https://himabatavia.substack.com/p/76-dark-showers And some notes on zen cleaning and co-living by Hima Batavia
The art of well-being is truly the dance between my needs and our needs, which can then be wound up in concentric circles of feeling good and guilty, which are further wound up in deeper impressions on where to place our needs in the web of our familial and community relationships, making it all so…tricky. I know contemporary times love the maxim that ‘we must take care of ourselves first, in order to care for anyone else,’ but I kind of reject this platitude as a one-dimensional and overly simplistic representation of the dynamic and unquantifiable forms of exchange that care needs and takes on m life to exist and persist AND feels all too convenient to an individualist agenda. In contrast, Zen Buddhists might say that serving and offering care in some cases actually has nothing to do with ‘you’ at all.
It’s a process.
Hima Batavia