Good caregiving requires us to embrace humility and reverence: to cultivate a healthy respect for the wonder and mystery of the world and its rhythms, for both the body and the soul.
Last year, I visited an Idaho farmer and his wife. We walked together through a grassy field, and they named all the various grasses, herbs, and legumes underfoot as we walked. They pointed out a pollinator meadow they had planted a few years before, an orchard they were cultivating, and a large vegetable garden. They led me to a pasture where several steers were munching contentedly together. The steers walked confidently up to us, and gently sniffed our hands with their wet noses. They chose this breed of cattle, the farmer noted, in large part because of its gentle, family-friendly nature.
This farming family has lived and worked in Idaho for over two decades, slowly but surely increasing the health and diversity of their farm. They intimately know every square foot of this land—and all the creatures that live on it. And as I surveyed its lush pastures and quiet beauty, I could sense its peace and health. The land bore all the marks of good care—and the resulting joy emanated from it like a song.
Few of us, sadly, have received or offered such tender care ourselves. Our bodies, land, and communities often bear the marks of ill health. Our society is grappling with an epidemic of loneliness, with widespread deaths of despair, and (lately) a rise in child abuse, all of which signal that our homes and communities are not functioning as they should. Our land suffers from soil erosion, water contamination and depletion, air pollution, deforestation, species extinction, and more. Surely if we look to specific places or people, we will find health. But if we were to measure the health of our country and communities more holistically, we would fail.
“As my life has morphed from desk work to that of changing poopy diapers and rocking small children to sleep, I have felt the tension between our society’s fixation on autonomy, competition, and efficiency, and the necessary virtues and patterns required for caregiving—whether for the land, or for ourselves. ”
How and why has this happened? And how can we redeem the work of caregiving, at a time when it’s sorely needed?
This topic has filled my mind of late. As the granddaughter of farmers, I have felt a burden to educate myself on stewardship of the land, and what it should require. But I am also a mother of very small humans—and my primary job is to ensure their care and wellbeing. As my life has morphed from desk work to that of changing poopy diapers and rocking small children to sleep, I have felt the tension between our society’s fixation on autonomy, competition, and efficiency, and the necessary virtues and patterns required for caregiving—whether for the land, or for ourselves.
It is important to note at the outset that a sick world and a sick human race are not separate things. They are two intertwined realities, dependent on each other. As Wendell Berry writes in his essay “The Body and the Earth,”
Body, soul (or mind or spirit), community, and world are all susceptible to each other’s influence, and they are all conductors of each other’s influence. … If a farmer fails to understand what health is, his farm becomes unhealthy; it produces unhealthy food, which damages the health of the community. But this is a network, a spherical network, by which each part is connected to every other part.
As members of the world, every piece and parcel of life on this planet is inextricably intertwined: part of a system that is as complex, beautiful, and potentially fragile as a human body. But lack of care or brokenness in any part of that body inevitably has an impact on the rest of the body. This is what we ought to expect—but we so often ignore this complexity, because it implies indebtedness: that we might owe something to the larger world in which we live, and the community (human and otherwise) that it represents.
Modern individualism would have us believe that we are isolated, autonomous beings, free to abandon community and its demands. But to be a caregiver requires us to embrace our indebtedness—to faithfully milk the cow when she needs to be milked, for instance, regardless of the inconvenience of the hour or schedule. Caregiving requires us to faithfully change diapers or wash wrinkled skin, whether it feels “fulfilling” or not. We will always encounter inconveniences and frustrations, extra demands and lost free time if we are caregivers. Whatever is “in it” for us may not be measurable or quantifiable in any easy way.
“Modern individualism would have us believe that we are isolated, autonomous beings, free to abandon community and its demands. But to be a caregiver requires us to embrace our indebtedness—to faithfully milk the cow when she needs to be milked, for instance, regardless of the inconvenience of the hour or schedule. Caregiving requires us to faithfully change diapers or wash wrinkled skin, whether it feels “fulfilling” or not. ”
Take, for instance, the farm in Idaho I visited: most conventional farm operations would be discontent with its size, with the number of animals raised there, with the scope of operations and style of grazing employed. More could be done to maximize profits, they might say. And it’s true: these farmers might be able make more in the short term if they were willing to graze more cattle on their property, to work with larger industrialized partners, to spray the land with chemicals, or to fatten up their cattle quickly with cheap conventional feed. They might make more if they moved away from this property altogether, and chose a farm location that was larger, more “convenient.”
But the Idaho farmers I interviewed have intentionally embraced limits in the name of health. They seek to foster the long-term flourishing of their farm—which means that profit must come secondary to stewardship. Any measure that serves to decrease the diversity, self-sufficiency, or natural rhythms of this farm is rejected.
Caregiving thus requires us to question the demands of efficiency and productivity. While we can indeed organize a home to maximize its order and competence, it is also true that the very young and the very old generally proceed at a slower pace, and neither can nor should be “optimized.” Similarly, our efforts to optimize the planet (monocropping, for instance) have resulted in a widespread loss of diversity and health. At every turn, we’ve created a world for ourselves that tends to subordinate the demands of health, beauty, complexity, and rest to those of profit.
