What happens next?
Weaving Defiance: Myths, Bodies, and the Ecosystems of Resistance
What happens next?
My body feels heavy like it is filled with rocks. I am surrounded by a kind of discouragement, despair, overwhelming exhaustion, and blank stares with blinking eyes that cannot locate language for the destructive death cult of empire and the tightening grip of authoritarianism looming like smog that fills and suffocates the lungs. I am sent reeling back to the opressive regime and domination and deumanization of authrotiariansim I know so intimately that it altered the shape of me. I roam between wanting to divest, refusing to give energy to the machine churning out endless click-bait to keep engagement and giving everything to those closest to me and care for those discarded, and a desire to do something so radical it alters me entirely. You can’t have us I hear as a refrain in my own mind. Our personhood, our spirit, does not belong to the state, and you cannot claim us. Even in the quiet at night when sleep is hard to return to, I am pulled toward embodied defiance that is also endless love, toward resistance, toward magic and a return to what matters.
Resistance is not a strategy; it is an ecosystem, a thicket of roots and fungi and saplings growing in the ruins of empire. Authoritarianism seeks to sever our connection to the natural world, to the collective, and to enchantment and the mythic realms of our stories and body knowing. But resistance is fertile, rhizomatic, and relentlessly alive. It is a story etched in flesh, a ritual born from marrow and memory. In times of authoritarianism, the body becomes a site of defiance, the collective a sanctuary of rebellion, and ritual an amulet against despair.
So I remember the wisdom of rejecting the state as savior, reclaiming the language of the body, the ways of subverting authoritarianism through the communal, through connection to all worlds and realms, through the ethos of embodied resistance. I write myself lists as reminders, anchoring and expanding the way through.
Root Down, Deep and Wide
Resistance begins below the surface. Like mycelium, send tendrils of connection into the unseen. Build relationships with neighbors, the soil, and the overlooked. In a world obsessed with spectacle, find power in the intimate and unseen. Rootedness will hold you steady when the storms ahead come.
Compost Despair
The authoritarian thrives on inertia, and despair is their greatest ally. Let grief and rage break down in the compost heap of your being. Turn them into fertile ground for resilience. The autocrat fears decay because it reminds them that all things fall apart, including them. So compost, ferment, let things rot. Like fallen leaves and rotting fruit, these feelings are not wasted but transformed into sustenance that feeds the future.
Learn the Language of the Wild Things
Authoritarianism is sterile, obsessed with control. Turn toward the messy, the feral. Learn from the ecosystems around you: how trees share nutrients, how wolves regulate balance, how rivers carve paths through stone. Let their stories teach you how to resist domination with spontaneity, interconnectedness, and persistence.
Photograph of the movement of river and stone in Iceland. Call on Your Ancestors
Invoke those who resisted before you—abolitionists, suffragettes, queers, witches, and all who dared to imagine another way. Let their courage sustain and embolden. Light a candle and say their names. Ask them for guidance and honor their memory.
Care
Care is how we remake and rewrite new myths. Care is political. Cook soup for your friends, knead bread, braid hair. These acts seem small, but they create the connective tissue of resistance. The domination of empire aims to isolate; each gesture of care is a thread weaving us back together.
Invoke the Trickster
The trickster thrives in cracks and contradictions. Use humor, play, and subversion to disrupt the narratives of control. Authoritarianism despises ambiguity; become slippery, unpredictable. Like foxes and crows, find freedom in cleverness and adaptability.
Crow Tarot - The Trickster- by Sandra McGinely Anchor Yourself in the Earth
Begin where all mythologies of resistance arise: the ground beneath you. Press bare feet to soil and remember that the earth holds every rebellion that came before. Breath is your first act of defiance; let it deepen and steady, carrying with it the stories of ancestors who stood against tyranny. The autocrat thrives on your disconnection. Reclaim your body as sacred territory.
Create Living Altars
Make sacred spaces everywhere. An altar can be a pile of stones, a bowl of water, or a wildflower sprouting through concrete. Dedicate these spaces to those who resist, to those who endure, to the possibility of a freer world.
