Won't you be my neighbor?

Circling HomeWork #39

With Art x Care rapidly approaching (two-ish weeks away, on October 25!), Krystiana and I are going to share some of our own, non-exhaustive thoughts on care and why we wanted to create this event in this month’s HomeWork newsletters. New HomeWork issues are open to all readers in October, with appreciation to our paid subscribers.

As my husband and I consider mid- to long-term plans and where we may end up geographically, I have been doing a lot of thinking about and living within the mutual care of our neighbors. Family, friends, or institutional care contexts (like medical care, schools, childcare, churches) may come to mind first for me when considering care, but our neighborhood and neighbors are the setting we move around and through, depart out from and return home to. So I wanted to write a little something about this.

But first, a flyer ⭐💫✨

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Growing up in the Indianapolis suburbs, I knew some of my neighbors, or more accurately I knew the neighbor kids along my street. I knew the phone number of the girls across the street better than my own (and embarrassingly, one time got mixed up and provided an adult with my neighbor’s home number rather than my parents’). Last year, Edan Lepucki¹ wrote a newsletter about the glory of impromptu and unscheduled playdates, made more possible by families with similarly-aged children to hers who moved close by. It made me realize that many of my values around place and community go back to those days of children played outside together across various houses, yards, and cul-de-sacs. Life is better when you have a friend just down the block.

Among my peers the suburbs often get a bad rap, or are perhaps ignored entirely except for wistful conversations about washers and dryers, garbage disposals, and a backyard that might be possible there one day. It’s possible to flee to the suburbs as an individualistic and isolating way to live, but I think there’s a certain kind of suburban experience which I was fortunate to have and actually primed me quite well for a more community-oriented life. From moving downtown into the city I’d grown up orbiting for college to the much, much larger city where I now live.

This isn’t to pit city and suburban neighborhoods against one another, but rather to say that playing with the neighbor kids, borrowing or loaning a cup of flour, chatting with a familiar face on a walk, or jumping in to help out a neighbor in a tough spot is relevant anywhere.

There is a teaching in the new testament called the parable of the good Samaritan². I think it’s pretty familiar even to folks who aren’t religious, but in short it illustrates that the true neighbor demonstrates love by showing mercy to those he interacts with, rather than falling back on something more identitarian.

Living in Brooklyn during the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, folks quickly responded—posting flyers and gathering people virtually to coordinate distribution of food, masks, and other supplies to people who needed them when other services were unavailable or unsafe. Participation is a good place to start when you are overwhelmed or don’t know where to begin. Showing up for a project you didn’t have to conceive builds your muscle and faith for community support. It hones your ability to pay attention to those around you, and to ask for help when you need it.

In yoga’s ethical tradition, the yamas teach us to embody non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing and non-hoarding. Ways of being in communion with those around us which are deeply caring in their generosity, flexibility and honesty and which acknowledge the ways our lives are rooted in interbeing³.

If we have values of communal care in the religious, political, or philosophical realms, I am interested in noticing and naming where those ideals intersect with how we live our daily lives. Not in a “gotcha” way, but in an attempt to move toward integrity.

It’s not so high-minded, really. Being a neighbor is practical. Just in the past week or so in our life and neighborhood, a lot of care has been passed around:

• We got a flat tire and needed to borrow some tools. One neighbor who didn’t have what we needed put us in touch with another who did, and he loaned us a tire iron and pump.

• A neighbor needed someone to watch her son for a few minutes while she ran an errand, so I did.

• The community garden where I’m a member gave away freshly harvested produce to people who stopped by.

I am interested in where and how these everyday actions scaffold the possibility of care that stretches wider and holds even more. It’s not just chores either, it’s organizing the block party, getting a stylish new item of clothing someone was discarding, starting a group chat with others in the building, or hosting cookouts at home. Not approaching moments of human connection in a calculating way by any means, but more so realizing with a little distance and reflection that all of those small moments are necessary to get to a place of increasing trust and interconnection.

Building relationships takes time, but do you know that proverb about the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago, or today. I think getting to know your neighbors works the same way.

Though I’m always half-researching how people (especially artists) manage their life as parents by bookmarking essays the one I shared above, or thinking back to how my parents raised my siblings and me, I also am really committed to not framing caregiving as something that begins only or exclusively when you yourself have a child. This is a conversation we’re hoping to extend through the artists who will be sharing at Art x Care, who have experience, skill, and insight to share in not just how their art practice bumps up against parenting, but also community organizing, neighborhood involvement, facilitating support for other artists, working in a medical profession, participating in spiritual communities, and more.

Hope to see you there, and I look forward to continuing to think together on this topic more in the weeks and months ahead as we welcome event speakers back to the newsletter as featured artists.

Kat Ryals thinks like a project manager

The Day Job Dispatch

Transferable Skills

See also: small town clothes + studio announcements

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1. featured in Circling Issue #19

2. Luke 10:25-37

3. term coined by Thich Nhat Hahn; his book on the subject—Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism