At least two layers of support: an anatomy of collective care
layers of tree bark
I remember the first time that I learned about the buddy system as a part of organizing. It was during a five-day training held by Training for Change, maybe 12 or 13 years ago. On the first day, they paired us up with someone to be our buddy. Then they asked us to sit down with our buddies, generally share a bit about ourselves, and then to share two specific things: the ways in which we get in our own way and the ways in which our buddy could support us when/if this happened. It was really quite beautiful, and very relieving. The facilitator shared that every one of us, every single one of us, will do things that get in the way of achieving what it is that we want. Along with the truth of systemic or structural barriers, these are the self-created barriers that prevent liberation.
I knew immediately how to answer that question. How do I get in my own way? I stay in my head or I go too fast or I focus on how everyone else is doing rather than attending to what is happening within me. I withdraw and distance, studying things rather than being in them. I contract when scared, isolating myself, rather than extend into risk. I forget to pause and notice what I am learning or experiencing, instead moving quickly on to the next thing. I move away from connection and towards isolation or duty when stressed and overwhelmed. This is pretty typical individualist conditioning. Mine is the flavor that comes from white girl conditioning. Yours might be different.
I willingly told my buddy these things and then told them they could help me check-in during breaks, match breaths with me, remind me to slow down, and help me orient to the present. To pause. My buddy told me theirs, we hugged our consent out, and then mostly forgot how to show up for each other during the rest of the training. Not out of malice, but because we were still learning to hold this layered attention: what is happening in front of us, what is happening within us, and what is happening within the body of the one we are attending. We didn’t completely forget. We remembered in stutters. It was clear we both needed more practice.
****
Our first world is a fluid world. Sperm meets egg and then rapidly moves through a series of complete changes before, at about two weeks, forming the home where we will spend the next 36 weeks of life. We emerge, slowly, while suspended in fluid within a sac, the amniotic sac. This amniotic sac, while still inside, is held within a uterus, a womb. This is our first home. This is our first experience of containment, of support. It is a support that has two layers, the amnio sac and womb. The sacredness of our life is held like this, with two kinds of soft containment.*
In general, the body organizes everything this way. How this happens is not the same for all bodies. Some bodies, whether how they have been shaped or how they have been hurt, are glorious in their survival with only single layers in some places and double in others. We are creative and complex. Always.
Two layers, this gift of our ancestors, which is evolution, asserts support as that important, that necessary for life. So important, that there are reinforcements. One balancing the other. From the moment we begin to emerge within our first and fluid world.
The amniotic sac itself; it has two layers. The outer layer, the chorion, is the toughest layer and it is magic. It supports the development of the placenta and it is the tissue that helps the parent’s blood nourish the fetus. Lifeblood nourishing lifeblood. The inner layer, the amnion, is a cellular matrix that cuddles, hugs, holds, and most directly supports you, me, all of us as we are moving from egg and sperm to ready-to-be-born.
You can recall this, the feeling of it as an echo across your skin. Trust that feeling you have, even when it doesn’t make immediate logic-brain sense.
In the earliest of days, this amnion is right up against your early fetal self, holding you closely, snuggly. Imagine yourself tucked right in, that lovely feeling where all of your shapes merge with all the shapes around you. The amnion slowly expands, giving us more space as we grow, so that we can be feet and head pushing out against womb-wall, flicker kicks against skin. There is fluid between the two layers, there is fluid within and around us as we grow, there is fluid around the entire womb, a mix of fluid and membrane which is the body of the parent.
Our first world is a fluid world, before we emerge into this world, a space of earth and air with fluid and fire woven throughout.
There are two layers of support, right from the beginning. We don’t think about it. We expect it - it is who we are. It is what we emerge within. Our ancestors have organized the world in this way. We become within two layers of support: one that connects to the inside, amniotic sac like a second skin, and one that connects to the outside, womb that is the body of our outside world, our first parent, which we leave behind when we emerge.
*****
When I gave birth to my daughter, to our daughter, I felt a lot of things. Silly sentence, of course I did. But one of the things I felt was this: there were going to be more adults than just my partner and I who were keeping track of her. Who knew her. And I prayed that within that tangle of adults paying attention would be someone, at least one, who she felt safe enough with to talk to when no one else felt safe. I wanted to make sure that she did not disappear, not all the way disappear. That if anything horrible was happening to her, that there were enough people watching that, even if she hid it well, someone might track the scent. I know how the tangle of shame and abuse can make the one who is hurt find ways to hide the impact, hide what has happened, and present the front that says all is ok.
