rooted forward

Reclaiming Direction Through Collapse, Ecology, and Psychological Evolution

What If Forward Isn’t a Direction?

For most of my life, I’ve been trying to escape the backward world. I assumed there was a forward one—elsewhere, ahead, just beyond the next border or breakthrough. I chased it geographically, professionally, relationally. The myth was simple: forward is a place. Somewhere better.

Even this year, I believed the ache I carried was locational. I thought maybe the grief would lift if I crossed the right threshold. But no matter where I went, the fog traveled with me.

Reading Baby Blue this month named something I hadn’t been able to: the sensation of swimming upstream inside a global undertow.

Chasing Progress: A Cultural Myth

I’ve chased “forward” into friendships that curved sideways, into projects that echoed the past, into institutions that promised change but clung to fear. Less than 1% of my work has felt truly forward. The other 99% has been resisting regression. White-knuckling the wheel so I don’t slide backward.

So what is forward, if not that direction?

Maybe it isn’t what we build or brand. Maybe it’s how we feel.

(Yes, I know—that’s a very therapist thing to say.)

But I mean it.

Forward Isn’t Marketable

Maybe forward doesn’t scale. Maybe it can’t be monetized. Maybe it performs terribly in grant proposals.

Maybe forward is resonance—a quiet shift, a soft refusal, a felt sense of newness even when nothing looks different...yet, let it overwinter.

Grief as an Altar

There is grief. It lingers. There’s loss—more than we admit, or want. There are awkward moments with what no longer clicks. There is quitting, and not being a quitter.

But grief isn’t just a byproduct. Grief is an altar. A place to kneel with what was real. A place where love lived—and still lingers in the ashes.

Ecological Intelligence as Psychological Evolution

I’ve started to hear forward in the voices of comic book artists and musicians. In shop window posters that reject false binaries. In the logic of plants—how they bloom quietly, communicate across species, and collaborate beneath the surface and how the edges of their leaves change.

Forward, it turns out, isn’t just nonlinear—it’s invisible. More precisely, it’s energetic.

A psychological evolution. Not where we arrive, but how we relate.

What Plants and Mycelium Already Know

Even in ecology, forward isn’t expansion or yield—it’s intersubjective connectivity. A widening of perception to include plants, fungi, decay, water.

Interspecies communication isn’t metaphor. It’s methodology. Permaculture. Natural farming.

Forward is a return to the intelligence of relationship over the illusion of dominion.

This wisdom isn’t new—it’s ancient. It lives in oral traditions, in mycelial webs beneath language, in every ceremony that remembered kinship before conquest.

Books, art, dreams, grief—they’ve always known. So have plants. So have those who never left the land. Geniuses we’ve only known how to celebrate long after they’ve died—or died because of how they saw forward.

Planting Myself Elsewhere

I used to orient myself around where I’m from. Or, no longer from.

Tended my life like a small, conventional farm. I thought ideas like distance from pathogens was the healthy boundary. Except, pathogens are everywhere.

Then I thought the answer was new markets, new rooms. But the same backward conversations found me there.

So I turned to our garden. Literally.

Our Backyard Garden, and Lineage

This year, we built our backyard garden. Actively started our path toward a self-sustaining garden life. We got day-old chicks in February—while snow still covered the ground.

I nurtured flowers, vegetables, animals, and soil in suburbia—not to escape, but to find myself. To listen for what comes next.

I began to talk to ancestors I never met or who passed—those who farmed in Texas generations ago. Those who drifted away from oppression and northern lights in Europe. And to my grandmother, who taught me the plants of the Pacific coast while driving her gold Chrysler convertible with the top down, hot pink lipstick on, and a glittered gold golf visor catching the sun.

Lineage, I’m learning, isn’t inheritance—it’s intimacy returned to soil. Memory composting itself, ready to feed the next generation of living organisms.

Rooted Forward

If that’s true, then forward isn’t a direction. It definitely isn’t an arrow. It’s:

Inward. Downward. Rooted. Wild, and yes…