The Estuary: A Future We Can Breathe In (Part Four: Ground)
The Mangrove’s Grip: How We Root in Unstable Soil
“You are me, and I am you. Isn't it obvious that we 'inter-are'?”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
Some trees rise in open fields, fed by certainty and sun, stretching toward the sky with elegant defiance, their strength drawn from the depth of soil that has never been disturbed.
The mangrove is not one of them.
It does not emerge from ease; the mangrove finds its form in the in-between, where the land refuses permanence and the water never stills — in tidal zones where the ground is soaked in contradiction and the very notion of stability becomes an act of imagination.
There, in the shifting silt, in the saturated edges where land and sea meet without resolution, the mangrove takes root, not in spite of the instability, but through it.
It does not waste itself pretending that the ground will hold; instead, it learns instead to hold differently. Its roots, exposed and tangled, reach out not just for nourishment but for balance, for interdependence, for the possibility of remaining upright when nothing beneath it can promise to stay the same. It does not deny the nature of its environment — it adapts with a kind of radical clarity.
In doing so, it becomes the structure that holds entire ecosystems together.
There are many of us in education, in justice work, in community care, who know this terrain all too well. We were not offered unshaken ground, nor did we grow from places that poured into us without condition. We built our footing inside systems that shifted mid-step. We anchored ourselves during policy reversals, during budget collapses, during the quiet unraveling of expectations we were never consulted in setting. We kept teaching when classrooms were cold, when grief entered the building unannounced, when our own weariness went unnoticed, as though we were meant to be infinite in our capacity to hold others while rarely being held ourselves.
Still, we remained.
The roots of the mangrove rise above the surface, unapologetically visible in their reach. They do not hide their grip or disguise their complexity for the comfort of an onlooker. They sprawl, raw and unashamed, across the thresholds of land and water, illustrating what is required to stay upright in flood-prone places. Perhaps that is the quiet truth that no one says aloud: survival in spaces like these is not about becoming unshakable — it is about becoming tangled enough, connected enough, relational enough to endure the force of the pull without being taken under.
This is what we have come to call the grip.
The grip is not a fixed quality or a heroic stance; it is the learned art of staying grounded in motion, of reaching sideways when downward is no longer an option, of drawing strength not from certainty, but from connection. The grip is what steadies us when the terms of engagement change mid-year, mid-conversation, mid-heartbeat. It is what steadies the educator responding to a child’s crisis while their own heart is breaking, what steadies the leader recalibrating amidst a vacuum of support, what steadies the advocate who continues to speak into silence, not because they are unbroken, but because the work refuses to wait.
To hold this way is not simply to survive — it is to co-create resilience in real time.
Mangroves are not praised for their beauty in textbooks, yet they protect everything behind them from devastation. In the violence of hurricanes, it is the mangrove forest that receives the blow, absorbing the force of waves that would otherwise collapse the shoreline.
This is what educators do each day, often without acknowledgment.
They interrupt harm before it becomes institutionalized.
They become the buffer between children and the sharp edges of the world.
They preserve a kind of tenderness in the face of policies that do not know how to make room for it.
They hold the line — again and again.
Yet to hold the line is not the same as being held. There is a cost to anchoring in isolation, a weight that multiplies in silence. Even the strongest root system rots when asked to carry too much without reciprocity.
Mangroves do not grow alone; they form forests — disordered, beautiful, entangled.
Their strength is not individual.
It is ecological.
In the dominant narratives of professionalism, we are taught to become oaks — solitary, upright, immovable — as though dignity resides in withstanding. Yet in floodwaters, it is the oak that falls, too rigid to respond to change. The mangrove remains because it does not perform resilience; it prepares for rupture.
It moves.
It makes room.
It understands that sustainability is not found in rigidity, but in reciprocity.
Our schools, too often, are built upon the assumption of stillness — that plans will proceed as written, that needs will remain predictable, that the ground beneath us will behave. We are told to be unwavering in the face of overwhelming demands, to continue teaching as if composure were a metric of care. Yet those of us who do this work with our whole being know the truth: the ground is always shifting, the work is always in motion, and the measure of our strength is not whether we remain unchanged, but whether we have built ecosystems that know how to move with grace, with interdependence, with honesty.
Mangrove pedagogy is not a celebration of grit — it is a commitment to grip. Not the kind of grip that clenches, but the kind that connects. It is about rooting in relationships, about stretching across, about forming systems where no one has to carry the weight alone.
It asks us to abandon the mythology of self-reliance and begin designing for the truth of our shared fragility.
To practice mangrove pedagogy is to create schools where support is not a seasonal offering, but a structural principle. It is to redistribute weight before someone breaks, to normalize the messiness of human complexity and refuse to punish people for needing help, to build in ways that assume the water will rise — and still make it possible to stand.
Field Notes for Readers: Designing for the Unsteady Ground
If we are to survive the rising tide, we must learn to build not for perfection, but for possibility. A mangrove does not wait for dry land to grow; it roots in motion, extending its reach not in fear of collapse, but in preparation for it. Likewise, the architecture of our educational and community ecosystems must be shaped by the knowledge that instability is not an interruption of the work — it is the environment in which the work is done. We cannot continue to ask people to stand tall in flood zones while offering only solid ground in theory.
The grip, then, must become more than metaphor — it must become method. The following field notes offer a set of design principles not to be taken as prescriptions, but as invitations. Each one is drawn from the lived wisdom of those who have stayed upright not because the ground was steady, but because the network was strong.