I knew that respecting a person’s life boundaries means missing some things, honoring sovereignty over control, but there would be enough people listening that something, please god, someone would pick up the scent if it needed to be picked up. And people did, in a hundred small ways. And we missed things. And while all of this was happening, there were always at least two layers of support. Of protection. Because support and protection are largely the same thing: one membrane looks in (support) and one membrane looks out (protection). It’s up to my daughter to name if it was enough or too much. Depending on when that question is asked, the answer is likely to change. Just like mine does.
********
Every cell in your body exists with the same two layers of support: the cellular membrane or the “skin” of each cell is made up of two layers. The outer membrane faces the outer world, assessing information, the life that is flowing through the interstitial fluid, the fluid of its out-there universe. This outer membrane says yes this can come in and it shapes itself to let this outside-thing, this protein, or absorbs this oxygen or fluid and lets it come in….or it says no, this can not, and so the membrane stays closed. It also receives that is being out from inside and releases it, bye amino acid, bye unneeded waste, floating out into the interstitial void. The inner membrane assesses what comes in from the outside and receives what has passed through the outer membrane, a final check before letting it move into the inner space of mitochondria and nucleus. It takes what is ready to leave and shapes it so that it can move through and out.
Two layers of support, woven through every single cell of your body, right this second. See if you can feel that, just for a moment. This sense of two kinds of support, containment, protection, and care with a space between and in that space there is fluid. And fluid is about movement and possibility. One of the many reasons why water is life.
Pause. Wait. More than enough, more than enough support.
Trees have an inner and outer bark. A plant has a cuticle, upper epidermis, and palisades, layers of its outside self connected to its inside self. Turtles are protected by skin below their shells and the shell itself has two layers. The inner layer is part of the skeleton and is fused to the ribs. The outer layer is formed from skin tissue and then inside, the soft vulnerability of a body that is more fluid than hard.
And fish have scales and skin layers, the youngest aging and migrating up and out before being shed off into the surrounding ocean or stream. Unlike you and I, their skin is full of mucous membranes that make their outside self slippery, viscous, so they slip through the water rather than push against it when they swim. The fewer scales, the more mucus. The less mucus, the more scales.
Human skin has three layers with again the same principles: the outermost engage with the outer world. It’s waterproof, it contains the glory of melanin (whether a lot or a little) and it is part of the immune system, holding those cells that can rush in when there is a break in the skin. The middle layer is where the nerve endings live. It's where our body experiences pain and pleasure. It’s where the blood flow is, where we control temperature with sweat, where the skin cares for itself with oil.
It’s also where we release pheromones to communicate pleasure and pain to others. One of my favorite things is to put my nose right there, up against the crook where neck meets shoulder on my partner. Right there. It makes her squirm and laugh but it’s a testing for me. Even when we are fighting or feeling disconnected, as long as she smells good to me, and she always has, then we are still here. Together.
Below all of these layers of skin is the deeper golden fat layer, this closest inside layer of skin that keeps us warm, keeps us padded, keeps stores of energy for later, and connects our outside-listening skin to our inside body. So many layers of support. So many. Fat is the inside support that is also protection. It’s what that layer does.
What does it say about a people who turn this golden fluid, this sweet insulation that creates a single word out of support/protection into something to be eradicated, a sign of shame?
Always, at least two layers of support. At least two layers that provide both protection and connection, a relationship between the community of cells that is your specific body and the community of cells that is life on this earth, that is this earth.
******
I remember my great aunt telling me, and she had very fierce eye contact when she did, that blood is always thicker than water. You can’t trust your friends, she said. They won’t stay with you for the long term. It’s your family that will stay with you. Always.
I was disrespectful, forgetting that she had probably survived things that made this true. I only looked at her like an old woman who knew nothing about me. She was the first full generation of children born in the US, raised in a family that was sprawling across apartments and last names. By the time things got to my generation, that family was both frayed and assimilating. People were not kind to each other, in fact, many of them were violent. And that big circle fractured into smaller circles, some loved still moved through and others were filled with harm and resentment.
