[S]ymbols are defined by how we use them. Their power lies in how our imaginations interface with their construction, in what parts of ourselves we’re able to pour into the scaffolding they provide.

I do, however, find it vital to exercise kindness toward the obsessions and attempted expressions of the kid who carried me, day by day, to the life I live now, the life I myself am carrying day by day toward my own future self. […] Your previous incarnations and the work they did deserve more than knee-jerk dismissal. I was trying to do A Thing, and when it comes to self-reflection, cringe is often the body’s autonomic timekeeper. Blessed are those who have survived long enough to grow into new people, to surpass their past selves.

On one hand, I feel a sense of clarity and community and love that I had never fully experienced before: even if I am a broke, mentally ill brick, I am a whole human being who finally feels like she sees the beauty in herself, in staying alive. On the other hand, this beauty doesn’t come from the saccharine narrowness of cozy self-acceptance or commodifiable affirmations. Rather, it comes from finding ways to love and be loved by others that resists isolation and the authoritarian impulses it bolsters.

“The majority of the Japanese people, they’re not interested in politics,” [Mars89] said. “We want people to know what’s happening.”

The choice to hold the protest in the middle of a big city was deliberate, he said. “I hope some people passing on the street when we have the protest start to think about it.”

One regular participant of Protest Rave is alternative musician Haru Nemuri. “Artistic work exists within the freedom and diversity of expression, which is inherently political,” Nemuri said. “If you ignore politics while being an artist, you’re basically a free rider of that freedom.”

Nemuri has also been inspired by movements in other countries and is thinking about how to use her art to foster a stronger culture of political discussion in her country.“

Last year, I saw [Zohran] Mamdani win an election, and their team took to the streets with signs saying, ‘Let’s talk politics,’” Nemuri said. “I’m not a politician, but a musician, and I think I can expand this towards more artistic activities. Drawing from [German philosopher Jürgen] Habermas, I’d love to bring the public sphere, the coffee house, out onto the streets where literally anyone can join.”

In Japan, trained forest bathing guides often incorporate yoga and meditation into their forest bathing practices. Janice, however, takes a more straightforward approach.

Standing up, she offers what she calls her first invitation. She asks us to taste a pine needle, close our eyes, and listen to the wind, the shifting leaves, an insistent bird nearby, and other birds farther away. “Does the bird’s song have a rhythm to it? Can you hear a rhythm in the wind?” she asks. “Put your hand on your heart, feel it beating. Now, with your eyes closed, sit in the direction your body will want to sit in, and be still and listen.”

I head to the fallen hulk of a giant pine. I have seen it here before and have thought, “What a shame that it was cut down.” Inside the trunk, which is perhaps five feet in diameter, is darkness, a cave, and a tunnel that once led to the sky through the dead trunk’s center. Next to it, the stump is filled with sawdust and spiked with holes. On the ground between the stump and the fallen tree, purple mushrooms seem to pull inward, desiccated and withdrawn.

A few feet away, a circle of wood spines marks where a larger tree died long ago. Out of this ring of spines evenly spaced, every foot or so, a young tree grows out of the tree that had been. A circle of forest, rising from the carcass of the elder; an outer world emerging from the inner. I find something comforting about this moment. In the distance, a red-tailed hawk cries.

I feel a sudden wave of peace, and something else: compassion.

What also surprised me was how the stories—our descriptions of what we saw, heard, and felt—often sounded like parables or folklore. The child who dissolved into the storm of noticing. The “big tree beings” that had been here so long. The ants that were both leaders and followers. The urge to climb a tree and sit in the palm of its reaching fingers. The outer tree cared for by the inner tree, like a gentle nurse. And the circle of new forest rising from decay.

I wondered, Where do fairy tales come from? Or religious visions? Is the forest enchanted? Or have we suspended our disbelief, dismissed the pretense that we know all the answers? That’s one way to describe awe.

There is a scene near the end of Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone — called by Primo Levi “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis” —in which Otto Quangel, a simple Berlin factory foreman, sits in his prison cell awaiting execution. His crime: writing anti-Hitler messages on postcards and leaving them around the city. Most of the postcards, Fallada tells us, were turned in to the Gestapo immediately by terrified citizens who found them. Almost no one who picked one up was moved to act. The resistance, by any conventional measure, failed.

And yet the novel insists it did not fail. The act of refusing to pretend, of naming reality in a society organized around enforced silence, was itself the victory. The postcards were not propaganda. They were testimony. They were proof that someone, somewhere, in the grinding machinery of terror, insisted on remaining human.

This is what art does. This is what it has always done. And this is why authoritarian governments move against it first.

The literature of resistance to authoritarianism returns, across every culture and century, to a single insight about the relationship between art and power: the stories a society tells about itself are not decorative. They are structural. They determine who is visible and who is erased, what is grievable and what is not, which experiences are recognized as belonging to the common human inheritance and which are treated as exceptional, peripheral, or dangerous.

This is why every sustained authoritarian regime has moved against cultural expression, and why the quality and diversity of that expression is among the first casualties when democratic norms collapse.

What is being defunded is the democratic imagination — the capacity of a pluralist society to recognize itself in its full complexity rather than in the curated image that consolidating power wants projected. Otto Quangel’s postcards threatened the Nazi regime not because they were persuasive to many people but because they existed, because they made visible the gap between official reality and lived experience - the gap that every authoritarian system depends on people agreeing to ignore.

The books are not cautionary tales. They are field reports from people who understood what we are only beginning to learn.