Tend to What Is Yours

Something I see everywhere—in politics, in media, in the quiet, charged spaces between people—is a reflexive stance of opposition. We live in a time where critique masquerades as contribution, where resistance stands in for engagement, where we tear down more readily than we build. It happens across all domains—between men and women, left and right, the spiritual and the material, the rational and the mystical. At the root of it is an assumption so deeply ingrained we hardly see it: that to create change, we must diminish what we oppose. That our energy is best spent in battle rather than in the slow, patient work of creation.

But the logic of opposition is an artifact of an old story—one in which progress comes through conquest and the world is something to be subdued. It is a logic of scarcity, one that insists there is not enough space for all things to grow. But what if this is not true? What if, instead of dismantling what does not belong to us, we turned toward what does? What if, instead of fighting for space, we cultivated our own?
1. Every Person Tends a Unique Landscape

Each of us is born with an acre of our own—the piece of the world that is uniquely ours to tend. Our calling. It is not given to us as a finished thing, but as something wild and fallow, waiting to be cultivated.

The modern world has conditioned us to doubt the existence of this landscape. We are taught that our value lies in our ability to compete, to accumulate, to compare. But in truth, our power comes from the depth of our tending. The more fully we claim our piece of the world—our particular genius, our care, our devotion—the more we will find ourselves in a world that reflects it back. Reality meets us exactly where we meet it.
2. Turn Toward, Not Against

The most effective act is not the tearing down of what is wrong, but the full inhabitation of what is right. When we feel powerless, we turn toward critique. We fixate on what others are doing instead of deepening our own work. But nothing thrives under the energy of negation. If we want to see a different world, we must pour ourselves into what we long for, not what we fear.

This is not an argument for passivity. It is an invitation to a different kind of potency. The more energy you bring to what you love, the more alive it becomes. If you long for justice, then do justice. If you long for beauty, then create beauty. A world built on opposition will only ever be a battlefield. A world built on devotion becomes something else entirely.

3. Creation is Not a Zero-Sum Game

The world we inherited tells us that if one person gains, another must lose. That attention is a scarce resource, that energy is finite, that one person’s flourishing diminishes another’s. But this is a distortion. Life does not work this way.

In a forest, the roots of one tree do not steal from another—they intertwine, exchanging nutrients, strengthening the soil. The more life flourishes, the more life can flourish. The same is true for human endeavor. The engineer who dreams of space travel does not betray the Earth—he expands what is possible. The artist painting in solitude is not withdrawing from the world—she is making visible something that would otherwise remain unseen. Each person’s contribution does not diminish the whole; it deepens it.

The old paradigm tells us that the way to create change is through force—through opposition, through argument, through the dismantling of what is. But the real work is different. It is about creating such a fullness in your own field that others cannot help but be drawn into it. It is about tending your landscape with such care that it begins to spill over, reshaping the world not by force, but by the gravitational pull of what is truly tended.