We need to recognize that care is complex and that we aren't always the heroic caregiver in all the care stories we tell. Care does not happen, despite the familiar pictures in our heads, one-on-one between a single powerful caregiver and a single needy care-receiver. This kind of dyad gives rise to a frightening, seemingly inevitable, outcome of domination. In everyday reality, we negotiate caring needs, responsibilities, caregiving and care-receiving in many directions at once. Once we begin to think about caregivers and care-receivers in more complex relationships, we can easily break down any lingering assumptions that care is necessarily hierarchical.

Start with the plants, follow their inquisitive growth, their running roots and rhizhomes, the widespread movements of their pollen and seeds, and an entire ecology of beings and becomings and comings undone will soon become perceptible. Get caught up in the involutionary momentum that propels these beings to get entangled in one another’s lives and you will soon start to perceive affective ecologies taking shape among the thicket of relations all around you.

—Natasha Myers, anthropologist

Natasha Myers, ‘How to Grow Livable Worlds: Ten Not-so-easy Steps’, in The World to Come, edited by Kerry Oliver Smith, Gainsville, FL, 2018, pp. 53–63.