Care as an Ecology
Your connections as a single social fabric
Ecology: the relationships between a group of living things and their environment.
"Ecology." Britannica Dictionary, www.britannica.com/dictionary/ecology
Consider the big picture of your relationships. What does that mean to you? In interamory, the big picture is your social landscape: a description of all of your connections in a single picture.
Many relationship projects ask you to consider only particular kinds of connection, with other connections receiving minimal or no consideration at all. Monogamy or polyamory can provide structure to your romantic life; ideals of family or community might orient you among relatives and neighbours; relationship anarchy might give you a framework for positioning intentional connections. But to cover the full spectrum of possibilities, from intentional to coincidental, platonic to romantic, domestic to professional, a broader conversation is needed.
In interamory, this big picture is built around the organizing principle of care. This first section of the website will introduce you to care as a project that people undertake towards each other, and it will show you how this creates a network of people who support each other’s wellbeing. I call this network your ecology of care: the system in which your relationships of all kinds interact to sustain a flow of attention, support, and consideration throughout your network.
By the end of these chapters, you should have enough points of reference to understand two key concepts in your care ecology: your circle of care, which describes the network of people who actively support you; and sodality, which describes how our circles of care support each other.