Webs of Care
Webs of Care
a self paced workshop on naming your needs, and relating to and with care
alie(N)ation is my work made accessible: pace yourself and indulge in your needs around care through this month’s workshop. tailored for every learner, navigate through this map to identify where you’d like to start today:
set your intention
begin workshop: webs of care (with slides)
receive resources
decide on next month’s workshops
Set Your Intention
ask yourself:
am i worthy? the answer is yes
am i deserving? the answer is yes
do i feel differently than the above ‘yes’? if so, this workshop is for you.
do i feel similarly to the above ‘yes’? if so, this workshop is also for you.
now, ask yourself: what are my needs?
You are ready for the workshop.
WEBS OF CARE
You can find all of the slides on the Webs of Care Channel; if you share, I ask that you credit appropriately with: “Webs of Care by [ accrediting either my name: Ingrid Raphael] or my @ [movingbodyofwork on instagram and substack].
How do we connect to our past self, our current self, and who we’d like to be in the future?
The way we interpret time is mostly linear-- moving in a direction, with the past behind us, the present at our feet, and our future ahead.
While this is true, we don’t always experience time in such linear form.
Now let’s ask this question again:
How do you connect to your past self, your current self, and who you’d like to be in the future?
You most likely started to think in a non-linear fashion: maybe you started thinking about the future first, then some memories of your past, your childhood, and then relating that to who you are today, and then back again at another memory in the past, and then propelling to you dreaming about your future self. This trajectory of thought can be visualized in this way below.
Time is relative and your experiences shape your understanding of it.
Your turn!
Visualize how you’d relate to time in your life
Extra perspective on time:
We experience shifting realities. More than ever, this is prevalent in our times during the pandemic. One’s current present circumstance is someone else’s future imagination for themselves and vice-versa.
For example, some are organizing for universal healthcare in the united states while this system is a reality for many in other countries. This sense of conditions warps our sense of time -- what is one’s future imagination can be another’s absent past or current present.
How is this related to care?
Jot down definitions of your understanding of care by filling in the blanks.
This will become your care manifesto that you can always refer back to and add to as you explore your journey with care.
Care Definitions:
Refer to the slide below to see if your definitions of care add to, align with, challenge, compete with, or complement these ways of relating to care.
Care Moves
Care extends in and out: when we focus on receiving care but not giving any — we are focused on the Ego. When we focus on giving care but merely receiving any — we are being SelfLess. And when we both extend care and receive care, we are participating in an “eco” way of relating to ourselves and others
Care can be multi-directional: acts of care take many forms and travel to meet the needs of multiple people. For example, a mutual aid group of organizers meet each others’ need to solve a problem, extending in acts of care— while simultaneously receiving acts of care, from various folks, like donations, volunteering, boosting posts etc…
Care is reciprocal: I would also push that care must be reciprocal in order for it to be truly activated and ignited
Let’s Explore: our experiences with care inform our needs
Look at the worksheet below: on the left, jot down times when care was practiced and how it made you feel. on the right, jot down times when care wasn’t practiced and how that made you feel.
Thank you for holding space for yourself and reflecting on, what may be beautiful/difficult times of, care.
Now Reflect:
What were you missing during that time?
What didn’t you speak up about?
Why did you feel that way?
How do (did) you show up?
What would you do differently?
These questions will help unearth a list of your needs: perhaps it’s to be held, be in community, solitude, rest, softness etc...
Reflecting on your experiences with care helps point you in the direction of naming your needs around care, relating to yourself and others.
Like time, and the practice of care, we just went through a non-linear way of thinking through how to identify our needs!
Care is Activated when we Connect our Needs
When we connect with others, we often have to weigh in another person’s needs to cultivate, build, and honor the relationship you’re trying to maintain with the other.
In this diagram, four people are getting their needs met by connecting with each other via Acts of Care.
Let’s introduce someone else’s need -- after all, we connect with more than one person in our lives.
Their need is Solitude and the other’s is Social Time. In the aspects of COVID, what can be their acts of care with one another?
It could be respecting each other’s time, spacing out how often they socialize, find other ways of socializing that don’t impede on solitude but don’t starve out social time for the other. The Acts of Care could be multiple possibilities: it’s up to the people to identify what works for them.
There can be moments where, because of the triangular shape, one person’s needs are prioritized over another -- or holds more weight.
Aiming to move towards an understanding when care is the Mutual Care circle that holds these connections together can help us move away from hierarchal ways of connecting with one another-- . -- while understanding that, depending on the situation, one’s person’s need may need to be prioritized based on their identity, working condition(s), the situation, or urgency.
There will be times where your needs are incompatible and you can assess this by identifying when Acts of Care aren’t fruitful and making you feel the ways you identified earlier in your left circle.
In those moments, center your needs while also considering others and see what’s possible.
When we name our needs, we name the ways we wish for care to show up in our lives
With the above worksheet, you can organize your needs and visualize how they connect to each other. Like we learned to connect to/with each other’s needs, we must do this with our own individual needs first and foremost.
What are your needs? And what are the Acts of Care that you can practice to meet your needs?
In Conclusion:
Make a mood board :)
I made one relating to the act of care “braiding” that became synonymous with a sense of therapy, calmness, and relating back to myself.
If you have a need that you need the motivation to perform or practice, make a mood board to help you visualize that actualization!
I hope this workshop helped you move through your understanding of care and relating to others xx ~
If you’re inspired by the findings around time, temporality, blackness, follow my are.na channel: time // temporal // black direction that I’ll continue to populate as I learn more about visualizing these findings.
RESOURCES
Read:
Bilphena’s Library features links to free pdfs relating to black feminist, and radical, essays by Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler, Joy James, Huey P. Newton, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison.
Watch:
This Light’s film archive, created by Jerry Bruckheimer, features a google folder called Spotlight: Black Filmmakers with some killer films like the one mentioned earlier Compensation by Zeinabu Irene Davis. I’m unsure how the films were procured but they’re available to watch. Movie date night ideas?
Attend irl or url:
Community Ritual 2021 Digital Spells: all month long, you can receive daily digital offerings from artists
NEXT UP ON ALIE(N)ATION
Workshop #1: Mapping & Exploring Your NeighborHood
Workshop #2: How to Save Images using Code & How to Put Alt - Text
Workshop #3: Hip-Hop Ontology : tapes to cds to ipods to streaming
Let me know if you have an interest in a particular workshop, and I’ll try to prioritize it~