Roots in Water: Gardening as Resistance

For the past five years, I’ve been tending life in water. No dirt. No plot of land. Just roots suspended in water, light calibrated to mimic the sun, and the daily vigilance of care. What started as a practical way to grow kale and cucumbers for green smoothies and salads in my apartment has become something much more rooted: a sacred practice of faith. A protest.

Amidst the backdrop of climate collapse, inflation, political violence, and spiritual disillusionment, my garden has taught me to see tending not just as a hobby but as a form of resistance.

Tending the Unseen

“They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water.” — Jeremiah 17:8

Hydroponic gardening is, at its core, the practice of nurturing life beneath the surface, roots spread out into ypods filled with nutrient-rich waters.

Seattle’s wet and dark seasons, Pests, root rot, and nutrient-deficient water have become quiet prophets, revealing the daily necessity of presence. Adjust the pH. Top off the water tank. Keep consistent airflow and humidity. Inspect the roots consistently. Check the leaves regularly. Nutrients have to flow. Light has to be just right—sixteen hours on, seven hours off.

If I’m honest, some days, it feels like faith. Quiet. Hidden. Fragile.

There’s no rich soil here, no sunshine or rain. Yet there is fruit. Muir lettuce, basil, thyme. Kale pushing up toward LEDs. Tomatoes and cucumber vines curling upward on trellises. These are not just crops to me. They are parables. They are an invitation into peace—not to fear when violence comes. To trust in green leaves, always. No worrying. No giving in to scarcity. Only hope. Hope in the promise that this tree—this life—will never fail to bear fruit. There is always hope.

Hydroponics as Sacred Practice

I’ve come to understand this garden as sacramental. A daily discipline of care. A liturgy rooted in fluidity and light. Each check-in with the system is a kind of prayer. Each time I look into my plant nursery, there’s a whisper of hope. Each adjustment—every cut, every ypod shift—is an act of faith in what cannot yet be seen. And each harvest? A testimony. A small, defiant victory.

Hydroponic gardening is science, yes—but it is also faith work. It’s protest. It’s resistance.

In this world—where food deserts abound, where the grocery bill rises like clay minerals caught in the turbulent winds of dust devils, where time and rest are rationed—growing food becomes more than a convenience. It has become defiance.

Gardening as Resistance

Every tomato I pluck from the vine is a whisper of protest.
Every bunch of kale is a reclamation of what empire says I don’t deserve: enough. Because there is always enough.
This garden resists scarcity. It is manna. It refuses to wait on systems that neglect.

In Black and Brown communities across the U.S., gardening has long been a form of resistance. From Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms, to Soul Fire Farm, in upstate New York, to community plots carved out between abandoned lots and chain-linked fences, our people have always known that to grow your own food is to survive—and flourish—on your own terms. 

These are not just gardens. They are acts of defiance. They are sites of memory and resistance. They are classrooms for liberation.

BIPOC-led, Afro-Indigenous-centered farms and food sovereignty collectives are reclaiming land not just as property, but as sacred inheritance. Teaching farming and food cultivation as spiritual practice, as reparative justice, as revolutionary love. Equipping others to uproot racism in the food system, recover ancestral agricultural wisdom, and plant seeds of sovereignty, solidarity, and survival.

This is how we resist: with calloused hands and tender hope. With compost and curricula. With greens and grit.

This hydroponic garden in my urban-style apartment is part of that lineage. It is ancestral. It is prophetic.

The soil may be absent. But the struggle is not—to which I am a willing accomplice.

Tending as Faith

Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches… and my Father is the gardener” (John 15:1–2). That scripture hits differently now at forty-three. I know what it means to prune—not just to remove what is dying, but sometimes to cut back what is still alive, vibrant even, yet growing in the wrong direction. To remove what is healthy but unbalanced. To tend—and, more than often—to heal what is diseased and rotting. To heal—not with haste or violence, but with patience, wisdom, and care.

Jesus called God “Father”. Not a distant patriarch or punitive overseer. He spoke of a gardener. Patient. Intimately involved. The originator and master cultivator of life. One who kneels close to the soil, who understands what must be trimmed for fruit to flourish. Compassionate and nurturing, present and purposeful. Not with a sword, but with shears. Not to destroy, but to bring forth more life.

I think of the Israelites in the desert, wondering if they were led to die, only to watch as quail fell from the sky and manna covered the ground (Exodus 16). Or the woman at the well who was offered living water that never runs dry (John 4:14). These are stories of sustenance in impossible places. Stories of a throne occupied by a lamb, not a tyrant. A Lamb who moves fluidly, not as a God of annihilation, but as a God of incarnation.

My garden is becoming sacrament.
Each plant, a parable.
Each root system, a reminder.
Each pruning cut, a call.

A call to hope forward. To resist from the heart. To imagine politics that nourish, not devour. To root myself in a faith that is liberatory, mutual, and fiercely compassionate. This is an antidote to powers that incite rage and panic.

Daily Faithfulness vs Empire Logic

Empire always demands quick results, immediate production, and scalability at any cost. But gardening—yes, even hydroponic gardening—asks for slow, careful fidelity. You can’t rush photosynthesis. You can’t bully roots into thriving.

The same is true for justice.

We live in a nation where political leaders cut education budgets and health care under the guise of “pruning government.” But they’re not pruning. They’re gutting. And unlike the Gardener in John 15, their cuts are not to produce more fruit. These cuts do not clear the way for life to flourish. Their cuts are for control. They’re scorched-earth policies masquerading as gardening, choking the roots of our shared democracy.

The Gardener in John 15 doesn’t act from fear or ideology. God doesn’t prune to punish, but to prepare the way for more fruit, for deeper roots and healthier growth. That is the difference between divine pruning and political gutting: one serves the flourishing of all, and the other serves the few. But you cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot be in service to compassion and love and condemn the most vulnerable. Any divisive realm will never prosper; it will always live in a fiscal deficit to its potential greatness, to its big, beautiful endeavors.

And it’s not just here. Around the world, we witness leaders who commit genocide with one hand while shaking hands with heads of state with the other. Children buried beneath rubble while their oppressors smile for photo ops. Ethnic cleansing is no longer hidden—it is livestreamed, and yet still met with diplomatic winks and policy silence. In the halls of power, "big, beautiful bills" are drafted with fanfare, but they rarely feed the hungry or house the displaced. They bolster markets, not mercy. They protect capital, not community. And the people—ordinary, everyday people—are left to survive in the wreckage of political theater, while being told it's progress.

Closing: Roots Below, Resistance Above

To grow anything in this season—faith, food, courage—is resistance work.
The roots may be hidden, but they are holy.

This is what Tending Life in Water is about. Not just how we grow, but how we live, resist, and hope—through soil-less gardens, political wilderness, and daily acts of care. And hope will not fail us. In systems overrun by rot, we still plant. We still tend. We still believe in life.

What began as a practical method of growing kale has become a ritual of survival, a politics of patience, and a sacrament of hope.

🌿 Up Next?

📖 Up next in the series: The Garden as Gospel → Expected July 25th
We’ll trace how the Bible’s gardens—Eden and Revelation—frame a story not of destruction, but of restoration.

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