And so we struggle to make good decisions on behalf of our bodies, families, and communities. It is far easier to paper over annoying health symptoms with ibuprofen or Advil than to seek out the root of the problem. We can spray the driveway with Roundup to save ourselves the trouble of weeding. Our children’s demands can easily be silenced by a glowing screen.
“The land can no more speak up for itself than a six-week-old baby can put its desperate desire for food and love into words. But traditionally speaking, those whose careers call them to care and stewardship—farmers, horticulturists, ranchers, conservationists, nurses, hospice workers, nannies, stay-at-home parents, and the like—have all felt a shared burden to seek and nurture the health of the vulnerable and voiceless. ”
But in each of these instances, a quiet cry for health, echoing beneath the surface, demands more active, laborious caregiving from us. Those who require caregiving are often vulnerable, defenseless, voiceless, or frail. The land can no more speak up for itself than a six-week-old baby can put its desperate desire for food and love into words. But traditionally speaking, those whose careers call them to care and stewardship—farmers, horticulturists, ranchers, conservationists, nurses, hospice workers, nannies, stay-at-home parents, and the like—have all felt a shared burden to seek and nurture the health of the vulnerable and voiceless. Their work of caregiving can thus be a small but mighty effort to oppose the dictates of a ruthless world, to assert the value of rare native plants, a healthy quiet stream, or a curly-headed five-year-old—the things and the people that may have no immediate quantifiable value or profit, on whom the beauty and joy of the world rests.
It is important to note that injustice and inequity often create systemic problems in this realm. For the single mother making minimum wage, it is always going to be difficult to balance the demands of caregiving with those of career. How to find time to read aloud to your children when you’re working 60 hours a week? How to steward your home or land when you haven’t the money or time to devote to such an endeavor?
Similarly, the work of caregiving is often demeaned or ridiculed by white-collar professionals who we generally see as “elites” in our country. While the spread of Covid-19 has created a newfound appreciation for doctors and nurses in America, the work of caregiving as a whole—whether for ourselves, other humans, animals, or our land—tends to be underpaid and undervalued. This is perhaps, at least in part, the result of an economy that prizes consumption and innovation over the work of maintenance and stewardship. Those who fight against entropy and decay—of our roads and infrastructure, our bodies or our land—are often placed last in the global competition, even though their diligent labor is integral to life.
The results are obvious: farmers who seek to properly nurture and steward their land or livestock often must fight to stay afloat, combatting the whims of the market and the apathy (or even antagonism) of many government institutions. Those who clean toilets, run day cares, or stand watch over the dying rarely get applause or accolades from the outside world.
And we have not just devalued the roles of caregivers—we have broken down the foundations of community, family, and dignity which undergirded their work. Many Americans live far from their familial support systems, and thus struggle to find help in times of need or stress. Many neighborhoods—especially in poorer or more rural areas—have grown increasingly fractured and disconnected.
This process of degradation and loss has been long, but we cannot underestimate its impact—on those employed in it, and on the bodies and places entrusted to their care. These two undervalued occupations—caring for people, and caring for the earth—have much in common, and can teach us valuable lessons about each other. Both require us to subordinate short-term profit to long-term health. Both require a patient devotion to the subjects of their care. And both demand a loving that involves deep knowing: just as those Idaho farmers could name every legume and herb in their field, so I hope to know every freckle, favorite food, and quiet need of my daughters. As those farmers have committed their lives and bodies to their farm for a lifetime, so I expect the demands of motherhood to continue until my dying day.
To promote good caregiving will require us to praise and value it, to put our dollars and votes toward its flourishing, and—most importantly—to engage in it ourselves. Whether that means planting and tending a garden, volunteering time at a local nursing home, or seeking to devote more time to our own children, we all can become better caregivers—and thus strengthen our muscles of stewardship and love.
Caregiving will require us to set aside the easy and efficient to promote the wellbeing of the tiniest and oldest—the newborn in a mother’s arms and the microbes flourishing in the soil, the redwood standing tall in the forest and the octogenarian eager for a companion. It will require us to reconsider our indebtedness—to neighbors and families, to the land and all the creatures who rely on it. In many instances, it will require sacrifice. But the fruit of this work is too abundant and valuable to measure. Here, too, the wisdom of Wendell Berry is worth considering. As he writes in his essay “Think Little,”
The principle of ecology, if we will take it to heart, should keep us aware that our lives depend upon other lives and upon processes and energies in an interlocking system that, though we can destroy it, we can neither fully understand nor fully control. And our great dangerousness is that, locked in our selfish and myopic economics, we have been willing to change or destroy far beyond our power to understand. We are not humble enough or reverent enough.
Above all, good caregiving will require us to embrace this humility and reverence: to cultivate a healthy respect for the wonder and mystery of the world and its rhythms, for both the body and the soul. Caregiving for the land and caregiving for human bodies both represent a fight for—and a reverence for—life. Whether we are changing poopy diapers or helping an elderly person eat their dinner, planting seedlings in the soil or helping a cow give birth, we are actively fighting in ways large and small for life’s continuation: fighting against entropy, decay, deprivation, and disaster. Thus, every effort extended on the behalf of the vulnerable and voiceless is an effort to perpetuate and hopefully increase the liveliness of the earth.
Could there be any more dignified or important work than that?
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Gracy Olmstead is a writer whose work has appeared in The American Conservative, New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She was a 2015 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and is currently writing a book about the Idaho farming community where she grew up.