Tending as Rebellion: Planting Seeds in the Ruins

There are moments in history when resistance doesn’t look like a march or a manifesto.
Sometimes, resistance looks like a hand in the soil.

This is one of those moments.

As systems collapse and headlines scream of existential threats: AI takeovers, ecological unraveling, democratic disintegration, biosecurity panics, we are told we must fight, fast.
Urgency roars.
Action is demanded.
Power must confront power.

And yet…

A grandmother plants corn passed down for generations. A child plants a seed in a school garden.

In backyards and balconies, people gather to tend to compost, pollinators, and each other.

These acts may seem small, maybe even quaint.
But they are anything but passive.

They are rebellions in the register of care.

What Story Do We Live Inside?

We live inside a dominant story that insists only scale matters.
That bigger is better.
That systems can only be challenged by counter-systems with equal force.
That caring is fine after the fire is put out.

But what if that story is part of the collapse?

What if the rush to power mirrors the very logics we’re trying to escape?
What if the world doesn’t need more heroes with answers, but more kin with questions, more stewards who listen, more tenders of the unseen?

To save and plant seeds is to say:

“You may control our land, our water, our governance.
But you cannot control our remembering.
You cannot kill the continuity of care.”

Planting school gardens, then, is not a distraction.
It’s a form of intergenerational strategy.
It builds resilience into the bodies and bellies of the young.
It creates cultural antibodies to domination.

Not Either/Or, but Both/And

Yes, we need policy change.
Yes, some will choose confrontation and disruption.
And yes, others will respond by weaving networks of care that quietly outlast collapse.

We must resist the binary that pits protest against planting.
Some will block highways.
Some will block hunger.
Some will confront the powerful.
Some will feed the ones the powerful forgot.

All of these are needed.
Together, they form a living ecology of resistance.

Tending as Threshold Practice

To tend—to garden, to grieve, to hold space for confusion—is not to retreat.
It is to build the soil of the next world.

Care is a muscle we will need if anything is to regenerate.
Not just after the storm, but during it.

So if your work right now is invisible, relational, too slow for headlines,
If your hands are in the soil while the world burns,
Know this:

You are not small.
You are not naïve.
You are anchoring a future beyond collapse.

Let us remember:
Care is not the opposite of resistance.
It is the root of it.

Let us plant, not because we are sure of the harvest, but because tending is the vow.

We plant,
because we remember.
We remember,
because we care.
We care,
because we are still alive.
And that, too,
is a kind of revolution.

💌 To all who are tending seeds in this unraveling time: thank you. May your hands be blessed with memory, with humility, with soil. May your care be contagious.