Hello gentle-people,
As I was organizing this series into a collection that could be accessed on my landing page, I realized I couldn’t find part one. I racked my mind and my posts to see if maybe I accidently changed the name somehow or it ended up somewhere it wasn’t meant to be. I gave up after my search rendered no results…
…it seems I have accidently deleted it.
I will return later with a transcript to replace this piece—perhaps when I also get around to doing what I’ve resolved to do during my publishing break: move my drafts over to a safe place. I have *mumbles incoherently* drafts on here. My biggest fear has been confirmed—I have to be saving these posts somewhere else!
Luckily, I had recorded part 1 before this mishap.
Wishing you all a gentle landing, as I extend that same wish to my weary self today.
Here is part 2 & 3:
Hello, gentle people,
I am always playing with phrases. Maybe you've noticed. Lately, I have been cracking myself up by dropping, “don't threaten me with a good time, into my conversations.”
Today, I am playing with the phrase, I could care less, because it's true—
I could give it my best try.
water sign woman by Lucille Clifton
the woman who feels everything
sits in her new house
waiting for someone to come
who knows how to carry water
without spilling, who knows
why the desert is sprinkled
with salt, why tomorrow
is such a long and ominous word.
they say to the feel things woman
that little she dreams is possible,
that there is only so much
joy to go around, only so much
water. there are no questions
for this, no arguments. she has
to forget to remember the edge
of the sea, they say, to forget
how to swim to the edge, she has
to forget how to feel. the woman
who feels everything sits in her
new house retaining the secret
the desert knew when it walked
up from the ocean, the desert,
so beautiful in her eyes;
water will come again
if you can wait for it.
she feels what the desert feels.
she waits.The troublesome work of defining care
Depending on how you read my intro letter, You might be thinking, “I can't believe Rose J. Percy, writer of A Gentle Landing, is saying she wants to lean into heartlessness. I'm unsubscribing immediately!” And I blame the ambiguous nature of the word care and its many definitions.
I could do a whole series on the definitions and probably write a post a week for the rest of the year. Just look at how many interpretations we could delve into. Now, here I have a screenshot of the definitions of care taken from a Google search, which you can delve into yourself and linger on these definitions, but it's interpreted as a noun and also a verb and comes with so many meanings I didn't even count.
Luckily, I have already written on some definitions of care that I'm partial to. In one post, I talk about the word care through the word “tender” and how we can think about it as a way of a caring attention. One might call it tenderness, and the acceptance of ourselves as tenders. And that post is called Permission to Linger.
I have also written on writing as a practice of care in my series delving into my writing praxis. And that post is called “A Place for Keeping, Writing as a Practice of Care.”
Now, here are some definitions that I am fond of. And for the purposes of this post, I am understanding these four definitions of care and I added a fifth for just the ways I'm playing with the words “carrying” and “care” together.
Care as a tending (or attending), once again, with particular emphasis on attention. Since we have been here before, let’s stick with “tending.”
Care as an attachment or interest. Let’s stick with the word “attachment.” It often feels like the things we care of are a part of us..sometimes we are indeed connected.
Care as avoidance of danger or risk. I will “caution,” instead here, since I also love the phrase “throw caution to the wind.” We can do some fun poetic things with that.
Care as a troubling, a feeling stirred up by what we brood over. I will use the word “burden” here, since something of this definition reminds me to remember the weight.
I will also be playing with caring and carrying in order to drive home one central point: we all have a carrying capacity when it comes to care…even if we hate to admit it.
“You have to turn it off. You have to learn to turn it off.”
I am trying harder to care less every day.
By that I mean, as a child, I used to be overwhelmed by something one might call “car(ry)ing too much. Some might also call it a sense of responsibility or conviction. And I read this book once in college, and it was treated like the pinnacle text for our general education curriculum. And it was assigned as the last text in our ethics class, the capstone text, and it was called Scandalous Obligation by Eric Severson. And I remember reading that book, which talks about Christian responsibility, and I thought, “this book is not for me.”
Because I am the girl who, just upon seeing a commercial on food insecurity affecting children miles away, could not bring herself to enjoy a cookout. An auntie of mine gave me a speech which remains with me forever, and the essence was, “you can't help the children if you cry. You have to learn how to suck it up and feed yourself so you can grow big and strong. Then you can be of much better use to them."
Through the years, I have either taken her advice or shaken it off. And her words led me to see my feelings as an inconvenience in a sphere of caring. And sometimes I can't help but feel she had a point when I find myself stirring in my worries for myself and others. I was a cautious child and I grew into a cautious adult.
I can't help but feel her point when I seem to collect cares or grow a new interest in some injustice in the world beyond my capacity to respond or affect change. And I see her point when as a result of these new interests and attachments, I feel scattered and overwhelmed by all there is to care about.
And I see her point when I feel like I'm failing, either emotionally or through physical challenges I'm still learning about in my attempt to “learn how to carry water,” as it leaks out of the sides of my eyes in this last ditch attempt to demonstrate how burdened I truly am.
So as I consider her words, I felt like I had to learn how to turn something off. And back then I was just barely a teenager and I couldn't name it. So I tried hard when I was overwhelmed to shut off everything. I've included a picture of my monstera plant when I first got it a few months after I first got it in the spring of 2021.
Something had to go.
In the midst of what has been a hard couple of weeks, much of which was defined by embodied mental, emotional, and spiritual pain, I wanted to let something go. I had entertained many different ideas, but I was pretty certain I wanted to cut off my hair. In the past, going bald served as a foundation for embracing a new shift in focus. But I didn't want a new haircut.
I wasn't ready to let go of my locs. I didn't want to get a new haircut. I wasn't ready to let go of my locks, but something had to go. I could feel it.
