Hello dear followers,
Potent gratitude for new and old kith and kin. Your engagement and encouragement, for the way you listen, for the quiet, inspiring and wild ways you are embodying these truths, and urging me to keep weaving these threads of Soft Rebellion are deeply nourishing.
Today, I return to its roots—to a deeper current within the original call. I’ve been unraveling each of the eight pathways, tracing their shape in separate posts. But this one—this one lives in my bones. As a devoted animist, as a ritualist whose hands are always in the soil of the sacred, this path carries my heart.
The land remembers. Beneath the pavement, roots press upward, patient and persistent. Water finds every crack, every weakness in the walls. Birds carry seeds where no human hand dares plant them. Wildness is never truly lost—only waiting for the right moment to return.
Rewilding is an act of devotion. A whispered incantation in the language of dirt and decay, of germination and growth. It does not seek permission. It does not wait for the right conditions. It moves like mycelium beneath the surface, undoing the rivers of sidewalks, blanketing ownership with slow, unstoppable insistence.
Fascism doesn’t just control—it consumes. It eats up the land, devours bodies, erases narratives. It poisons our stories, distills our rage, and wraps it all in tidy, authoritative packages. It tries to strip us of our birthright: Earth connection, its wildness, its freedom. But wildness does not bow, its feral essence does not concede. It is anciently dug in, rises from ruins, and spreads like fire in dry fields. Our commonwealth, of the people by the people, needs our dirt stained hands in merciful prayer for its soul’s renewal. To rewild democracy through ritual is to summon the wild forces to compost power, subdue greed, and return equanimity to the land—because true power is not owned, it is shared.
Ritual Pathways to Ineffable Emergence:
Unbinding Power—Releasing the Sacred Thresholds
Sovereignty is not a crown worn by kings—it’s the pulse in our very veins, our ancestors’s blood in soil. To rewild democracy through ritual we bind old notions that sovereignty is bestowed in the hands of a few and shove it back into the dirt where it belongs, to compost, to decay. We feed it with our prayers that instead the mycelium redistribute that power, giving it to the streets, to the wild places, to the forgotten corners, to the seen and unseen humans and other than humans where real change erupts. Power isn’t something to hoard—it’s something to channel through the people, through the land, through the cracks in the system that are already breaking wide open.
Unleashing the Wild Tongue: The Earth Responds
Democracy is not a dry contract sealed with ink. It is a creature with many mouths, a wind-torn chorus of voices rattling through vacant lots and ravaged fields, carried on breath and storm. It does not live in ballots alone but in the pulse of protest, in the stories we weave, in the wail of the unheard. We are not meant to be tamed, our power measured in years, in counted votes. The earth is already speaking—splitting open, flooding, trembling with fury. And we must answer. Not as polite petitioners, but as a many-throated beast, raw and relentless, connecting through ritual by keening with the wild, for the wild, until the earth remembers its mycelial connection to us—as kin, as chorus, as the tangled roots of something too ancient to be silenced.
Returning the Commons— Giving Back What Was Stolen
The land was never meant to be sliced, sold, or severed. It was meant to be a song, a pulse shared between all things—root, stone, and sky. The rivers are not for profit, the forests are not for extraction, and the air is not a commodity. In ritual action, in an effort to return the commons to all sentient beings, we must attune to the ancient heartbeat that thrums beneath our feet, bring offerings of forgiveness, not in platitudes but in right action-sacrificing the places in our own lives where we are complicit, those places where we hoard, where we profit from at the expense of others, those place where we use beyond what is necessity, tear down the fences that keep us from knowing we are woven into this wild tapestry. It is not just land we give back—it is the breath of the earth itself, the wild heart that beats in our bones, calling us home to what was never truly lost.
Restoring Ecological Wisdom—Rewilding Democracy
Democracy was never meant to be a cold scaffolding of laws and institutions. It was meant to breathe, to pulse, to root itself in the living earth. The land knows the way. The rivers, the mycelial networks, the ancient stones—each a keeper of memory, each a voice in the great chorus of governance beyond the human. To ritually rekindle democracy is to remember our kinship, to listen with our whole bodies to the rhythms that shaped us. Every choice, every law, every vision for the future must be woven from the deep intelligence of the land itself. To fight for the earth is to fight for freedom—not as a human construct, but as the birthright of all who belong to this vast, trembling web of life.
Reconnect with Ancestral Wisdom—The Past Knows How to Rise
The old ways are not dead—they are alive in the whispers of the trees, the song of the river, the rhythm of the wind. Rewild democracy ritually by tapping into ancestral wisdom, by remembering that the earth has always known how to govern itself. Our ancestors do not rest in silence—they murmur through the land, reminding us that the earth has always known how to govern itself. The systems of control we’ve inherited are brittle, unnatural, trembling at their own weight. But the wisdom of those who came before? It is raw, untamed, woven from fire and bone. It does not ask permission to return. It rises, wild and urgent, calling us to dismantle the dying world and plant the seeds of something fierce, something free.
Learning with the Land—Knowledge as a Living Flame
True learning does not live in books alone. It is stitched into the veins of leaves, carved into canyon walls, sung by the wind as it moves through stone. To reclaim knowledge is to make it wild again—to step beyond the sterile walls of the classroom and into the great breathing world. The forest is the schoolhouse. The river is the mentor. The stars hold the oldest curriculum. Our practicum incite us to question, to disrupt, to dream in colors unseen. Carrying this ember of imagination, let it catch, burn, ritually creating Need Fires. Fire was never meant to be caged. Reclaiming democracy in the old ways of tending flame—not as destruction, but as renewal. Burn herbs for protection. Light candles for the forgotten. Learn the sacred work of controlled burns, of fire as medicine, as clearing, as return.
Altars of Rebellion—Stone, Bone, and the Breath of the Wild
Do not bring your prayers to cold, dead halls. Build your altars where the earth still breathes—where root and river tangle, where fire licks the night, where bones of the old world whisper their unrest. Offer not just words, but the raw marrow of your defiance. Lay down your grief, your rage, your unwavering love for the untamed. Let the land remember you as kin. Let the ancestors see you standing, unbroken.
To rewild democracy is not to mend its cracks—it is to scatter its dust into the wind, to let rain and roots do the work of forgetting. It is to kneel in the soil and shape something wilder, something woven from reciprocity, from shared power, from the memory of how governance once pulsed through the land itself. This is not democracy as doctrine. It is democracy as river, as wildfire, as a heartbeat that cannot be caged. It moves through the people, through the land, through every wild thing that refuses to be owned.
