One of my favorite things is seeing weeds climb up the middle of street signs, morning glory taking over telephone poles, and tree roots warping pavement. Grass growing through the cracks in sidewalks.

These are gardens of resistance. Life is strong enough to flourish and overtake the difficult conditions that civilization has created for it. Things of persistence, color, and creativity in a world bombarded with concrete and asphalt oppression. Surviving in a mechanized and routine environment where growth, nurturing and integration are secondary to the maintenance of institutions. A place where the lifecycle is thwarted.

I like to see the same kind of social-life forces in people. I often feel sad, angry and exhausted by all of the things that are oppressive about the world. Sometimes all I can see are the confines of my time, my relationships, my breath, and my flourishing. But, I find joy in moments outside of the mundane and outside of the commodity.

My truth is in moments of nurturing, vitality and creativity. It is an emotional place where I can live critically and love uncritically. This beauty is the spirit in a struggle for survival. And like the weeds growing in the sidewalks, revolution and resistance can be found in everyday life.

The goal of this project has been to find the gardens of resistance in my life and share them. It seems that I have more often had access to an education of oppression than to celebrations of resistance, so it may be skewed towards the former.

In working on this zine, I had to answer a few questions.

Why do it?

This is a way of sharing.

I have spent a lot of time in the last few years finding things that I think are essential. I have tried to reference, include, or capture the spirit of a lot of those things. Many of my friends or acquiantances don’t have political or theoretical connections, while they do have interest. This is exposure.

This is a way of reaching out.

For the last few years, I have been looking to myself and to the resources around me to be strong and true and to understand and build community. I have done a lot of listening, a lot of checking things out and assessing. Some of this writing dates back to 4 years ago.

While I have been developing my Anarchist politics, I have not established an Anarchist identity. Because of style and personal connections, I have felt tangential to the Anarchist scene. It is not just Anarchists that I want to reach out to, of course. Everyone experiences oppression, whether they can articulate it or not.

This is a benchmark.

What I really value is intimate relationships, and those are difficult to develop in groups and at events through which I have participated in the anarchist scene. This project has been a process of discovering intimacy with myself, with my pen, with my politics and emotions. I think there will be something new in here for everyone, even those of you who know me so well. I discovered new things, too.

This project marks something in me, but I can’t really articulate what. This little book is filled with stories, reflections, and compilations that will articulate it for me.

Is what I have to say interesting enough?

This was kind of easy to answer, especially since I decided not to force anyone to read it. I looked around and saw 1) that a lot of the things that I find interesting are really more boring than this, and generally the competition isn’t very tough. 2) My insecurities were probably more influential in this question than anything else.

Where should my boundaries be?

This comes up for two reasons: I expose myself and I expose others by printing this.

One of my biggest conflicts how to balance my relationships with people and my criticisms of the world and ways of operating within it. It often would be tactically smarter and certainly easier to not talk about how I am feeling, to not call people on shit that I see going down. Needless to say, this is hard. I have alienated a lot of people that I care about by being true to myself and talking about it. I have left relationships in ugly ways. I have also seen people that have the same feelings keep their mouths shut and leave “cleanly”.

In some cases, I make decisions to simply not engage in relationships that can’t be had honestly and openly. This has been alienating and disappointing for me and others. This has been particularly difficult in dealing with progressives who often fail to understand the dialectical nature of activism.

Some work that went into this writing was the product of emotional work for me personally. Here, I expose myself to the backlash of my words. Some of my criticisms of institutions are harsh. Important people in my life are a part of institutions, and they aren’t easily separable. I think I have opted to be on the “safe” side here, especially in exposing others. I avoided going to far into details of touchy issues that have already been emotionally trying for myself and people that I care about.