What makes us strong?

When a seed sprouts, the tiny seedling must push itself upward through layers of dense soil to emerge into the light and begin to photosynthesize. The sheer force required to defy gravity and heave heavy particles aside seems as though it would crush the fragile stem of a baby plant. And yet, seeds emerge triumphant, time and time again. What a marvel of strength!

I’ve been considering the idea of strength a lot lately. We are living in terrifying times. Our places—our homes—are flooding, catching on fire, burning down, washing away. All around us, hot-headed people are inciting or enacting violence against those they don’t agree with or view as different. The very future of our nation feels uncertain. We’re watching helplessly as mass violence and atrocities continue in countries around the world. The natural systems that support life on earth seem on the verge of collapse.

It's hard to admit that we are scared. Admitting our fear is like admitting that we are weak. Or worse, that we are powerless. But we still have to get out of bed in the morning and do what we can to protect and nourish our loved ones, to pay our bills, and ideally, to also find small moments to savor the short and precious time we get to be alive here on this tiny planet orbiting in the vast galaxy.

It’s a lot. In our own way, we each seek soundbite-simple answers to this painfully complex reality.

The approach taken by our current president is to obsessively project an image of strength and to brutally criticize those who he deems weak. It seems that in his estimation, to appear strong is to appear virtuous and valuable. To appear weak is to lack virtue, to lack worth. I am seeing many others in my community following his example.

But there is a difference between appearing strong and actually being brave. Any combat veteran will tell you that. Any person who has birthed a baby will tell you that. Any farmer who has planted seeds again after a flood or a hailstorm has wiped out their entire crop will tell you that.

Bravery walks hand-in-hand with fear, as Brene Brown’s research has shown. Our moments of greatest bravery are also moments when we are scared shitless.

It isn’t brave to try to convince us that others who are different than us are to blame for our problems. What is brave is to actually join hands with those different perceived “others” and to boldly face together the real threats bearing down on all of us.

I don’t know exactly how to do this. All around me, I see countless loving experiments performed by diverse iterations of folks trying to do it, and it’s messy and hard and confusing and scary and vulnerable. It’s also beautiful and heartening in its messiness. The perfect isn’t the enemy of the good, and many wise leaders like Prentis Hemphill and Alok and adrienne maree brown and Rowen White remind us to let go of the fantasy of being able to do it perfectly.

Plants also offer us grounded examples for how to move boldly forward in community. Some of the latest research into plant social behavior (yes, that is a field of scientific study…be still my plant- and community-loving heart!) shows that plants are navigating similar complex social dynamics when making decisions about how and when to cooperate or compete with each other.

If you haven’t yet picked up a copy of The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger, I highly recommend that you do. Every page of the chapter “The Social Lives of Plants” is a revelation in how much we don’t understand about the plant world. We learn that sunflowers will grow roots in such a way as to deliberately avoid competing with each other for nutrients, and also that they will turn their sunny flowerheads to avoid shading out their neighbors in some cases.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that plant breeding has played a large role in shaping the ways cultivated crop plants respond to each other. One researcher she profiles named Susan Dudley has been studying what she calls “altruism” in plant communities, and she suggests that one of the central tenets we seed savers practice—saving seeds from the best-performing, most vigorous plants in the patch to continually improve the genepool—might be misguided.

By selecting the “strongest” individuals, we are selecting for the most competitive individuals. With each generation, we increase the number of plants in our populations who are vigorously competing with each other, and we reduce the number of individuals who are more reserved and cooperative—those who avoid growing aggressively into each other’s sun space, for example. Over time, this creates a population of super-competers who are always duking it out with each other, rather than nurturing a population who can forego the expensive business of self-defense and allot more resources into actual fruit or seed production—into the provision of life itself.

It is a foundational need we all have to know ourselves as belonging to a community. We all desperately want to belong somewhere. And knowing ourself as a member of a community does actually make us safer and stronger. There are plenty of loud voices on many sides of the political spectrum trying to tell people they can find belonging within a community founded on hating other people.

To those who feel the fragility and shallowness of these propositions in your bones: I also feel the empty promises of belonging that they provide. And yet, I frequently slip into the urge to divide us into teams and make the other my enemy. It isn’t surprising—our culture encourages us to do this every day.

But…

Our strength comes from resisting, from putting some elbow grease into wiping clean the muddy window that obscures our ability to see a different way forward. It is an act of resistance to name and hold tenderly the fragile fear that births haughty or violent performances of strength. It is an act of resistance to voice our yearning for something different, and then to hone and stretch our imaginations to envision what that something different can look like on the other side of the glass.  It is an act of resistance to join together with others who are doing the same.

Each sprouting seed must be strong. In the daily act of resistance that is planting and tending a seed, it is also an act of resistance to boldly explore the places where we’ve been taught to favor competition and violence and consider how we might instead select for cooperation, for altruism, as a vital component of strength.

What kind of agriculture—what kind of community of belonging—might emerge as we orient like sunflowers in this way?