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In Volume 25 Issue 2 of Kosmos, Shannon Willis weaves a resounding discourse on water’s art of soft rebellion. In what she calls a “manifesto for a slow resistance movement,” Willis shows us what water can teach us in these challenging times…  

Here is just part of her wise treatise:

“Soft Rebellion is the mycelial strategy of weaving beneath the surface, unsettling rigid structure with slow, persistent entanglement. It does not meet violence with a mirrored fist but with the supple intelligence of the willow, bending just enough to redirect the force and send it spiraling elsewhere.

Soft Rebellion is the way water carves stone—not through brute force but through patient insistence, through intimate knowledge of the cracks, through the whisper of time.

Its strategies are those of the trickster, the lover, the root and the reed. It listens before it moves, feeling into the hidden weaknesses of oppressive systems, understanding that no empire, no ideology, no monolith is without its fractures. It knows that control is a brittle thing, and that softness—fluid, adaptable, decentralized—is far harder to extinguish than steel…

Soft rebellion does not play by the rules of the oppressor. It moves beneath, between, beyond. It resists not with brute force, but with the cunning of ecosystems, the resilience of roots breaking concrete…It cultivates deep, embodied resistance—rebellion that does not just fight against but builds towards.

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More about Water: Water Is…

My non-fiction book “Water Is…The Meaning of Water” celebrates water through at least 12 perspectives. The story of how it became is an interesting one, which I share in this interview with Joseph Planta. In short, during my work as a research scientist and environmental consultant, I studied water’s role in energizing and maintaining the biomes, ecosystems, and communities of our precious planet. Through my consulting work, I discovered a great disparity between humanity’s use, appreciation and understanding of water. This set in motion a quest to further explore our most incredible yet largely misunderstood and undervalued substance. I made the decision to write a book that, though based mostly in science, was for the general public to read and understand. I went beyond my traditional limnological knowledge and researched water’s many anomalous properties and our varied use of it all over the world, from the arcane discoveries of water memory by German and Russian scientists to the giant hydrological dams in China. From physics to metaphysics, I investigated water’s strange properties and our relation to it. Water Is… represents the culmination of twenty-five years of dedication as limnologist and aquatic ecologist in the study of water. Water Is… combines my personal journey—as mother, ecologist, and teacher—with scientific discovery that explores water’s many identities and ultimately our own.

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