For my family, that inside layer of support did not have a second layer that was focused on love and respect, on dignity and care. The second circle that was there did not support us through economic and cultural struggle, through what it meant to have so many of the sons, my uncles, return from the war without any place to put their rage and grief, through what it meant for a family to lose half of its members in a single moment. Instead, my family moved deeper towards whiteness as the second layer of support, midwestern hardworking whiteness. I think this is why my great aunt told me not to trust anyone outside. She knew that what was outside was trying to suck away the lifeblood of those who were in. She told me this even as she, herself, moved deeper into that overlap between German as culture and German-American as white.
Dominance is a spirit that pretends it is the layer outside, the one to hold us when we don’t have enough at home. Dominance says yes, you whose name we don’t know or care about, we will protect you as long as you do this and that. Then you will be safe. Dominance is a spirit that is constantly deciding who gets to stay in and who is out and who is punished. Dominance chooses some to be its golden bright children, acting as the visible voice for a spirit that has no heart. Dominance wraps its tight arms around that smallest of inside-circles and says, if you play by my rules, then you will be safe except for you, over there, it doesn’t matter how hard you play by my rules, on a daily level, I will change my mind. Dominance doesn’t like melanin or traditional ways or gender that does anything except support a binary story of hunt and submit reproduction.
Dominance sucks out the fluid that is between the layers and attaches itself, parasitic, to the inside layer. We know this, even those of us raised to be the most protected. We know this, sometimes if only hidden away inside our bellies.
********
It was from Suzanne River via Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen where I first learned the principle that support precedes movement. Anatomical physical support is what comes before the physical execution of a movement. Bend your arm at the elbow, right now. Even before the muscle fibers begin to bind and stretch, loosening and tightening the ligaments which then move the bone, there is a movement of connective tissue, of muscle and of bone that comes in as a kind of base, a kind of foundation, a support that precedes all movement. And then each of those layers that comes in to support the muscle-ligament-bone movement has their own layers of support… and so on…. and so on… and so on. Everything, always, is about two layers of support and support precedes movement. The same is true for reflexes, for developmental stages. Our ancestors were wise and saw us becoming through a series of steps, each one integrating to form the base for the next. That is what a lifetime is supposed to carry, a series of integrated experiences called wisdom which open up space for the next growth to expand. Awkward, new, shaky but not toppling.
Two layers of support. For movement to move and growth to emerge with ease and purpose, these two layers are a necessity.
Take this moment to pause and honor, with bone-deep respect, the fierce resilience and glory of every single person (name them in your thoughts, whisper their names out loud) who, even as they were targeted and attacked, even after experiencing the violence of what happens when a person or system or belief slices through that support to deeply wound, still claims and remembers the experience of support, the two layers of receiving and of giving, of support and protection.
Who are your teachers and what did they teach you?
I often think this is what eldering is or should be: the memories of those who have lived through so much and who can name it and sense it as it shows up again combined with the ability to also remember and assert the need for these two layers of support and protection; to notice when they are missing and demand that they be erected again. All of this woven through with that place where love and the joyful assertion of survival come together.
*****
I am part of an emerging project in the Twin Cities called REP. We work from the place of building/supporting two overlapping circles. One circle focuses on honoring, deepening, and building interdependent intimate infrastructures. You can call it pod mapping or collective care or mutual aid. It’s the work of moving into community as a concrete commitment. Who do you call when you do not feel safe in your home or when you are scared for reasons that are clear and reasons that are not? When someone you love has passed? When you are ill and can’t feed yourself? What skills do you and your people need to support each other more thoroughly and to turn, together, to those outside your circle and show up in moments of crisis or vulnerability? Mental health first aid training? Deescalation training? Living in homes in common? Raising and teaching children together? Growing old together? Caring for those we love who are vulnerable together? Who do you celebrate with, who do you grieve with? Who sits alongside you as you wonder-plan about how climate change will impact your grandchildren and pushes with you as you wonder what you can do for them right now? Who is going to love you hard and hold you accountable when you are sketching on something you said you would do? Who is going to remember you and love you clear when someone else is naming the harm you have caused? Who is going to remember you when you are having a hard time remembering yourself?
