Community Tuesdays Chat: Mutual Aid
Creating a catalog of unabashed gifts
Hear ye! hear ye! I am here
to holler that I have hauled tons—by which I don’t mean lots,
I mean tons — of cowshit
and stood ankle deep in swales of maggots
swirling the spent beer grains
the brewery man was good enough to dump off
holding his nose, for they smell very bad,
but make the compost writhe giddy and lick its lips,
twirling dung with my pitchfork
again and again
with hundreds and hundreds of other people,
we dreamt an orchard this way,
furrowing our brows,
and hauling our wheelbarrows,
and sweating through our shirts,
and two years later there was a party
at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth,
one of which, a liberty apple, after being watered in
was tamped by a baby barefoot
with a bow hanging in her hair
biting her lip in her joyous work
and friends this is the realest place I know,
it makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful,
you could ride your bike there
or roller skate or catch the bus
there is a fence and a gate twisted by hand,
there is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana,
it will make you gasp.
– Ross Gay, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude”
This week, we’re debuting our first “Mutual Aid” themed chat thread.
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, “mutual aid” refers to a practice of community care in which everyone has something to offer, and everyone gets to need something from the community.
Mutual aid offers a critique of capitalism, which tells us that the only way to exchange goods and services with one another is by selling them to the highest bidder, or that our highest worth lies in doing whatever this broken system wants us to do and then waiting patiently to be rewarded for it. .
It offers an invitation to look, as often as we can, for other ways to be of service beyond selling our time and then writing donation checks with the money.
Mutual aid also offers us a way to step out of any story that tells us that we must always be giving, or always receiving.
It allows us to step instead into a more open, non-hierarchical space with one another, in which we can see ourselves and others as having the capacity and the right to both give and receive.
As longtime organizer Kim Kelly points out in LitHub:
To make a crucial distinction, mutual aid is not charity; there is no means testing, no judgement, no quid pro quo or paternalistic notions about “saving” people. It’s about giving what you can to someone who needs it, and knowing that, if the roles were reversed, someone else would step in to help you.
Small wonder, then, that this phrase is having a moment.
Mutual aid is what this moment requires of us, and what we require of it.
One of the most powerful recent examples I’ve seen of mutual aid in action came during the L.A. fires. Mutual Aid LA shared this spreadsheet widely, which then enabled Angelenos to coordinate everything from caring for homeless pets to distributing allergen-free meals and masks where needed, all without a single dollar exchanging hands. (They’ve since updated their system to an even more efficient one – take a look here.)
Within the communities we create online, I see a similar spirit of mutual aid at play.
of hosts a regular community chat thread called ADVICE TIME, in which people ask for and offer advice to people who are stuck in some sticky situations, and of hosts a CLASSIFIEDS feature that functions similarly, but for goods and services.In my own classrooms, I have often started the year with activities that help us all to see and share in the gifts my students bring. One of my favorites is an activity called What I bring, originally inspired by the brilliant Tom Rademacher, in which the students create art to hang in the classroom all year on this theme — detailing their gifts as computer whisperers, spouters of football facts and go-to shoulders to cry on.
Loving-kindness meditation, in its own way, can feel like a kind of spiritual mutual aid. In this kind of meditation, we acknowledge that what we want for ourselves, we also want for others, and what we wish for others to have, we too deserve for ourselves. When fervently practiced, it can even dissolve the distinctions between “us” and “others.”
All of these miraculous kinds of community care have inspired this week’s Community Tuesday thread prompt.
[For an explanation of what we’re trying to do with Community Tuesdays, see last week’s post and kick-off thread, which is still active if you’d like to chime in.]
In this community of caregivers, I know there are people who have much to offer – and that we also know what it’s like to feel depleted, in need of receiving, but not sure of how to ask.
So, in this initial thread, I thought I’d invite us all to complete these two simple sentences:
I love to _______ for other people.
I love it when other people _____ for me.
Join the chat here:
Need some examples?
Here’s how I might answer this one for myself:
My friend Emily once told me that she thinks my favorite thing to create is “spaces of transformation.” Which is true. I love creating any kind of container for learning and growth, whether it’s a classroom, an online community, or a garden. Along those lines, something I really love to do for people is to do something I call “watching the light,” either in their community spaces or in their actual gardens. We sit together and breathe, then take inventory of where things feel life-giving and fertile, where things feel as though they’re going to need a few months or years of soil remediation before they yield the desired results. We also bring self-compassion and acceptance to the tricky dark areas where it’s long past time to stop tilling. I find that often people don’t get permission to do this kind of breathing and thinking with another safe person, and that kind of clarity and witness is often what we need to move from a stuck place, when it comes to our intentions, to one that’s more workable for us.
I really love it when other people create spaces of nourishment for me, whether through hosting a yoga class or a writing class where I can relax my body, go inward, and focus on learning and sharing with others. I also really love it when that space includes food. I’m a decent cook, but I’ve never been a great baker, and often, due to my chronic illness, I don’t have the spoons to do any cooking at all. A few years ago I wrote this essay honoring all the people who brought me food after a life-shattering loss, and how much that meant to me. Food is definitely my love language.
In my interview series, I’ve also posed questions like this to interviewees, or they’ve brought it up themselves.
For example:
In this interview with educator Jonny Adler, Jonny shares that he loves to create opportunities for his friends to come together, and he especially likes crafting tea ceremonies that are unique to the people involved. He also really loves it when other people make fun plans for him without requiring a lot of decision-making from him, whether it’s picking the restaurant or figuring out what movie to see afterwards.
In this interview with the Rev. Molly Bolton, Molly shares that when they worked as a hospital chaplain, they really loved to offer poetry, particularly to people who were not religious, as a way of still creating a sense of ritual and sacredness around healing and loss. They would also host poetry workshops for adolescents within a teen psych unit, and remind those teens that even when they felt so low, they still had much to offer: their poetry to one another, and their presence and witnessing as an audience. I still find this notion to be so empowering – the idea that when we have nothing left to give, we can still give someone else our attention and presence.
I think too of an essay I once wrote about the last days of my brother’s life. He is on my mind this week – yesterday (March 31) would have been his 37th birthday, had we not lost him to brain cancer ten years ago.
My brother had so many fascinating and talented friends, and I had the privilege of meeting them as they all came to say their goodbyes during his last days and offer him comfort. An art therapist brought a beautiful set of paints. A letterpress artist brought a large piece of art he’d created so that we could all sign it for him, and a pro skateboarder brought a custom board for the same purpose. A musician brought her guitar and sang one of his favorite songs, and he mouthed along with the words, even after he had lost the ability to speak.
And my friend Nina was there, after my brother died, piling my Styrofoam plate high with lasagna in the Buffalo fire hall where we ultimately held his post-memorial lunch. Doing for me what she knew I could not, on that day, do for myself.
There are seasons in our lives, like that one, in which we need to be reminded of the beauty of receiving. And there are other seasons in which we need to be reminded that no matter how weak or scared or sad we feel, we still have something precious to offer.
During a time when so many sacred things are being put at risk by profit-driven, poison-addled people, there is so much power in claiming these gifts that we have, and claiming the spaces and freedom we have to exchange them, in ways that subvert and side-step the very notion of profit itself.
There is so much power in reminding ourselves that there are things we have that no one can take away, and that only we can give.
Such a beautiful post.