Community Caregiving

 

“The immediate genius of generosity is that it draws us out of ourselves.”

                                                                                                                                                                                              Wendy Lustbader

I didn’t see the subject of this Slow Lane coming. I have no idea of what I’m going to write. I only know that the title set-off some kind of reverberation that has galvanized me to sit down and see what comes.

I only thought of caregiving as exclusively personal. I’ve had caregivers for almost 17 years now. I’ve been grateful, vulnerable, ashamed, and astonished by the care I’ve received, but I never thought about it in collective terms before, never conceived of caregiving in any collective way— except I have. Without knowing, or even noticing, I’ve been creating and supporting group activity, always intent upon helping a group become a ceremonial ground, a place where one can discover, and be, fully human.

Now, for the first time, I’m realizing that I am a community caregiver. Perhaps, many of us are. I hope many more will be. By labelling these efforts as community caregiving they become visible, and can be valued again.  Caregiving, in general, has been undervalued in this society. It is work that has been left to the underclasses, and the marginalized. It is as if heartbreak, illness, disability, and pain are a unwelcome part of our humanity.

As one of the old, I know that these qualities, as hard as they are, deepen our humanity, and tend to bring out what is most special about our species. Caring then becomes something else. It is supporting the futherment of human evolution, particularly of the heart. A caregiver is love manifest. A mid-wife at the door of Creation.

A community caregiver is someone who is sensitive to the tides of our larger connection. Not just the social dimension of who we are, but the entire ocean of our cosmological togetherness. Those of us gifted with this kind of awareness are moved by tidal forces to create celebratory events which make more explicit the ties of love that bind us, and make being human so poignant.. In any moment a social caregiver can be switched on, and does their best to attract and pull together a cluster of humans.

I didn’t consciously know I was one of them. I thought of myself as a caregiver, a man touched by hopeless courage, bound to what is deeply broken, but because I have lived in this fractoring culture, I never thought of myself as in service to any collective. I’ve been enlightened. There is something so big, that it calls us all in different ways, and some of us have to serve it.

Community, I think, provides an intermediate playground. It is large enough to be the something palpably larger, that it provides a glimpse, of the even larger wholeness we owe ourselves to. In this age, caregiving is gratitude personalized. Community caregiving is the Universe doing self-care.

I suspect, that the luck that steadily comes my way, is somehow related to the quality of community caregiving I do. The gift increases when it is given away. The Universe thrives and expands because caring does.