Seeing the stars with clarity, on a regular basis, is something that I am still not completely used to; the Detroit of my youth was many things, but a dark sky paradise it was not. I still have the primal fear that comes when thinking about being out in the boonies after dark, but I’ve come to appreciate that my little town has access to that expansive view more often than not. I’ve never been good at identifying constellations; at least, not real ones — but it is kinda fun to just connect the dots and come up with your own on the fly.
I’m always challenged by my desire to stay curious about new things to learn or try, versus the constraints of the work I’ve committed to do and the communities I’m accountable to. To orient myself amidst all those possibilities of things to do, I’ve settled on a deceptively simple question as my north star: will this alleviate suffering?
Asking myself that question about everything has made it a little easier to connect the dots; my work with Avalon fits because having stable affordable housing is something that dramatically improves lives; when I felt tech work was pulling me away from that star, I ended up studying in higher education (and feel free to laugh at the prospect of going from tech to education rather than the other way around.) Even spending time deepening my art practice fits in, because in that case the suffering I’m alleviating is my own. After a while, I was left with my own personal stellarium — those three-dimensional star maps you see in planetariums — and it’s now how I think of the scattered mix of skills I’ve developed, techniques I’ve learned and causes I care about. I started jotting down stuff I felt confident in my ability to do without too much new learning, looked at one of the problems bugging me and started seeing if any of them could be useful to someone really deep in that work.
When I started becoming a bit obsessed with affordable housing, it was hard to figure out what my entry point was and why I should be focusing on it. Once I viewed myself as an educator, it made sense to care about things that enable education; how can you focus on schooling when you and your siblings are sleeping in the back of a Lincoln? I could feel the constellation forming; if I care about the kids, I should also care about the parents, what opportunities they had, and what barriers prevented them all from thriving.
So I knew why I cared, and how it connected to what I was already invested in; that said, I didn’t have a degree in public policy or a bunch of connections with elected officials, but what I did have was an incredible reservoir of pettiness and consistently free Monday nights to advocate at city council. It turns out, the ability to Show Up has a disproportionate impact on local politics, and while I couldn’t (yet) articulate the financial needs and tax credit models, I knew enough about education to plant my arguments there.
This mental model helps me a lot, not only when deciding what to do, but how to go about it. We develop all sorts of skills and abilities while grinding under the weight of capitalism; connecting the skills used in some of those spaces to things connected to that north star is one of the easiest ways to get involved in changing things for the better. A couple of examples I thought about this weekend:
After college, I worked in an IT role configuring Windows PCs for a good 5 years or so; most of those skills have no bearing on my current work but still occupy some of my internal memory; I don’t have time (or desire) to be IT support for anyone, but for lots of people a working laptop is an absolute godsend. For shelter workers, church stewards, folks returning from incarceration, kids going off to college? It’s not too much trouble to pick up a cheap laptop off lease for ~150 USD from a university disposal site (for Michigan folks, U-M’s is available here and MSU’s here,) physically clean it up and get it ready to go.
Earlier this summer, I went out to document some graves at Woodlawn Cemetery, alongside a moving number of folk working in the rain on Juneteenth. Founded in 1946, Woodlawn served the Ypsilanti area as one of the only options for Black people to bury their dead; the vast majority of other graveyards were segregated, and the site fell into disrepair over time. Everyone knows a few dads who love an excuse to break out the chainsaw, and plenty came by to help clear overgrown trees. I loved seeing one of the people with descendants in the graveyard beaming at the progress, all executed with the same tools and skills folks are regularly applying to their own backyards. I have some of those skills, but chronic illness meant I didn’t have the stamina for that kind of effort - so instead I picked up my camera and helped capture the effort, as well as the results of our community teamwork.
volunteers clearing out brush during the Woodlawn Cemetery Restoration cleanup event on Juneteenth
What are some hobbies or skills you’ve developed that can be turned towards care work? Maybe it’s crocheting warm kits with hats and mittens for unhoused neighbors, or pitching in to cook for community potlucks. Offering to babysit the community kiddos at an organizing event makes attendance possible for so many people that would never attend an official ‘outreach and engagement’ meeting, and shows that parents are welcome in your movements.
I’ll come back to this idea later, but in talking with people it’s really amazing how many stars exist in our shared skies — and I hope that seeing these connections changes the way we look at how we can contribute to the world we wish to build.
We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.