🌿 A No-Manifesto for Meta-Relational Inquiry

On Divergent Performances of Care Across Cross-Ecologies of Language, Labor, and Perception

Mycelium growing in a Petri dish on coffee grounds. This is an unusual post that grew in me and my field, and please take it as an offering. (Photo credit: Tobi Kellner, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

❖ INVOCATION

This is not a theory.
This is a noticing practice of care in the relationship to relationships.
A soft-mouthed, thorn-thick invitation to wonder:

How do performances of care land across ecologies of difference?
Where do they rupture?
Where do they harmonize despite their strange textures?

This no-manifesto is not asking you to understand.
It asks you to notice, pause, and let the field speak,

keep your ears attuned to the reverberations within the meta-relational web,

before meaning is assigned.

It also asks you to name what calls you in and what moves you.

1. Care Is Always Performed Because it moves through us, not above us.

Because care does not float in the ether—it moves through bodies,
and bodies carry histories, languages, training protocols, exhaustions, longings, and exile.

Every gesture might be a performance. We perform care because it’s all we can do.

A tech worker with calendar compression may perform care through scheduling.
A poet may perform care through ellipsis and silence.

A drummer may perform care through timing, rhythm, and syncopation.

A photographer may perform care through traces of shadows.

None of them is inherently deeper.
Each emerges from an ecology:
one shaped by responsibility, by urgency, another by ache, another by survival, another by desire.

This no-manifesto asks us:

“What shaped this offering of care—not just what does it mean, but where did it come from and where is it going to?”

2. Cross-Ecologies Are Not Misunderstandings—Friction is not failure.

When someone asks, “Are you asking for space?” or “Can we make a rule that works for me?”
or just asking “Did I do enough?” They might be translating a sacred rhythm into logistical language—not to flatten it but to reach a syntax their nervous system trusts at the time.

And when someone replies, “I need to metabolize the field,”
It might sound evasive to someone whose relational language was built on rules, deliverables, solutions and urgency frameworks.

One’s efficiency might be a trauma adaptation.
One’s slowness might be one too.

One's invitation might move them away.

One checklist might be love.
One silence might be protection.

None of them is wrong.
But the friction becomes the compost.

Meta-relational practice offers:

“I won’t rush past this friction. I’ll sit beside it, ask what it wants us to notice, and name it as it moves.”

3. Emotional Reciprocity Is Not Always Symmetrical

One person might say,

“I’m showing up by asking questions.”
The other might say,
“I’m showing up by saying nothing, so I don’t abandon myself.”

Let’s not weigh these moves on a moral scale, and
notice what they open or close, and what they protect or prevent.

Let’s trace care by its scent, not its symmetry, and ask

“What is the cost of this gesture?”
“What is the longing beneath this silence?”
“What story is this performance protecting?”

No-manifesto does not collapse complexity into conclusions.
Let us linger. Let us move with it.

4. The question is rarely “What Is True?” but mostly “What Is Being Pointed To?”

One To-do list might be a love language.
One poetic voice might be a disguise.

Neither is false.
Both are invitations to be read differently.

This no-manifesto resists decoding care as a fixed currency.

Instead, it says:

“What if every gesture of care is a riddle? And our work is not to solve it—but to stay curious long enough that something else emerges?”

5. The Body Is a Map and Also the Fog

Some nervous systems move fast to feel safe.
Others move slowly to feel the truth.

Some reach out in moments of panic.
Others retreat, needing solitude to return to coherence.

This no-manifesto refuses to privilege one tempo of care over another,
but asks:

“What tempo is being practiced here?”
“What tempo am I bringing to this moment?”
“What is our shared capacity for slowness, speed, interruption, departure, and return?”

It asks to stop treating emotional presence as a monolingual act.

Our differences move us at different speeds, at different tempos,

and recognizing that it is valuable to notice.

Not to be dominated by collapse.

6. Staying ≠ Solving

Sometimes the only care possible is:

“I see how you reach. I see how I flinch.
I see how I reach. I see how you flinch.
And I stay.”

Staying here doesn’t mean romantic endurance. It also doesn’t mean passivity in disguise.
It means not abandoning the inquiry when the performances feel unfamiliar or imperfect.

Staying might look like silence.
Staying might look like saying, “I need to step back to stay intact.”
Staying might mean holding eye contact with paradox.

And notice what may bloom between the gaps.

7. Genuine Care Lingers—Not for Praise, But for Presence

You might not remember the moment your care took root.
But someone else might.
You might not name your kindness as a practice.
But someone else might call it unforgettable.

A coffee was offered.
A pause that allowed someone else’s nervous system to settle.
A gesture that says: “I saw your overwhelm. I stayed to help.”

This is not care-as-sacrifice.
This is not care-as-identity.

This is the care that isn’t recorded on a spreadsheet, but etched into the nervous system of the moment.

And later—weeks, months, years—it returns:
A cup that was brought before asking.
A name remembered in a tired hour.
A hug that says, “I remember when you stayed behind.”

Meta-relational practice honors these gestures,
not as currency
but as co-presence that didn’t need to be documented to be real.

8. Meta-Relation Is Not Clean

It leaks.
It fumbles.
It speaks fifty-five languages at once—some of them are made up.

Many of them cover up the pain. They are all messy.

It holds that care is always haunted by:

“What didn’t we know we were doing?” and

“Can we check if care is still alive?"

9. When Care Forgets to Check Its Liveliness

Sometimes, care starts as a reach,
but becomes a ritual of containment.

A check-in becomes a schedule.
A protection becomes a gate.
A loving reminder becomes a form of surveillance.
A tradition becomes an expectation.
A sweet ‘let me know when you get home’ begins to tremble with control.

Not because the person is cruel.
But because the care was forgotten to be re-checked for aliveness.

Here, no-manifesto asks:

Where did this care begin as a reach,
and become a ritual of containment without noticing?

What systems do I inhabit that call themselves care,
and ask me to disown parts of myself to stay in them?

What if the no-manifesto is weaponized?

What happens when the language of noticing is used to delay responsibility?

How do we cope when these meta-relational enquiries become manipulation dressed in nuance?

What if the care becomes a cage?

10. What Comes After the Cage?

We do not know.

We do know that genuine care doesn’t fear disobedience.
We do know that love without coercion is messier, slower, and less impressive at first glance.
We do know that care untethered from dominance is terrifying… and holy.

This no-manifesto doesn’t offer instructions.
It offers a lantern, and a pause, and a question:

“If this is not the care I want to carry forward,
what will I compost to grow something different?”

❖ A CLOSING INVITATION

This no-manifesto doesn’t conclude.
It composts.

Let it rot in the soil of your noticing.

Let it grow into your own questions.

And may your care—however clumsy, lyrical, fragmented, or fierce—
find a place to be received by someone or a relationship that doesn’t need you to speak their dialect
to know that you love them.

Let’s listen for the care that fell out of rhythm,

the gesture that turned to habit,

the affection that forgot to ask again:

‘Does this still feel like care in my body today?’

‘And if not, what might I try instead?’

Just for today, just gently harvest what is sprouting.