The Ground Is the Strategy
tl;dr: Real resilience comes from reclaiming the ground. From local relationships, embodied attention, and forms of community that can’t be extracted or managed from afar.
If you don’t have the time for this full piece, I urge you to skip ahead and learn about The Fierce Vulnerability Kinship Lab.
First the bad news. I start here because the optimist in me had not considered this possibility until reading Douglas Rushkoff:
Another way of imposing authoritarianism is to give victims false victories. Try outrageous things and then pull back. Like, shoot some citizens, then withdraw a bit and replace the guy in charge. Or threaten invasion of Greenland, and then compromise by just claiming all the rare earth minerals. Show the victim you can kill them, and then “reward” them with mere abuse. When the oppressor “backs down,” it’s strategic. It means we’ve become ready to accept their terms — which can still change at any time. After all, the bully doesn’t actually beat us up if we give him our lunch money.
And here I was thinking we are having an impact.
And maybe we are. Maybe Rushkoff is off.
More likely it’s a bit of both.
And I’m still an optimist, but I’m a tragic optimist. I am striking my deal with life and its terms. I’m placing my stakes on love and meaning, on faith and fierce hope.
We gotta keep pushing back.
And we gotta count our victories when we get them.
Where Rushkoff is absolutely right is in his assertion that we must become the ground. His piece on how to build resistance when the shoe drops is one of the wisest I’ve read so far:
Who are the people around you?
Who are they? What do they need? What can they offer? I used the recent storm as an excuse to reach out…
Gotta start somewhere. And it’s not political or lefty to find out if there’s an elder person or someone who needs to be checked up on in a storm or a blackout. Or if you live out in the real world, who has water? Who has a chainsaw? Who knows first aid? I know, that sounds advanced. Like real mutual aid. So how about do it the easy way: Knock on someone’s door and ask for something. An egg. Borrow an egg. And bring one back the next day.
Know these people. Know their faces. This is your squad. You think a war is coming? Okay, it’s your platoon. The more you know and depend on these people, the more resilient you are against any adversary — be it storm or stormtrooper.
Create the conditions for community support, safety, and awareness. Then the good stuff happens. I lived in Greenwich Village in the early 90s at the peak of the AIDS crisis when gay men were getting chased and murdered in the street in great numbers. Those of us who had apartments on ground floors started putting pink triangles in our windows, so gay men knew they could seek refuge with us. They had a place to run. No one else knew what the symbol even meant. But the more pink triangles that went up, the more people realized that practically every home was part of this effort. Not a “movement” toward something, but a state of being. Of presence. Of readiness.
The movement, the activism, the ideals arise from that. They are the figures that emerge from the ground we have prepared and embodied.
And they are local. In Minneapolis, people are joining Signal messaging groups by the block. All the organizing apps were removed from the App Store for fomenting insurrection; so people were forced to create their own hyper-local messaging groups — at the scale of just one city block. Each one has an organizer who can report up to the neighborhood group, and so on. Not everyone needs to be everything to everyone all the time. The network takes care of that.
The more networked we are, the more specialized we can be. The more grounded we are in our area of expertise — be it foraging, immigration, biodiesel, childcare, or local councils.
Without connection to the people and communities where you live, all of these stresses and TV images are food for abstraction. No ground, just figure. And then you are on the path to dehumanization.
The Ground as Reality
Oliver Burkeman recently posted a note inviting us to remember that:
Politics is not the base layer of reality.
Take a moment and let that sink in.
For many of my friends here, it is quite the challenging proposition.
Politics matters. It has real consequences. It shapes people’s lives in both good and very painful, lasting ways.
But politics is not the deepest story we are living inside.
When we unconsciously treat political drama as “the real world,” and everything else as a temporary escape, something in us contracts.
When we treat politics like the base layer of reality we begin to live inside a narrative designed by people who benefit from our fear and fixation.
We are literally feeding them the most powerful currency.
The currency of our attention.
Our attention is what’s being extracted by our political and economic system.
All of that energy wasted on fluorescent ads in Times Square?
Yes. That’s a bid for your attention.
The rush to build energy-sucking data centers to power crypto and AI?
ALL OF IT is a bid for your attention.
When we make the choice to root ourselves in relationship, creativity, prayer, beauty, and moral agency, we make the choice to live within the embodied layers that make wise action possible.
We withdraw our attention from the abstract realm of screens full of people we will never meet.
We begin to unlock our hijacked limbic system from the spectacle of fear and powerlessness.
From here, it is not that we care less.
It is that we care more clearly.
And we carry less of the weight that was never meant to be ours.
