Friday Care Package
The Hyperlocal Tending of Care
Dear Substack Community: Each Friday, I write on care. I have decided to put care into everything I do, including my writing. Care is not a monolith; it does not look the same. I am a Transmasc Latino, so care looks like me cooking for my community and feeding people. It also looks like me not remaining silent about the harm that continues to be perpetuated against the underside of history. I sit down with my cup of mate and write. Today, I invite you back into the framework that I started several weeks ago and explore the ethics of care and the need to speak the painful truth. So, as we normally do, I invite you to breathe, and then consider what I have written.
Friday Care package: The Hyperlocal of Tending Care
Care is not abstract. It is not a grand gesture, not a utopian dream waiting to be realized in some distant, more enlightened future. Care is here, now, in the turning of soil, the refilling of a neighbor’s glass, the quiet work of noticing. Care is hyperlocal, a choreography of small gestures, a devotion to the near-at-hand.
Queer ecologies teach us that care is not linear nor bound by rigid categories. It is relational, ever-expanding, ever-shifting. Catriona Sandilands reminds us that queer ecology “calls into question the very nature of nature,” inviting us to see that tending to life is a practice of refusal—refusing to let extractive systems dictate what is worthy of care, refusing the logic that says only the most visible, the most productive, the most human, deserve attention.
If care is to mean anything, it must be grounded in the body, the land, and the moment. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in Undrowned, asks us to learn from marine mammals, from the way dolphins surface together, from how whales echo across vast distances yet remain attuned to their pod. She teaches that care is breath, is presence, is the willingness to listen before acting. What if our care was like this—slow, rhythmic, accountable to the ones nearest to us?
To practice care in a queer ecological way is to practice it as a verb, as something we do in relationship with and never alone. Vanessa Raditz’s work on queer rurality reminds us that tending land, tending kin, tending self, are all forms of resistance. The small, unnoticed acts of care—sweeping a porch, learning the names of local wildflowers, mending what has torn—these are the gestures that sustain movements.
Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, who co-founded Queer Nature, teaches that survival itself is an act of care. To be queer, trans, disabled, or otherwise othered, and to still find ways to make kin, to build reciprocal bonds with the land and each other, is a defiant reimagining of what care can be. Care is knowing which plants grow near your doorstep that heal, which winds signal a coming storm, which voices in your community need to be held. Care is knowledge woven into the everyday.
And Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, reminds us that care is already happening in the margins. That mutual aid, that the “unsexy” work of checking in, of creating access, of making sure no one is forgotten, is the truest form of collective liberation. “Care is the future,” they write, “if we want it to be.”
So this week, I ask: where is your care most alive? What small, unnoticed act of tending are you already participating in? What gesture of care do you need today? Perhaps tending care is less about reaching for something new and more about returning to the practices we already hold. Perhaps care is waiting to be remembered.
Let us commit, then, to the hyperlocal—
To the soil beneath our feet.
To the neighbor whose name we know.
To the gentle persistence of breath.
This, too, is revolution.
Friday Care Plan: Tending the Hyperlocal
1. Attend to the Microbiome of Your Space
“The ground beneath our feet is alive with networks of reciprocity.”
• Take a few moments to touch the soil, tend to a houseplant, or even notice the mold in forgotten corners. How do you respond to what needs tending rather than controlling?
• Wipe down a neglected surface with attention, not just for cleanliness but as an act of gratitude for the matter that sustains you.
2. Practice Non-Extractive Gathering
“Take what is given, leave what is needed.”
• Gather something hyperlocal—a leaf, a stone, a word, a sound. Let it guide a small reflection on what it means to take without harm.
• If possible, leave something in return: a seed, a note, a bit of beauty, a whisper of gratitude.
3. Queer the Boundaries of Kinship
“Who and what do you include in your circle of care?”
• Reach out to someone—or something—you don’t usually consider part of your kinship network. This could be a neighbor you rarely talk to, a bird you notice daily, or even the wind against your skin.
• Offer a gesture of care: a hello, a bit of food, a prayer, or simple presence.
4. Practice Composting as a Spiritual Act
“What is decaying in you, in your community, in your world? How might it transform?”
• Identify one belief, habit, or assumption that is ready to decompose. Name it.
• In some way—writing, whispering, burying—let it go. Trust that what is breaking down will feed something new.