The Power of Attention and Small Acts of Care
Finding Inspiration and Guidance in the Work of Alys Longley
Greetings Livable Futures community!
I am so glad to know you are all out there doing the beautiful work that you are doing. It gives me strength and I am sending you all love in these very challenging times.
My response at the moment has been to turn inward a bit and reflect, to get out of the often harmful and bullying social media frenzy, to listen to and read from voices who are writing with nuance, depth, context, and historical awareness as well as attunement to present suffering. And I am finding myself returning to prayer practices lately and seeking new meditations.
Rethinking Prayers as Acts of Attention
I know that prayer is not a word that all readers of this newsletter will relate to and I'm not sure I always do. But I offer it today as an inclusive term held in an interfaith and more-than-religious manner. I think prayer belongs to all of us, human and nonhuman, religious and atheist, trained and untrained. It is for me, at this time, a yearning of the heart and a desire to sit quietly and sense the larger motions of the world and time, and ask for peace.
I am using the Livable Futures grounding practices daily and you can too:
Arriving into presence of what is…
Facing the magnitudes…
Sensing what wants to be known…
Listening to those who are more often unheard…
Feeling and softening into intention…
Yesterday, I found myself re-listening to my conversation with Alys Longley on the podcast and her offerings around staying in touch, paying attention, and small acts of kindness.
I interviewed Alys in 2020, before the pandemic lockdowns, in her home in Auckland, New Zealand/Aotearoa.
In our conversation, she echoes my question this way from the events of that time:
“So how do you sit with sudden and an immense radical change, like in Australia with the fires or with Hong Kong, with their riots and Chile with their protests and being able to keep imagining and know that, that the changes could go in so many different directions, but to hold a commitment to a value system or to small acts of attention and care and love.”
Today it could be aftermath of the fires in Maui, the wars in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza, the increasing divisiveness and hateful speech, the ongoing extinction of biodiverse species on the planet. How might we sit with the immensity of the suffering and still move with care?
Kindness as Serious Work
Alys is a wildly prolific and generous scholar and artist working in all kinds of capacities, bridging writing and performance work, working with ecological themes and intercultural collaboration. In our conversation, she spoke about the New Zealand government’s investment in kindness:
“Kindness is on the forefront of the political landscape in a way that I haven't experienced it before, but in this country, it is really refreshing…there's so much binarism and so much violence and the way that people are referred to in the world today. So I think the idea in government that we have here is making efforts through the rhetoric of the government to place kindness in policy also. And there's been a wellbeing budget, so wellbeing is talked about as something that's desired for the whole country, and that's moving into mental health care and other forms of healthcare and arts budgets. There are also of course questions about the materialization of the rhetoric, but it's an active thing. You do really feel the difference in our political landscape here. We are a kind of strange, spacious, and calm place at this point of the country's history."
And I will affirm that we felt this calm and kindness as visitors to New Zealand. Even getting on a bus or ordering coffee everyone seemed to move at the speed of care. We quickly felt ourselves slowing down and shifting into this vibe and expressing ourselves more positively. Even as a family who already try to put kindness first, my husband, son and I felt the difference. It was notable how easily wellbeing can grow when immersed in it as a cultural value.
Our experience in Aotearoa/New Zealand serves as a reminder of the power of culture, in institutions, classrooms, and any of our communities. I am feeling this with the wonderful students in our Livable Futures learning community this semester and I am grateful every week when I spend time with them!
You can listen to my full conversation with Alys Longley here, or wherever you get your podcasts. It is full of her wisdom and creative strategies for activism and thriving amidst uncertainty.
For today, here’s another short excerpt that I hope you'll find supportive right now:
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Norah Z.: I think [the New Zealand government's focus on kindness] is a great example of how rhetoric does matter. And as a tourist, I experience it also with the word Tiaki [a Maori word] that’s on all the welcome posters and videos?
Alys Longley: you could say Kaitiaki; and Kaitiakitanga is the practice of guardianship and care.
Norah Z.: yes! As you enter the country, they ask you to take part in that guardianship and care and this is fantastic. And you're doing work in this, in your artistic and scholarly practice as well, co-creating a symposium on kindness.
Alys Longley: I've been thinking a lot about tenderness and practices of tenderness that are material. So somatic practices, practices of touch, practices of spatiality, being aware of, paying attention to those very small things of the world and also bringing in space for poetry and imagination. Especially with our work with ecology and environmental sustainability…you can get overwhelmed by the scale of the issues in regard to climate change and the level of destruction and loss. I've really come to believe that every tiny gradation of attention matters, even just to have a small amount of poetry or a small amount of hope or a little thought about how something could be different, it matters tangibly.
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How are you finding ways to keep paying attention and what acts of hope, poetry, and imagination are supporting you and your communities right now? How are you creating rituals or practices that support being in communion with the needs at hand and sensing intention?
Closing Thoughts
As I finish this post, the sun is rising and the golden leaves of a giant oak in my back yard are glowing with light. I’ll take that as a cue to end with a bit of good news that came overnight in special elections around the U.S. and here in Ohio, voters passed overwhelmingly to support a state constitutional right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions. It is worth savoring the positive and amplifying it in our experience so that it can grow.
Stay tuned in November as well for some conversations with artists working in AI and Web 3.0 for women’s, LGBTQIA+, and disability rights!
And I’m heading to New York City tomorrow to see several exciting performances by women artists exploring humane technology. I’ll be posting on my instagram about the artists and their work and I look forward synthesizing it for the newsletter.
I’ll share it all here.
Meanwhile, we can practice together the art of turning toward the larger suffering of others while still nurturing peace in our own lives so that we can take action with intention and from an ethics of care.
Big love to all and be well,
Norah