We regain our agility. Our adaptive response-ability.
Coming Together, Here on the Ground
A few weeks back, when writing about what to do In the Face of Escalating Violence, I invited us to nurture trust & relationship:
Go deeper. Much, much deeper. With the folks you already know. The people who share your values. The ones that you anxiously talk to about the news. Those who are already going to the protests.
Our social web is dangerously fragmented. The culture keeps us impossibly busy. Dangerously isolated from one another.
This is the time to drop your laptop. To skip the Netflix show. And to visit each other’s homes. To have dinners together. To see our children playing and our teenagers get crushes on each other. To ban phones from our gatherings. And to break out one of those decks that facilitate deep and meaningful conversation.
Your aim is to deepen connection. You will know you are getting below the surface when these become the people you can call on when you are sick. You will know when to bring them soup. The people you will go on long walks with when you feel like you are coming apart.
I just spent hours of a Friday afternoon with my friend Anton of Light of Day Records. Talking about vinyl. About how it is the only medium to come back from the dead. About the fact that vinyl pressing plants can’t keep up with demand.
About the thirst for what is analog, carbon-based and real.
About the experience of album art.
About the power of staying with a single artist through the totality of an oeuvre.
Vinyl yields a listening experience that goes deeper. It leaves you with an indescribable sense of texture. Like you have a sense that can touch sound.
It’s a very different relationship with the medicine of music.
And music has always brought us together.
At one point in the conversation I was like:
Nevermind the facilitator’s card deck!
Let’s just bring our records to each other’s homes.
Let’s find out what they tell us about each other.
I’m not trying to be random by bringing records into the mix. I’m just saying I’m with Anton, the revival of this medium is telling us something about our longing for what’s real.
We have an instinct, an intuition, an embodied longing for connection. For life on the ground. For the base layer of reality.
This is where I start noticing signals.
Not programs or solutions, but patterns. Experiments. Mycelial stirrings that feel like responses rather than reactions.
One of the clearest signals I’ve seen recently is something called:
The Fierce Vulnerability Kinship Lab
Conceptually, this has to be one of the most compelling experiments I’ve encountered in a long time. I want to be clear: I’m not involved. I came across it the same way you are coming to it right now. Through a shared link, passed hand to hand through the network:
Everything I’m reading tells me this effort is oriented toward the same ground many of us have been tending for decades.
And it was decades ago that I worked with Kazu Haga. In an early stage experiment in decentralization. We have not kept in touch, and I have not read his book, Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse. But I know he is a special person, a person of principle, and I know we share some remarkable friends in common.
The stated approach and the structure to this emergent Fierce Vulnerability Network are aligned with much of what I’ve been learning and teaching.
I admire the inherent humility in it. The pace. The reverence. And the growing understanding of decentralization and network dynamics.
From Kazu:
I realized recently that my vocational call, at least in this season of my life, is to be in communities that are willing to ask the biggest questions.
We are living in a time of profound transition - what many call the Great Turning - when the systems that have shaped our lives are unraveling, and something new is struggling to be born. In moments like this, I find myself less interested in tunnel vision: one issue, one campaign, one legislative win. Not because those things don’t matter, but because they don’t feel sufficient.
FVN is a place oriented toward listening to emergence, toward being guided by spirit, and toward asking the kinds of questions I posed in my book:
What if instead of chanting, we cry?
What if instead of holding signs with demands, we tell stories?
What if instead of yelling, we sing songs?
What if instead of anger, we lead with heartbreak?
What if we stop trying to win and start trying to heal?
What if we build a movement where nobody - even those on the “other” side - ever questions their belonging?
What if we understand nonviolent action as collective trauma healing?
What if instead of trying to “shut it down,” we try to “open it up” - our hearts, our relationships, our capacity for repair?
What if we mobilize the power needed to stop harm while cultivating the love necessary to heal it?What would it take?
What if?
You can read Kazu’s invitation yourself. And please let me know if you decide to dive into the experiment. I want to stay abreast of what you learn. My own community building efforts will keep me from being an active part of this experiments. But I already know we are part of the same mycelium.
Something is Happening Here on the Ground
Not someday. Not after the crisis passes. Right now. Within and among our bodies. Beneath our feet. Inside kitchens and living rooms and neighborhood threads.
From the return of vinyl and our hunger for what’s analog and real, to experiments in decentralized kinship rooted in fierce vulnerability, a pattern is forming.
It isn’t loud. It doesn’t announce itself as a movement.
But it is coherent.
And it is alive.
Exactly here, exactly now, from within the chaos itself. There is something being born.
And it needs our attention on the ground.