Refusal
This week I’ve been thinking about refusal. Not the kind that shouts, not always. But the quiet, steady kind. The kind that rises.
Out my window, spring is making a mess of things in the most glorious way. The pavements in my neighbourhood—grey, tired, laid down in lines—are being undone. Not in great dramatic gestures, but in small, persistent acts of green defiance. A purple flower here. A curl of moss there. Shoots that don’t ask permission. Roots that do not obey boundaries. Nature, refusing the tomb of concrete. Nature, insisting on life.
There is something deeply political about this kind of refusal.
Because we are living through a time that asks us to submit. To give in to the idea that this is how things are. That collapse is inevitable. That the systems are too big, too broken, too late to change. But nature reminds us otherwise. Nature is never static. It mutates. It overflows. It refuses to stay dead.
And so perhaps we are called to a similar kind of refusal. Not just the activist’s No—though there’s power in that—but a refusal that is also a Yes. A Yes to life, to complexity, to entanglement, to care. A Yes to refusing extraction, refusing domination, refusing speed when slowness is what’s needed. A Yes to refusing the myth that we are separate from the living world. We are not. We never were.
In this great entangled crisis—climate, nature, justice—it matters how we refuse. Not with purity or perfection, but with creativity. With rootedness. With tenderness and boldness at once. Sometimes refusal is showing up differently. Sometimes it’s walking away. Sometimes it’s standing still long enough to hear the whisper of a dandelion breaking through the concrete.
We need more of this right now. More refusal to replicate harm. More refusal to look away. More refusal to carry on as though we are not being invited—urgently, lovingly—into a new way of being.
Because here’s the truth: the cracks are already there. The uprising has already begun. The question is: will we notice it? And will we become part of it?
