Careful and Care-full Collaboration: When we coalesced on this theme, we wanted to make space for writers, artists, and their communities to share practices and processes that would invite reflection on what it means to enfold care and collaboration. Thank you to the Black Earth Institute for embodying the possibilities and potentials of such work, and the invitation to make such collaboration a reality and lived experience.

Given current actions that are moving so quickly to consolidate authoritarian power, we understood both the opportunity and need for this issue to celebrate, model, and encourage multiple artistic and relational possibilities of co-creation. We invite you to hear their reverberant echoes and to linger with the stillness in their gathering.

As editors, we came together regularly during the five months after the call opened to share our thoughts with each other on our understanding of the theme, as well as to discuss how the submissions themselves were shaping it. As we spent time with the works, five linked questions emerged: How do careful/care-full collaborations move us toward each other? How do our movements create resonance(s) between us? What grounds us as we root ourselves in motion? How do we open to multiple possibilities of being alive across time? How do different spaces guide how we collaborate and care? Together, they ask us to think about how co-creative practices and processes can lead us to more hopeful and peaceful futures, while also helping us be present for and with each other, our histories, and the places to which we’re connected.

While these questions organize the issue, we hope you approach them less as constraints and more as invitations. In some cases, they may prompt other questions, or they may remind you of works in other sections. As a reader, viewer, or listener, you may make connections that we did not. We invite you to allow the works and the intersections among them to lead you to explore language, image, sound, movement, or states of being in ways that are new to you. Perhaps, they will lead to your own careful and care-full collaborations.

The contributions in this issue beckon us to take seriously this co-creative work, yes; but they also remind us to play and to laugh at ourselves. They invite us to stop, breathe, find a place to be quiet, to move, to re/create relationships with ourselves, each other, and the other beings—past, present, future—around us. They invite us to dream of being free in familiar and unfamiliar ways, and they offer paths to get free and stay free with joy. And with love, always love.

Thank you for spending time with us.

Abegunde, Mita, Matty, Kate