“From the ground up,” my boxing coach always told me. “All your power comes from the ground up.” Like weeds that burst through the cracks in the sidewalk, it’s the roots, that life force energy from Earth, that push the weed through the pavement to break free.
It has been a harrowing week; many of us grappling with anger, grief, and frustration around wildly unpopular top-down SCOTUS decisions that threaten our bodies and the body of Earth. I have been sitting with it all, trying to breathe and be, feel what I feel, and find constructive ways to respond. As always, nature is my teacher and my healing. I’ve been meditating on the medicine and resilience of Dandelion.
Dandelions bloom again and again on city streets, forest edges, and suburban lawns despite being trampled on, poisoned, and mowed down. I look at their incredible seeds that release in the wind — inches, feet, sometimes miles from their original source — and fall to the ground, barely visible. But once they reach into soil and take hold, and their taproots are firmly planted, that force of nature is relentless. It is true for us too. Even smallest efforts, like seeds, like weeds, can rise up through barriers and in between cracks in seemingly solid foundations to be unstoppable.
Author and environmental activist, Bill McKibben wrote about the recent SCOTUS ruling in his Substack post, ‘Be The Backlash!’:
“The key thing to understand about these Supreme Court decisions is that they’re fantastically unpopular. On guns, on choice, and on climate the Court has taken us places Americans badly do not want to go. By majorities of two-thirds or more Americans detest these opinions; those are majorities large enough to win elections and to shape policy, even in our corroded democracy. The right, after decades of slow and careful and patient nibbling away at rights and norms is suddenly rushing full-tilt. That’s dangerous for us, but also for them. The force of that charge can, jiu jitsu-like, be turned against them.”
That’s one of the first things I learned when training as a competitive fighter: when someone rushed me or ran toward me in the ring, I stepped to the side to fight them at angles. “Use the path of least resistance,” my coach would always say. He applied physics to boxing and taught me how to generate power based on those principles, principles found in nature.
Local grassroots efforts, channeling the resilience of weeds, and martial arts moves. That's where I've landed for now.
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