So I chose to take some cuttings off of this beautiful monstera plant you see in these pictures. I kept the new cuttings and placed the large potted plant, which looked a bit too large to be on the bookshelf that it lived on, out to the curb to be received by some happy stranger.
I first got my monstera in 2021 when I was nurturing a rather large houseplant collection. The room I was staying in had a beautiful big south-facing window. My monstera lived with me through three houses, and I had gifted cuttings from it and watched it grow to require two moss poles for support.
I watched in surprise when it flourished at the last place I lived, a place where I struggled to flourish. My room, small and dark, had a tiny window taken up halfway by an AC unit that was screwed into the window. I used grow lights to try to keep a few plants alive on the bookshelf. My efforts failed. Somehow, though, new leaves kept coming up along the sides of my monstrous potted home.
I wrote down my care instructions on an index card, complete with notes on the last time it was fertilized and how long ago it was repotted. I hoped the next person would not let her die, but I knew there was a chance I could have killed her myself. I worried about killing her constantly.
Now she was someone else's burden.
I now have one less thing to care about.
I could care less.
“Rose, run that song back one more time. The one where you're crying, ‘Help me, I'm dying.’ I love the melody!”
—me in a conversation about how my work feels sometimes.
When I consider that burnout produces apathy, it makes sense that so many people experience a fatigue around their ability to care. It has been a while since I read Burnout: The Secret of Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagowski,but I hold onto one of my takeaways from the definition of burnout outlined in Three parts, the first being emotional exhaustion, the fatigue that comes from caring too much for too long. Many of us know this in a parallel term, compassion fatigue, which often applies to those who work in caring professions or hold domestic caregiving responsibilities.
Our society is continually reinforcing individualism that harms us all, and this definitely impacts what we think caring ought to look like. This is a quote from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha from Care Work Dreaming Disability Justice:
“What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it's disability, health care, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body to a collective responsibility that's maybe even deeply joyful? What does it mean for our movements? Our communities/fam? Ourselves and our own lived experience of disability and chronic illness? What does it mean to wrestle with these ideas of softness and strength, vulnerability, pride, asking for help and not—all of which are deeply raced and classed and gendered?”
These questions posed by Piepzna-Samarasinha serve as an inspiration for me as I write. An understanding that communal care makes a gentle landing possible undergirds all of this. Also true is the understanding that falling, failing, and flailing are often inevitable on this path.
But what does that have to do with caring less? You tell me. How much can you actually hold?
How much are you holding right now in this breath when you think of that question? So let's break it down further into questions that reflect the definitions I've mentioned:;
What are you tending to in this season, really? Not what you are saying you are tending to, but what is actually possible within the time you have allotted?
Are you committed to anything at present that requires more than your hands in order to be well taken care of? Have you stumbled into new interests and formed new attachments? Are these new extremities splintering your capacity? Is there anything you can cut off so that water can flow to what is flourishing? Are there ways these new attachments can be nurtured through a network of care versus your individual care?
Perhaps you are now much more aware of all there is to be afraid of, the dangers and the risks all around you. Has any of this fear contributed to loving yourself and others better? Where can you, “throw caution to the wind,” in recognition that your worrying has its limits with forecasting?
I hope you're keeping track and notice that I left burden out of this list. We will return to it soon enough.
But how about we take a break here? I also included a Lucille Clifton poem here. So you're free to take some time with it and we will come around to it again. because I am learning how to pace myself as an active care. I am taking time with my words, as you've seen in the “perching lines” series.
I am trying to make these newsletters just a bit lighter. But trust, we will come back to the burden. I know because, well, the burden always finds its way back to me.
I am learning how to carry water.
I want to say this marvelous woman's poetry has changed my life. Since the day I first heard, won't you celebrate with me, recited by the dean of students in seminary. I knew it was for me somehow. In the way that I know many Black women, femmes, and men, such as my brothers Robert and Jan, find themselves in her poetry.
June 27th is her birthday. Tomorrow, if you're reading this on pub day. I wanted to do something big. I wanted to have a conversation, read some poems, have folks listen. And as I planned it, the details that I wanted to line up only led me to more questions. But I kept searching for a way to honor her birthday and to recognize how becoming a Lucille Clifton scholar has shaped me. I want to honor her work like Alexis Pauline Gumbs honors the survival ethics of Audre Lorde or how adrienne maree brown devotes herself to the world building of Octavia Butler.
I would be satisfied to honor her with just one twentieth of the archival devotion Professor Honorée Jeffers brought to the three-hour class she taught on the Sankofa Poetics of Lucille Clifton last month.
I have been trying to find a way to study the poetics of Lucille Clifton in some official capacity other than this newsletter, but maybe this is it. And if that is the case, I am thankful to reflect on her poetry here. I am thankful for the people it has brought close to me. I am thankful for the light that came to Lucille Clifton and so glad it seems to have found its way to me.
Or maybe this is my burden: to do as my faves above do in bringing the words they love into the worlds they love. Perhaps this is why it doesn't feel like enough to just do an event, read some poems, and call it a day. I need to write about the light that came to Rose J. Percy. I keep wondering if I am meant to carry it all by myself.
As I sat in my sorrows about this event that never was, I realized I overlooked a very important Cliftonian idea:
The event was her life.
She says, won't you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life?
So I sent some brave emails. I applied for a job I felt too afraid to hope I might get. I shared a burden with my closest friends. I am taking steps to learn to live and love better.1
21:05
I am leaning into my dreams because I must do something with this quote kind of life and quote that I keep surviving. In her invitation is the audacity to believe there is something worth celebrating about being here. I will celebrate her life by living my own more deeply.
If you are reading, then you are bearing witness and thus attending an event I could never plan out in my wildest dreams. So thank you for being here.
Let's keep seeing where this goes.
Ya girl is reading bell hooks and crying everyday.
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