Become a Fungal Network
Fungi thrive in darkness, in the decaying remains of what once was. Build networks that span the edges of society, connecting the unseen, those in the margins, the outcast. Support underground abortion networks, sanctuary spaces for migrants, and communities for LGBTQ+ youth. Through these networks, resource-sharing and collective action become possible, even in the harshest conditions. These edges of society hold the seeds of new worlds, waiting to crack open the oppressive center.
Fungal Networks
Prepare for the Long Winter
Myth teaches us the ways and rules of the underworld, that every dark age ends, and that survival requires endurance. Build caches of food, knowledge, and relationships. Practice skills that sustain: gardening, repairing, storytelling. Trust that your preparation will see you through the longest night.
Take Back Time
Authoritarianism imposes urgency, making us feel there is no room for rest or reflection. Take back your time. Walk slowly, write long letters, idle in the sun. Slowness is a refusal to be swept up in the machinery of domination. We will not make new worlds by using the same compulsive frenetic imposing of ongoing information faster than we can process and relentlessing requiring more and more of everything.
The Subversive Power of Joy
In the face of repression, joy becomes the breath of life and a rebellion. Dance in public squares; plant wildflowers in barren lots. Authoritarians seek to erase your capacity to become sensitized and alive in and to beauty. Resist by making beauty, reveling in joy, celebrating all that is life.
Defend the Commons
Protect public spaces, libraries, and forests as sacred places of gathering and learning. These commons are where myths are shared and movements birthed. To lose them is to lose collective memory.
Invite and Honor the Sick, the Disabled, the Broken, the Unruly
The necro state requires that some people be used up and disposed of. Authoritarianism thrives on myths of purity and weapons of control. Honor the sick and disabled body as the very site of resistance in its refusal to comply and its persistence in its own human existence. Set the table for the ill and unwanted, and feast on our sick bed as protest and creation and care.
Chronic Pain and Illness Portrait by Kyrianna Sow Chaos Where Order Oppresses
Where the authoritarian demands submission, introduce disruption. Wear subversive clothing, organize slowdowns, and flood unjust systems with unworkable data. Chaos, when intentional, becomes the trickster’s tool against oppression.
Plant Seeds, Literally and Figuratively
Authoritarianism burns forests and silences dreams. Resist by planting. Gardens are acts of hope, seeds are promises to the future. Plant ideas, communities, and literal food. Watch them grow despite the odds.
Return to the Body as Home
Your body remembers. It is a map of evolutionary survival, a living archive of creatureliness. Move, dance, stretch, weep, laugh, wrap your limbs around another. Let your body remind you that resistance is not just a thought but a rhythm, an instinct, a pulse.
Mend the Broken Web
The world is frayed, torn by extraction and violence. Mend it. Learn to sew, repair shoes, fix broken things. Each stitch is an act of defiance against the disposability that fuels authoritarianism. To mend is to refuse obsolescence.
Weave Mythologies of Resistance
Authoritarianism writes its own myths of power and inevitability. Write your own myths in return: of small acts overturning great empires, of forests reclaiming cities, of the trickster outwitting the king. Myths are resistance coded into memory. Tell the stories of your community, those who survived, and those who fell. Let these myths fuel your actions and anchor your dreams.
None of us is a lone hero in this story. We are a thread in a tapestry, a node in a web, a sprout in a forest. Resist not with the illusion of invincibility but with the messy, tender, indomitable force of life itself. Like the earth, resistance is cyclical. What falls will rise again.
May we remember that authoritarianism is not a god but a gaping void that consumes humanity. May we fill that void with the mythic power of our body, our community, and our care. Our power lies not in domination but in connection—with each other, with the earth, and with the untamable wildness of life itself.
I have been trying to find words - nothing seems adequate. Weaving Defiance is a manifesto for me. You've named the ways of resistance that endure, that are encoded. We each carry the code; we are the survivors of those who survived to resist. We remain, rooted and rising. Thank you, Isabel.
Your thoughts and words have conjured a deep warmth within me that now it has given me hope. These words will see me through the next four years and I will continue to take the actions that you help so eloquently put forth.