Cultivating an Untamable Mind

On being ungovernable while living through an oligarchy

Thanks for being here everyone. Before we dig in, I’m excited to share an article I wrote for High Tech High’s Unboxed publication called Radical Dreaming: Reimagining Education to Honor Children and Childhood. Thank you, Alec, for working on this together, and Garrett for the nudge to connect us!

Lastly—If something you read below resonates, can you take a beat to like, share, restack, or comment? That helps folks find their way here. The best way to help this space thrive is by supporting as a paid subscriber. In all the ways you show up, I’m grateful you’re here.

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If it wasn’t crystal clear before, Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a wake up call that things are getting real fast. And we all have to make a choice—to tame ourselves, shrink small, get quiet in fear, or to continue to become untamable.

I can't say I’m not afraid. The confluence of fascism and AI surveillance should probably freak us all out. We are not writing and posting under the same rules of protection we had pre-January. We need to acknowledge that and make conscious choices about it. I want to be smart—we should all be smart—about what we share on the internet: the rights to free speech we felt protected under are under active threat.

And yet, history tells us that even under surveillance, untamable minds have disobeyed, changed laws, sparked revolutions when they find each other and work together. Our courage doesn't come from the absence of fear, but from the choice to act anyway—most especially when the stakes are high.

Control isn’t just digital—it’s analog too. There is a reason corrupt governments ban books: controlling access to the literature we ingest is a concerted effort to keep our minds uneducated, pliable, easier to tame or numb or distract or mold. There is a reason they plan to strip education of its already threadbare funding. An illiterate, uneducated populace is easier to control and coerce. There is a reason the CEOs of social media apps that shape how we consume, who we vote for, and the very way we think make up the oligarchy—they want to wield more power to make our minds more pliant, for their own profit. These things are connected. This is a fight for your mind, and you get to decide what to do about that.

I know each of us has different levels of risk, different things to lose, different privileges awarded or not awarded to us based on our positionality, which deem some of us more or less safe than others around how we use our voices. That is why white folks using their voices in these times is so damn important—they are more insulated from the harm than black and brown folks who speak out.

But whether your positionality affords you the privilege to take action or speak out online, each and every one of us needs to stay unruly in our minds and hearts.

Yesterday I had the privilege of seeing Dr. Rupa Murya speak at Medicine for Nightmares about her book Inflamed, connecting the dots of our ecological inflammation and our bodily inflammation, showing us in real terms the ways in which our bodies are not separate from this Earthly body we inhabit. Rupa is someone I look up to—a living example of what cultivating an untamable mind rooted in conviction looks like in action.

Afterward, as a friend and I perused the books store’s zines, my eye caught on this little tiny one called Notes on Weeds: an Ode to the Unwanted. It is a specific kind of pleasure to peruse a bookstore, to reach for an offline zine, to hold it delicately in my hands. That singular act feels more and more radical in these online times. I flipped the pages and landed on one that made my heart swell, titled Weeds as ungovernable. The lines that struck me most were:

To borrow from anarchist vocabulary, weeds are ungovernable. It is because they cannot be controlled that they are weeds. Feral plants that refuse to be erased, weeds are subversive and insurgent to capitalist state control.

More than anything, it must become our daily practice in these times to keep our minds untamable.

We do this by continuing to educate ourselves—by reading long-form, off internet books the whole way through—about the history of our countries, of colonialism, of how these dots connect.

We do this by pulling at the threads to keep understanding this moment we’re in, and teasing apart the role we play in it.

We do this by disconnecting enough from social media to understand the way it actively works to distract and shape our brains, for other people’s profit.

We do this by creating politicized art, making zines, imagining new realities derived from our own thoughts and minds and hearts.

We do this by finding similarly-questing people, listening to each other’s stories, showing up for each other, building deep trust together that allows us to learn, grow, take action, challenge, and support each other in keeping our minds untamable as the gaslighting ratchets ever higher.

Keeping an untamed mind is why I talk so much about autonomy, and agency, and self-determination in these posts—it is a singularly radical, political act to do so.

“self-directed learning” can and will continue to be talked about from a libertarian posturing by some. But without a liberation-based political, socioeconomic, and cultural framework, talking about education in that way simply reinforces the current construct.

But that’s not what this Folkweaver space is about— I am not here to ignore the political, social, and economic constructs. I’m not asking us to explore meaningful work or raise agentic kids to find meaningful work that they find enjoyable, divorced from a systemic analysis. Instead, I am here to say that working to decolonize our minds, bodies and hearts—to reclaim ourselves as our own, to teach our children to claim their bodies, minds and hearts as their own in a quest for collective freedom— is our most powerful tool to free us from the clutches of algorithms and news cycles meant to inundate us.

Cultivating an untamed mind for ourselves and with our kids allows us all to reclaim our conviction, our integrity, our voice, and most importantly, our humanity.

We untame our minds in order to build an internal moral clarity that stays unwavering, steadfast and unapologetic in the face of what’s coming—to build the internal conviction when laws and governments contradict our moral compass.

For me, I start with continuing to educate myself, unplugging from the algorithms more and more, getting strong in my mind and body and heart, growing food, and building robust communities of care.

In the next weeks, I’d love to talk about the self-education piece, and am already thinking about Books I Should Have Read.

What are the books that cracked something open for you? That decolonized your mind? That refused to let you see the world in the same way again? Drop them in the comments—let’s make an unruly list together.

In spirit with each untamable weed,

Sara