Infrastructure like this can show up naturally, organically, when you are part of a community or an experience that is under attack, whether economically or culturally or physically. It doesn’t always last when the attack has ended. Sometimes it does. It depends on what kind of culture holds you. Infrastructure like this also doesn’t show up as often when families or people are protected enough to have closed off private homes and lives. All systems of dominance depend on a binary brain; those who are safe, those who are not. Those who have, those who don’t. Those who are deserving, those who do not. A profit-based system can only have a small group in the most protected category. Some of us have to relearn what it is to trust other people to hold us and remember us in the most intimate of ways. Others of us come from people and experiences who never forgot.
The work of the first circle is making these conversations explicit and direct. Helping create strategies and plans and stories. Consensual. Emergent. Intimate*.
With this first circle we say, here is the membrane that is closest in. With those inside this membrane, we agree to show up at 2am when there is a bat flying around your bedroom, and to stay over time. To be there, even when you are in a crappy mood. To keep learning together. I am 57, still young but oh experiencing the savor of 30 and almost-40 year friendships. I wish for you many years of living with people who keep remembering who you are, even as you change and get lost and come home again.
The second overlapping circle is the one that asks: what do you do when none of the close-in relationships are available or can hold this moment of crisis or vulnerability? When what is held and known inside the membrane isn’t enough to meet this moment? Who can you call who you trust will hold you with love and respect as you move to whatever next step of support is needed? This is where we are working to support and train people who are able to respond to a phone call for help around a specific moment or experience. When you call, it is likely we don’t know you, we have never sat inside your home and had coffee, but that doesn’t prevent us from showing up with love. It’s a different level of intimacy, a different shape of care and respect.
We center this work in Black love and liberation because this Black-led vision knows that if we can guarantee that every single Black person who calls is met with love and respect, then it is likely that the rest of us will be as well. Every single Black person, every single Native person, every single Brown and trans and queer and disabled and poor and struggling person, met with love and moved to the next step. We center this work in ancestral memory because not a thing being created right now is new. The fact that we can sense this at all is about what our ancestors whisper to us in our hearts and bellies and minds, the fact of another world that is possible. And we center this work in radical consent because if we do not honor that your life is sovereign to you, that your cultural community has sovereignty over how its culture is expressed, then we immediately begin eroding the trust that could be there, between us.
These are two circles of support. The first circle is those who know you, who already claim you, who remember your life. This is the circle of looking in. Support. The second circle is the circle of looking out; the circle of calling someone who does not know you, who is not in your life. Protection. This is not an individual thing, it is a collective thing. We, in the biggest sense, we got you. There are different vulnerabilities with each layer of support. There are different needs for supporting each layer of support. Collective safety does not exist without both of them.
I am writing about this here because for the past year, this work has been filling me, lifting me. But we are new. We are still in those early stages where vision and emerging structure are just sending out early tendrils of practice. We look at each other and say, we are here for ten years. Please don’t ask us if this “works” or is “effective” until ten years have passed. We claim the right to time..
*******
I need these maps. Something concrete to help get through the middle stages from isolation to abundant connection. If there is nothing else to do, when I am confused about next steps, there is always relationship. I need these maps and when as a community of people we have forgotten them, I look towards the communities of cells, of plants, of birds and crawling things. Two layers of support, how an ant colony emerges, how a nest is built, whales and barnacles.
Two layers of support is the connective tissue between an individual life and a larger collective web of mutual aid. Of community. Not just between and among people, but between and among life. Something connected outside our capacity to name and see it, collective care emerges. Too big to grasp, too much to fit on a single map. So we start with what we can see and what we can touch, this foundation, these two layers of support. One close up and intimate, the other connecting us to everything.
*If this writing was useful to you and you have the capacity, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee (or a meal) as an offering of exchange!
*This is traditional wisdom. I first heard it voiced through a craniosacral training when my teacher was quoting Ray Castellino. When I have shared this with beloveds who are indigenous and raised within tradition, they tell me stories of learning similar things, named differently, as part of regular cultural knowing.
*This work honors the lineages of transformative justice, pod mapping, mutual aid, and many traditional kin practices that have practices without theory. Some of our teachers include the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Mia Mingus, Shira Hassan, Mariame Kaba, and a whole bunch of elders, grandparents and aunties.