featured photo | Zach Reiner 

Originally published by Shannon Willis, March 2025, in Redearthhealing.org

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.

Soft rebellion is the mycelial antidote to the brittle, crumbling monolith of power. In the face of a slow-moving coup—where democracy is gutted in broad daylight, where fear is the chosen currency of control—soft rebellion does not play by the rules of the oppressor. It moves beneath, between, beyond. It resists not with brute force, but with the cunning of ecosystems, the resilience of roots breaking concrete.

Soft rebellion understands that the systems tightening their grip on power want us exhausted, divided, reactive. It knows that despair is an instrument of control, that urgency is often a trap.

So instead, it cultivates deep, embodied resistance—rebellion that does not just fight against but builds towards.

Soft Rebellion in Action

Refusing the Script of Fear

The coup depends on a narrative of helplessness, of inevitability. Soft rebellion rewrites it. It speaks in futures not yet stolen. It refuses to repeat the script that says “we are powerless.” Instead, it whispers: We are vast. We are unruly. We are not so easily governed.

Sanctuary Networks

Authoritarianism thrives on isolation, on making people feel like they stand alone. Soft rebellion builds underground networks of care—mutual aid, resource sharing, protection. It weaves safety where the state seeks to unravel it. This looks like organizing community bail funds, housing networks, off-the-grid communication systems. It looks like knowing who in your neighborhood needs help, who has a safe house, who can be counted on when institutions fail.

Disobedient Joy

The coup wants you terrified. It wants you brittle and compliant. So laugh in its face. Gather in parks, sing, dance, make art that mocks the strongman and his fragile grip on power. Remember that joy is not a distraction—it is a weapon. It reminds us that another world is possible, that we are more than the violence done to us.

Slowing the Machine

Capitalism and fascism walk hand in hand, demanding productivity even as the world burns. Soft rebellion opts out. It works just enough to survive, then redirects energy into resistance, into community, into slowness. It refuses to feed the machine that funds oppression. It chooses to rest when the system demands exhaustion.

Decentralized Resistance

The state expects rebellion to be centralized, to have leaders it can imprison, movements it can crush. Soft rebellion is fungal—it spreads, untraceable, leaderless. It moves through encrypted networks, anonymous zines, whisper campaigns. It understands that a revolution with no head cannot be beheaded.

Rituals of Rewilding

Fascism thrives on control—of land, of bodies, of narratives. Soft rebellion rewilds. It plants trees in vacant lots. It reclaims stolen land. It teaches foraging and rainwater collection. It remembers that resistance is not just about destruction, but about growing something back.

Disrupting the Spectacle

Authoritarianism is theater—it survives on attention, on outrage, on the constant churn of crisis. Soft rebellion learns when to look away, when to starve the beast. It refuses to amplify propaganda, to take every bait, to let the regime dictate the rhythm of our days. It turns its gaze instead toward the work of healing, building, dreaming.

Turning Disinformation Into Openings

The coup thrives on disinformation, on turning reality itself into a battlefield. But soft rebellion doesn’t waste energy fighting ghosts. Instead of arguing in bad faith arenas, it uses moments of disinformation as openings—gently rerouting conversations toward truth, planting quiet seeds of doubt in false narratives. This looks like asking questions rather than attacking, offering a story rather than a statistic, introducing facts with the ease of someone handing over a cup of water instead of a hammer. It resists not through force, but through invitation—through giving people the tools to unspool their own illusions.

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.

Return to the table-of-contents for this Issue, What Water Can Teach Us