Super Dakota

There is that bit in the middle, where the plants grow.

Not the headline, not the breaking point, not the scorched edges where everything is loud and burning.

The middle is quieter than that. It smells like damp soil and patience.

It’s the place between collapse and repair, between what is shouted from podiums and what is carried home in tired bodies. Hands passing tools. Neighbours learning each other’s names. Seeds pressed into ground that was never meant to belong to anyone in the first place.

Just stems insisting upward

through neglect.

This is quiet resistance:

the audacity of softness,

the refusal to harden.

A yellow face turned to the sun

without asking permission.

Roots learning the shape of cracks,

memorizing weakness in stone.

Power prefers the edges—crisis, spectacle, fear. It wants us staring at the fires so we don’t notice what’s being taken while we’re distracted. But that bit in the middle, where the plants grow, is where resistance learns to whisper. Where people choose care over cruelty, solidarity over scarcity, again and again, even when no one is watching.

The plants don’t argue with the concrete. They split it.

Slowly. Patiently. Without asking permission.

This is how change actually moves: in mutual aid spreadsheets, in shared meals, in the refusal to believe that profit is more natural than kindness.

making soup while the world shakes,

teaching children names for birds,

saving seeds we may never plant ourselves.

In the stubborn insistence that another way of living is not only imaginable, but already underway.

That bit in the middle is fragile, yes—but it’s also relentless.

You can pave it over, fence it off, call it unrealistic. It will still find the cracks. It will still grow.

And one day, when the noise has exhausted itself, when the fires burn low, it will be clear that the future wasn’t built at the extremes at all—but quietly, collectively, in

the middle, where the plants grow.

This is where we are learning

how to stay.