I’ve known rivers: ancient, dusky rivers.

“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care. Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.”

Ecosystems flourish because they are teeming with diversity. This can teach us a lot about human relationships, as we often reject those ‘not like us’ in favour of those who seem outwardly familiar. Living connections depend on two basic things: allowing the self to exist while at the same time helping other(s) come alive. We lack this idea of reciprocity in our relationships. If you look at philosophical books about love, you find that you allegedly love someone or something because you gain what you don’t already possess as an individual. In this view, love is a resource. It is something we can ‘extract’, just as we extract from the living land. We have colonised love in the West. As we all know from the partnership war zone, such relationships often fail because they inhibit the freedom of others. They fail because they are not faithful to ecological reality. Healthy relating means growing through the other’s growth. For me, this is a working definition of love: a practice that makes others alive and, through this, enlivens yourself. Our bodies still function according to this ecological love, a harbinger of our animal nature.