Force for Good

It’s raining here in California. A lot. I can hear the patter on my roof…now a delicate staccato, drip drip drip. Earlier it was torrential, sheets of rain pounding with such force it sounded like a fire hose aimed directly at the house. While I navigate flooded streets and worry about seasonal water seepage coming up through the concrete in my garage, the tulip bulbs and ferns in my garden are having a very different experience. Their roots, swollen with life-giving moisture, are sending a signal to the green shoots to reach for the light…unfurling spiraling fronds, coaxing tightly bound blossoms into becoming.

Becoming aware of this intimate relationship between rain, changing light, and the awakening of life underground, I am filled with awe. The larger forces dancing life into being. An outcome arising unmediated by human desire, efforting, or strategizing. No PowerPoints, AI, or decision matrices needed. Just life calling forth life. The rhythm of seasons, elements, sun, and compost in a perfectly orchestrated symphony of interbeing.

And then I open my laptop.

What fills my feed is a different kind of underground…not roots swelling with moisture, but power structures long buried in silence, in money, in careful legal language designed to protect the powerful from the wreckage of other people’s lives. Epstein’s network. Presidential immunity. Corruption. A different interbeing, surfacing now into the light, not one of generativity, but one of impunity.

These are not the forces of life. They are its systematic negation.

And they are designed to be impenetrable. I scroll and feel my throat and jaw tightening, the wreckage is everywhere and it is staggering. The abuses are so vast, so systemic, so brazen. And beneath the helplessness is something fiercer: outrage. The dark force doesn’t just destroy life. It normalizes that destruction, mocking us for caring, distracting us with clickbait, numbing and exhausting us with a firehose of shock and disgust.

Both have been underground. Both are now surfacing. The difference is what they bring with them.

From Robin Wall Kimmerer, I learned the Anishinaabe word Puhpowee — the force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.

Life calling life.

From my media feed, I learned the term “Non-Prosecution Agreement” — a plea deal that allowed a violent abuser to avoid federal charges.

Destruction of life…excused.

There are two forces operating in the darkness. One coaxes tightly bound things into becoming. The other ensures the powerful never have to reckon with what they’ve destroyed. One offers a clear invitation. The other offers only a feed that never ends and an outrage that accumulates with nowhere to go.

My own vitality, the aliveness I can feel in my heart, mind, and body, shifts markedly as I move between these two worlds. In the garden, something opens. In the feed, something closes. The body knows the difference even when the mind has been caught in the addictive cycle of despair.

The life force asks something simple of us, even if it isn’t always easy: notice. Appreciate. Tend. Step outside. Put your hands in the dirt. Watch what is reaching toward light and ask yourself what you can do to support that reaching. In a time of deliberate overwhelm, attention is resistance.

The dark force asks nothing of us, because it wasn’t designed for our participation. It was designed for our consumption. And the most subversive thing we can do is refuse to be consumed by it.

I know which force I want to give my precious attention to. Choosing is not retreat. It is its own form of Puhpowee, life pressing upward, born from the dark.

The tulips are still reaching, moved by forces older than any court ruling. I close the laptop. I reach over and press my hand into the soft white belly of my cat, feel his purr move through my palm. The rain continues its patient work.

This, too, is a force. And it is asking something of me.