What the Aunties Have Always Known

On how community care is self care, with MaMuse & Wildchoir

When I was a teenager, I loved Ralph Waldo Emerson, particularly his essay on self-reliance. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. I repeated these words to myself often. Back then my family was large and everyone knew everyone’s business. This was by design. As somewhat recent immigrants, we had learned how to keep our family safe. My mom and aunties would often prod me on the details of my life, cross-referencing information, verifying. I kept several diaries at that time, some of them in code, because I knew that if my diary was discovered it was getting read. Probably by more than one person. 

All of this was done for your own good they liked to tell me, because they loved me. And I felt loved. I also felt stifled. I planned my escape to a mythical land of self-reliance, where one day I could do for myself alone and not worry about anyone else. Think Henry David Thoreau, but Doc Marten boots, drug addiction, and a basement apartment in downtown Seattle.

My journey of rebellious self-reliance indeed led me to some mythical places, but they were scary, too. And self-destructive. It took many years of sobriety for me to finally appreciate my family. During some of the worst days of my addiction, those same aunties helped my mom pull me out of drug dens and bring me home. These are the kind of aunties who will drop everything when called, pick you up from anywhere you ask, and bring along a plate of salami and bread in case you’re hungry. They arrive early to help and stay late to clean up and they never ask for anything in return. They know how to care for you because they know you. They take the time to get up in your business and ask.

It's strange how getting high can make a person feel like they are part of something. At least that's how I felt. At least for a while. I wanted to be free, of my family, of obligation, of expectation. There was a lot of it in my Italian and Catholic upbringing. And in turning to drug culture, I was able to disconnect myself from the culture in which I was raised, and find a whole new culture, a subculture. A whole new reality. And in the new reality, in this secret society, I was cool.

To be cool means to be aloof. To be disconnected. To remain untouched and to not care. 

I tried it, being cool. But I was never very good at it. My mom and my aunties made sure I knew this. Made sure I knew I was part of a family that cared for me, no matter how I tried to disconnect myself from them. My journey of sobriety has been me continually coming to terms with all the ways that I am connected. All the ways that I have been cared for. All the love that is available to me. Even if it isn't perfect.

That's the trick about community. About being mutually dependent. When we are human together, authentic with one another, and we do it close up and over a long period of time, we come to see what love requires: some measure of sacrifice, some measure of forgiveness. Some measure of compassion. And a willingness to care, to lose your cool and get involved. 

We are all, all of us, already connected with one another in this great web of life. And when we choose to be in religious community, we commit to being real with one another, we commit to caring for ourselves, our planet, each other. And in community we discover, none of us have nerves of steel. We are always blowing our cool. This is being human. It happens. In order to thrive in this interdependent, mutually dependent, life/world/community we have to show folks how we honestly feel. And we have to be radically honest with ourselves.

For me, I have learned time and time again. not only am I not cool. I can't be. It's unhealthy to try to be cool. To remain detached, aloof, some piece of the interdependent web that is somehow not dependent. This sort of bifurcation of my heart and my soul is not how I thrive. It is not where humanity thrives, as we navigate this complex modern world that increasingly separates us and calls it progress.

The aunties always knew that Emerson’s idea of self-reliance is a white supremacist lie. And it is always, ultimately, self-destructive. None of us, no matter who we are, relies on ourselves alone. Not even Thoreau, who was famously cared for by his aunties, too. They brought home-cooked meals and fresh laundry to that cabin in the woods. The aunties have always known. We are all inherently interdependent, meaning mutually dependent, dependent on one another to survive. Without community care—without a multitude of generations leaning into that interdependence and making use of it—none of us will make it. The earth and its creatures can live no other way. 

Emerson was wrong. It isn’t self-reliance that secures the integrity of my mind, but self-care. And even that doesn’t secure the integrity of my soul. For the integrity of my soul, I look to my community: my family, my ancestors, the earth, all the communities of people who claim me, and my body, as I claim myself. For the integrity of my soul, I build resilience by building relationships. I follow the example of my aunties, asking for help when I need it and showing up for others when they need me. Interdependence means we rely on one another. We depend upon each other. We actively care. It is the very opposite of self-reliance. And it is the only way we all survive and thrive.

Together may we seek out and honor the ways we are connected. May we feel the call to pour love into one another, into our relationships, into our sacred mutual dependence. May we learn and relearn how to care for one another, how to be honest with one another, and if we ever had it in the first place, how to once and for all, lose our cool.