From Riot Gear to Rooted Prayer

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.

Instead, I write from the smoke of incendiary flash bang streets, where the headlines bleed and an empire howls into its echo chamber, disquieted. Where the thunder roars outside my shaken window panes, angry.

Today, despite the proclivities to collapse and avoid, there is a compelling obligation to choose to stay present in awareness, witness the specters of conquest ordering weapons to turn inward towards the heartbeat of its people. This beast turning on its own body.

Before us, the hypocrites, the masked ones, who in the decaying flesh of democracy, weave their machinations of new world order.

Across the sea, a young woman is captured for daring to speak as if the earth were alive and not a dead thing to be bought and sold. The whales mourn in the telling of it.

And then, well, here comes the shriek of the old gods as their temples rot from within. An empire turning its armies on its kith and kin. As it binds the mouths of opposition with threats of extreme force, zip ties young visionaries, intimidates in riot gear, farcically demonstrating dominion, it reveals its true purpose. A purpose that is a glorified grift, hatred magnified, greed fueled, and hollow at its core, wearing the mask of order while seeding collapse beneath every polished decree.

These are not our leaders. These are emissaries of extraction, trembling behind their pulpits of steel and oil, bigotry and racism, doubling down because by the sheer numbers of us, they know the tide is turning. They know the soil is stirring.

Underneath this spectacle of coercion, this unholy orchestrated distraction, hope erupts on paved streets spreading like mycelia across forested floors. A rebellion of kinship, of compost, and of collective refusal. Not seduced by the noise of the dying but seeing clearly. This inevitable, undeniable truth:

What looks like escalation is the entropy of empire reaching its fever pitch.

Staged photo ops, armored cars, and tactical gear are not symbols of power. They are requiems for a way of being that cannot sustain life.

The tyrants can no longer seduce the masses with their rhetoric. The myths of separation are fraying. Their false gold is losing its luster, as their promises undelivered are not easily downplayed with the next big beautiful bailout, or swaying tariffs.

We watch as their reverent apostates grow weary-eyed and repentant unable to wash the sins from their hands.

More significant, however, are moments of movements, of rompimiento de gloria - openings like ruptures in the heavens. Slipstreams, where you, the ones in the streets with ash on your cheeks and fire in your bones, you sidewalk-sitters and grief-weavers, you water protectors with riverblood prayers, you joyous defiant dancers conjuring rhythm in the face of riot shields, correspondents struck silent by rubber while speaking in truth, petitioners reminding the elected what could and should be, writers whose ink is a spell of resistance, you devotees of prayers who whispering incantations to open the possibilities of a gentler world, you are the holders of the line, the keepers of the threshold.

You are the midwives of a world being born through the birth canal of collapse.

You are the awakened from collective amnesia that would keep us isolated, afraid, compliant.

You, walking in footprints older than empires, you are the remembrance of our collective belonging.

Not for the first time, but for the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, so that we remember how to speak in circadian rhythms, unlearn blinding obedience and return our allegiance to kith and kin.

Let the empire tighten its grip. Let it bare its teeth. It only shows us what it fears: the feral, the unruly, the rooted, the kin-bound are the future. We have kin and we are everywhere.

Dear Greta, dragged from the sea, you, a mirror to us all. You are not a martyr but our map. Your resistance belongs to the mycelial intelligence of life itself, interconnected, persistent, impossible to impede.

We become compost conspirators. We become spell-breakers. We become the folk who whisper to worms and remember the names of rivers. Because what’s coming isn’t a better version of the old world. What’s coming is a return to inter-being, embodied ethics and fierce, living kinship beyond flag and border.

So, here I am writing from the present, from within the belly of the storm, hand in loamy soil, listening to the fungal quiet beneath the sirens. Writing because the war machines are loud, but the authentic soil, speaking truth is louder. Writing because even now, beneath bootprints and broken treaties, kinship is flowering, in spite of their armored lies.

As the tyrants march, keep the steadfast weaving of a wild, soft, relentless world that remembers how to feel connective, generative.

The rebellion is already alive. And it’s not centralized. It is cellular, sacred and ours.

By my hand to your heart, faithfully.

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Image: Banksy, Migrant Child, 2019, Island of Dorsoduro, Venice, Italy