FilmOnDeepWater

This word “care’ is old – older than the records can reveal.  Two millennia ago caru originally meant “sorrow” and “grief”.  Strange how it has morphed into its opposite, but that seems to be the way of it.  One of the many wonderful mysteries of a living language.  But what of “caregiving? When I speak of giving care, what is being given?  Fundamentally, what does it mean to say that I care?  To care for?  To care about?  To take care of?  And when this care is being taken, does it mean that it is being taken to, or taken away? 

It is important somehow that this word care does have its roots in sorrow and pain.  Caring is a kind of connecting – a connecting to my own deepest self, the self that is always connected to the deepest, most profound suffering of the world.  Care then seems to be a gift; at least that is what the word seems to be saying to me.  On a deeper level it may be that the words are saying that it is not so much that sorrow is a gift, but that my awareness of this deep sorrow that lies near the center of my soul is the door, the portal, that invites me to participate in the even deeper joyful noise of the world.  “Giving care” then is a way of dipping into the deep well of my own sorrow and moving outward in the action of caring for another. This action of giving care is what transforms my sorrow and grief into connection and joy. 

On the other hand, “taking care of” has a transactional quality to it.  Expressions like “taking care of business” or “taking care of a pet” speak of being responsible for maintaining, rather than creating. “Caretaking” also seems to have a kind of temporary sense to it. Caretakers, paid for their labors, are somehow itinerant in nature, like the caretaker on an estate who lives at the edge of the property and can move on with the usual thirty day notice. 

Someone, even with great skill, who is hired to take care of a garden, will maintain it at least adequately, and perhaps even well. But a gardener, who lovingly “gives care” to her garden, can do nothing less than cause the garden to flourish.  It could be no other way because the well-tended garden then becomes an expression, a manifestation, of this deeper relationship between the caregiver and the cared for.  With every turn of the spade the boundary between the two is increasingly blurred until there is a time when the gardener can no longer tell who is really being cared for in any given moment.

Opportunities to give care are both ubiquitous and fleeting. Ubiquitous because there are always opportunities for me to give care to someone, even if that someone is myself.  These opportunities, squandered as they are more than I would care to know, are still ever present, are presents, gift wrapped lying at my feet.  But these opportunities are fleeting at the same time in the way that the doors of sorrow that serve the vestibule of my soul open and close in a rhythm and pace known only to itself.  I feel, though, that when I am giving care to myself, rather than just “taking care of myself” I am more aware of those open doors in others.  That may well be because in such moments, the doors to my own soul, the doors to my own sorrow, are wide open offering me an invitation to be real.

So the question for me gets distilled down to how do I care for, rather than what do I care about. How I care for myself and my world and all who are between and within determines what I really care about.  And that may well be very different from what I say I care about.  It is not possible for me to care for myself and at the same time fail to take care of myself.  It is truly an act of selfishness on my part when I don’t take care of myself.  Just as selfish as those times when I refuse to allow another to take care of me, when such care is warranted.

It’s remarkable to me now how often I move into questions of how, rather than why.  The how of things is so central to me now.  The how for me right now is writing.  The how is finding my voice and trusting that, in caring for myself in this way, I will hold the tension between generosity and stinginess.  The generosity will show up in my willingness to share my truth of the world, while avoiding the stinginess of withholding that truth from my world and myself.