Soft Rebellion

I want to be writing this from the future, a moss-soft place where peace has already come, where tyrants have crumbled into compost and children play along the promenade where the tanks rolled out unceremoniously to celebrate a would be king.

This is the entropy of empire: Not a sudden fall, but a long disintegration, noisy and cruel. The old spells of domination are breaking apart and with them, the illusion of control.

Disinformation thrives on urgency and spectacle, on the frantic impulse to react. Soft rebellion slows down. It moves at the pace of trust, at the pace of deep listening.

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.

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.

Authoritarian regimes expect rebellion to have a center, a name, a face. It craves an enemy it can indict, a movement it can infiltrate, a leader it can make into a martyr or a warning. It does not know what to do with the mycelial, the rhizomatic, the soft and spreading.

The machine lurches forward, a relentless tide of speed and consumption, grinding the world into fragments beneath its ceaseless gears. But I step out of its current. I pause. I let stillness root me like an ancient tree, a quiet act of defiance against the churn of capitalism. In these moments of deep listening, rebellion takes root—not in haste, but in the slow, steady pulse of a world refusing to be devoured.

In capturing the countless expressions of Disobedient Joy, I am delighted to share that there is an abundance of moments, both past and present, to offer you.

Let this be a balm.

But a sanctuary is more than a house for an altar, its table dressed in sacred objects. It is a threshold, a breathing membrane between worlds—a force of resistance, a mycelial uprising against the enclosures of empire.

Let us not give oxygen to the fray of last night’s broadsheet of lies and hypocrisies. Instead let’s do something entirely different.

Soft rebellion is not passive. It is insurgent, but in a way that cannot be easily named or neutralized. It moves in whispers, in laughter, in unnoticed refusals. It weaves a world beneath the one being forced upon us—a world that, one day, will break through the cracks and bloom.