Note

Soft Rebellion Part One

Apologies for my absence, after emerging from a profound wintering practice, I emerged in the maelstrom of sickness, political upheaval and a notice that the beloved land I have known for 14 years has been sold to hedge funders, those opportunistic gentrifiers who have no issues displacing single families for swaths of apartments complexes, or Air B&B’s.

In these times, I can throw myself in completely—so completely that I fray the edges of my own wiring, my nervous system stretched thin like a lightning rod, catching too many currents, too many storms.

And so I am writing this for everyone who, like me, has tried to outrun the fire only to become the kindling. Who knows the high of going all in, only to crash, emptied out.

We need a different strategy—one that doesn’t just burn, but smolders, spreads, takes root. One that knows endurance is its own kind of rebellion.

Soft Rebellion is the mycelial strategy of weaving beneath the surface, unsettling rigid structures with slow, persistent entanglement. It does not meet violence with a mirrored fist but with the supple intelligence of the willow, bending just enough to redirect the force and send it spiraling elsewhere. Soft Rebellion is the way water carves stone—not through brute force but through patient insistence, through intimate knowledge of the cracks, through the whisper of time.

Its strategies are those of the trickster, the lover, the root and the reed. It listens before it moves, feeling into the hidden weaknesses of oppressive systems, understanding that no empire, no ideology, no monolith is without its fractures. It knows that control is a brittle thing, and that softness—fluid, adaptable, decentralized—is far harder to extinguish than steel.

Soft rebellion moves through stories, through the slow embroidery of alternative worlds into the fabric of the present. It cultivates beauty in places of despair, weaving small sanctuaries of aliveness that offer refuge and reimagine what is possible. It disrupts through delight, through care, through humor that turns the blade of power back on itself. It does not fight on the battlefield chosen by the oppressor; it shifts the ground beneath their feet.

To rebel softly is to refuse to be reduced. It is to remain tender in a world that would harden you, to insist on connection where division is sown. It is to plant seeds in the ruins, knowing that even in the shadow of collapse, life finds a way to creep through the cracks and bloom.

Soft rebellion is extraction work. It’s the slow, deliberate untangling of the barbed wire we’ve swallowed—hustle culture, internalized oppression, fear masquerading as productivity. It’s the quiet but radical refusal to be a machine, to be optimized, to be ground down into a function rather than a being.

Soft rebellion doesn’t look like a war cry. It looks like walking away. Like choosing to move at a different rhythm than the one demanded. Like reclaiming time as something stolen, not something to be managed. It is choosing pleasure where exhaustion was expected, choosing presence where dissociation was normalized.

I’ll pop on tomorrow with strategies, weaving potency into feral resistance.