an ode to my garden...
Nothing drives Mindimooyenh more crazy than “self-care.”
“We are self-caring our way to fascism,” they yell.
I try and explain.
“That’s not a thing,” they reply. “It is just care.”
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (pg.86)
I laugh because, damn, I’ve never felt so heard. Fingers snap involuntarily.
Simpson, again, has succinctly, digestibly, and beautifully articulated the way capitalism tries to atomize us; to remove us from the ecology we are embedded in. We all need to take care of ourselves and we should probably do it more often. But what does care look like? So often, self-care is misunderstood.
March 2020: Covid-19 hits, my roommates move out, my partner and I split up, university goes online, dad gets sick, sister’s partner is in Lebanon, white supremacy is raging, “natural” disasters are headlining… none of my friends are ok. Self-care has never been more important. I need to start a garden.
The backyard plot of dry sand devoid of all nutrients is teaming with ivy. Ivy has these wild rhizomes that can sprout into a new plant within days, from the tiniest nubbin. Ivy is like capitalism, forcing itself on every inch of the garden, expanding at the expense of (bio)diversity. Ivy practices this kind of self-care that is toxic to everything around it – it quite literally chokes out all of its neighbours, in order to take care of itself.
That evening, I’m pondering the relationship between capitalism, ivy, people jet-setting far away for a retreat vacation, and how my ex can’t find the time or energy to have the breakup conversation. All of these things come back to a perception of self-care that disregards how interdependent we are on one another. This interdependence is a fundamental aspect of ecology – any grade 5 student can tell you about “the web of life.” Out of the discourse of ecology, as Berkes (2013) explains, there is (finally) an emerging idea of human societies (not just human bodies) as “part of the web of life within the ecosystem.” This inherently means culture - personal and spiritual elements, which Berkes claims have been missing from scientific ecology, are part of the web of life, too.
If we understood ourselves as embedded in reciprocal relationships with one another, with our food, with our work, with all the other beings on the planet, then inserting “self” into “care” seems ridiculous. In a circular, reciprocal system, we are needed, and we rely on others, too. Caring for yourself is caring for others. And when self-care is harmful to others (human or non-human), it is not care.
This idea of reciprocity is anything but new to many First Nations cultures, as Kimmerer (2011) beautifully shares. Sweetgrass is a plant that thrives when it is tended to and harvested by humans. Clam gardens, too, are abundant when stewarded and harvested by humans. Restoration, with reciprocity in mind, “is not complete until people can once again eat the fish” (Kimmerer 2011, p. 260).
In the face of the global grand challenges, there seems to be a tendency to reach for more evidence, more technical complexity, more quantitative data. And while yes, ecological systems are incredibly complex and there is, of course, mountains that we don’t know, perhaps the solutions are not quite so. Simply the way we think about our place and role in the world directly impacts the decisions we collectively make and the effects those have on biodiversity, climate, and ultimately, ourselves.
Perhaps the real crisis we are facing is the separation of the ecology of society from this other “natural” ecology. Shifting our perceptions of self in relation to others can help repair the connections that capitalism has tried so hard to destroy. Perhaps this is the groundwork to replace a system of inequality, extraction, separation and othering with an ecology of care.
References:
Berkes, F. (2012). Sacred Ecology. 3rd Ed. Routledge, New York, NY.
Guardian, The. 'Bringing beaches back to life': the First Nations restoring ancient clam gardens. Retrieved from
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/23/clam-gardens-first-nations-beaches-pacific-northwestOctober 8, 2020.
Kimmerer R. (2011). Restoration and Reciprocity: The Contributions of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. In: Egan D., Hjerpe E.E., Abrams J. (eds) Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration. Society for Ecological Restoration. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_18
Simpson, L. (2020). Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. House of Anansi Press, Canada.
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