Saxon, ‘to lament, to care, sorrow, complain.’)

To not care as a negative dismissal is attested from the mid thirteenth century. The phrase couldn’t care less is from 1946.

Care also has figured since the 1580s in many ‘similes of indifference’ in the form of don’t care a ____

fig
pin
bean
button
shit
straw
rush
point
penny
snap.

* * *

To care is to be present to the griefs and burdens of our season.

To lament what has been lost.

It is a mourning. A recognition of absence.

I remember how I cried so much the night my father died. I sat and smoked on a bench in the garden, snow falling all around me and my hands – the hands I had used to stroke his hair as he lay dying – were full of pins and needles jabbing at my skin, wanting to break free of the flesh.

Roland Barthes wrote the following entry in his Mourning Diary after the death of his mother:

Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something when I was taking care of her. Once, towards the end, half-conscious, she replied faintly, voilà (I’m here, a word we used to each other all our lives.) - November 5

Care is the acknowledgement of presence - I’m here, voila - and nurturing growth - mother love, self love, choose love.

Care is a quality of attention, a holding of both the present and the absent.

What is this life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare … the poet, WH Davies, asked famously.

Is to care to act?

‘When I am in despair, it feels as if whichever violent death I’ve learned of recently is occurring right in front of me, that the suffering has no end to it, that its enormity is matched only by the immensity of my guilt and powerlessness. When I am not in despair I can act. The guilt transforms to responsibility, the powerlessness to resolve.’ Heather Christle, The Crying Book

* * *

What does it mean to care for your family? To cook, to feed, to play, to collect, to teach, to share. What if you find it hard to care or you resent caring, resent the time stolen, the burden of looking after an elderly relative or a spouse? What if you didn’t receive any care as a child, meaning you don’t know how to offer care now?

* * *

When my kids hurt themselves, I don’t always know what to say. Only my body knows to embrace.

* * *

The last time I remember crying in public was when I saw an ancient schist relief of three mother goddesses in the museum at the Roman Baths. It was an undeniable, totally involuntary feeling that came over me. It was a feeling of recognition, relief and comfort. The ritual of making offerings to the mother goddesses in Iron Age and Roman Britain absorbed people’s care, their worries and anxieties, their burdens. I had been writing about them, exploring their relevance to our age now and their particular popularity in my local area of South West England, most especially in Cirencester and Bath. It is thought votive offerings were given to mother goddesses at temple sites, in springs and along rivers, in the hope for a return of health and well-being, nurture and restoration.

The needs of now.

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What would a poetics of care look like? Denise Saul brings us close to an answer in her T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisted collection The Room Between Us (Pavillion, 2022) which explores a mother’s illness and a daughter’s caring role. In the poem ‘Stone Altar,’ Saul gestures towards the care of mourning as she explores ritual practices, ancestry and the objects we imbue with memory and meaning:

Stone Altar

I am not sure how the stone travelled

from British Guiana but the story goes

my mother brought it to England to remind her

of a passing like the way one remembers

the flight of a bird by keeping its feather.

What I thought was limestone was chalk

passed down from grandmother Frances

found among other stones in a black handbag

pushed to the back of a cabinet.

That autumn I asked my sister to tell me about

the stone when I sifted through the possessions.

When chalk gave away some dust, she held it

up to the light and told me about

other things in a world of decay.

It seemed easy enough for her to

wipe away the dust from her fingers.

No-one receives what they truly want.

It took me a while to understand all of this

when I placed the chalk on an altar

next to blue kyanite stones I collected.

Watch Denise Saul talk about her work here.

* * *

I became fascinated by the cult of the mother goddesses during the second summer of the pandemic when I swam/walked along the River Churn, a journey which was also a search for home, belonging, a sense of family and care. The river would likely have been a site of worship for the local mother goddess cult centuries before my journey, a place where pilgrims went to cast their votives from the altar of the bank and pray for good health and wellness.

During my trek I developed a condition called post-thrombotic syndrome as a result of a deep vein thrombosis I’d got from Covid. PTS is officially recognised as a disability and can cause long term chronic pain and other debilitating symptoms. Over the course of that summer my capacity to walk grew less and less, while my leg grew ever more tumescent, lurid and painful. I am not, I admit, good at self-care and had not sought out any help.

During one visit to the river, I caught my leg on some barbed wire which had been installed to deter access to the water and the bleeding was so bad that I was forced to head off in search of a bandage. A couple of weeks later, I was unable to walk more than a few steps.

* * *

Care is politicised more than ever right now. A photo of the ex-Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock in the paper last week showed him holding up an enamel badge with the word ‘care’ written across it. Leaked documents indicate he went against advice to test people on entry to care homes early in the pandemic. Overall, more than 39,000 care home residents died with the virus between 10 April 2020 and 31 March 2021.

Every day there is a new reason to doubt the care of our national leadership. Just this week, we see the same government moving to make it illegal to arrive on our shores by small boat and claim asylum. Channel migrants will be removed from the UK, banned from future re-entry and unable to apply for British citizenship under new legislation.

“They don’t care about us.”

Care is not inalienable.

* * *

I was lucky. I am lucky. Some old friends came to visit and persuaded me to get some help. I have some treatment which, although it hasn’t cured the condition, means that I am pain-free and able to walk again. I live in hope that someday soon it will pass. I was able to finish my swim-walk on the river and deepen my connection to and knowledge of the mother goddesses, especially Cuda, our Cotswold goddess, a stone relief for whom was discovered in Daglingworth stream, a tributary of the Churn.

Was this sense of connection I developed with the river and the mother goddesses a fantasy? Around the world, rivers have been granted legal personhood as a means of protecting them, as a means of care. Spending time with rivers, particularly for indigenous people whose land-based practices have been violently disrupted by colonialism, has been called a form of healing.[i]

I don’t buy in to the essentialist narratives of therapeutic mother figures that help to sustain capitalist patriarchy and hinder our freedoms. But I am mindful of the palimpsest of the river, the many layers that go to make up its local history, of which I am a part. Through the intimacy of our encounter the river made me feel at home, it felt like a place that held me safe, close and made me feel cared for. The experience of following its course healed something in me and I came to feel as if I were both guardian and protected by the waters.

The impact of the pandemic on my own body will forever be bound up with my pilgrimage along the Churn and its ancient history of indigenous devotion.

* * *

Even now, even for many of my highly educated female friends who sort through the laundry piles between Zoom calls while working from home, care is a stereotype and manifest destiny for women. Care is a feminist issue, a race issue, an environmental and a geopolitical issue influencing the lives of women and the disenfranchised of the global south who make up the vast majority of caring professions and people who do the work of care without payment or relief. The currency of time and attention continues to hold so little value.

No hurry. Slow down.

Take the past with you.

Care strengthens me to act.

‘It is no measure of health to be well adjusted,’ as Sinead O’Connor puts it, ‘to a profoundly sick society.’[ii]

Care is resistance in the face of the destruction of natural resources and the callous disregard for the sanctity of human and non-human life. The opposite of care is greed. The opposite of care is isolation. Care as resistance is constructed in a way unfamiliar to the machinations of late capitalism.

Whatever you heal in yourself, you heal in the next generation.

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