They are not strategies in isolation — they are the slow weaving of systems that know how to bend, how to listen, how to hold.
Normalize Visible Complexity
Let the scaffolding of support rise above the surface. Let the roots be seen — tangled, unapologetic, necessary. So much of our professional culture rewards the illusion of composure, rewarding those who appear unaffected rather than those who are deeply attuned.
Yet the truth is, what holds us up is rarely neat: it is in the overlapping text messages that remind someone they are not alone, in the unplanned pauses that allow the room to breathe, in the whispered “I’ve got you” passed like a lifeline between colleagues in the hallway.
These gestures are not peripheral — they are the architecture.
When we honour them publicly, when we stop demanding that strength be silent, we allow resilience to become a collective act rather than a private burden.
Design for Unstable Ground
Begin with the assumption that everything will change.
Build timelines that leave space for breath.
Create protocols that anticipate disruption, not because we are pessimistic, but because we are prepared.
Instability is not the exception — it is the backdrop.
Whether through policy shifts, leadership transitions, personal tragedies, or the quiet accumulation of exhaustion, the ground will move. We can either pretend it won’t or we can design with the wisdom of those who know better. Planning for fluctuation is not a lack of ambition; it is the highest form of care. It is the acknowledgment that survival is not a linear path, and that flexibility is not fragility — it is foresight.
Widen the Root System
Trace the weight before it becomes invisible. Ask whose calendars are full of unscheduled labour — the emotional de-escalations, the late-night texts, the checking-in, the calming-down. Ask who tends the culture while others tend the curriculum.
In most buildings, it is the same people — again and again — whose strength is quietly assumed and rarely replenished. A sustainable ecosystem does not wait for collapse to trigger redistribution; it stretches preemptively.
Make it cultural, not exceptional, to ask: Who is holding the most? How can we share the weight?
Entangle the network before someone snaps from carrying more than their portion of the forest.
Respond to Instability with Relationship
After the storm — a conflict, a crisis, a sudden loss — do not rush to rebuild the schedule; rebuild the connection.
Check the pulse of the people, not just the plan. What steadies us in the aftermath is not efficiency, but accompaniment. We do not recover faster because we pretend the rupture didn’t matter. We recover when we are allowed to metabolize it together. In moments of uncertainty, the most strategic response is often the most human: ask who needs anchoring, who is steady enough to offer it, and how we can hold long enough for the room to breathe again.
A school is not a clock; it is a living ecosystem.
Let your response reflect that.
Root Across, Not Just Down
Depth gives strength, but width gives reach. In flood zones, it is not the solitary depth of one tree that holds the line — it is the cross-bracing of many. Build laterally: strengthen the bridges between departments, between roles, between generations of practice. Don’t just pair new staff with experts in content — pair them with the ones who know how to read the temperature of a room, how to hold a child’s dignity in moments of shame, how to stay. Prioritize trust over task, rhythm over rigidity, humanity over hierarchy.
These are the roots that spread beneath the surface, redistributing pressure, keeping the system intact when it is asked to absorb more than it should.
Let People Grip Without Guilt
When someone reaches out, let the reach be enough.
Do not demand proof of their breaking. Do not wait for the collapse to believe them. The cultures we create around asking — around vulnerability, around honesty — shape whether people feel safe reaching out before they fall. When help is met with suspicion or silence, people stop reaching altogether. We must shift our understanding of strength: it is not in how long someone can endure alone, but in how clearly they know when to seek connection.
To grip is not to fail. It is to know, with quiet wisdom, that holding on is something we do together.
To practice the grip is to stop building for the ground we wish we had, and start rooting in the one we are standing on. These field notes are the memory of what has worked when the tide came in. They are offerings from those who have stayed — not untouched, not unbroken, but together. In the places where the current runs strongest, what holds is not perfection but entanglement; what saves us is not silence, but visible support; what allows us to remain is not an individual will to endure — it is a shared commitment to hold.
The mangrove survives not by standing apart, but by wrapping itself around the lives beside it.
Let us do the same.
Strength does not grow in shadows — it flourishes where the grip is visible, where care is mutual, and where no one has to brace alone.
We were never meant to bear our strength in silence.
What sustains us is not the concealment of need, but the courage to be held where others can see.
Where the Tangle Holds
We did not begin in the safety of still fields or beneath the shade of unshaken trees. We began in the wetlands — in the places where the line between land and water disappears, where nothing stays dry for long, and nothing stays still. We found our footing in the soft ground others avoided, where the rules kept changing and the conditions never settled.
And still, we stayed.
We have stretched our roots not for glory, but for one another: across hallways, across classrooms, across years of quiet holding, we have built something that endures not because it is indestructible, but because it is entangled. We have learned that to remain upright in shifting soil is not to stand tall alone, but to reach outward, again and again, until the network holds.
Still, we have been told, again and again, to keep our scaffolding hidden, to disguise our care-work, to compress our grief into productivity, to offer steadiness without ever needing to be steadied ourselves. The strength we are praised for is too often the strength that costs us the most — the kind that demands silence, rewards overextension, and pretends the ground is not moving when it clearly is.
There comes a time when even the most enduring trees begin to question what they are enduring for.
So let this be that moment.
Let this be the turning point where we stop asking one another to be strong in secret.
Let this be the place where the mythology of composure falls away, and what rises in its place is a different kind of strength — not solitary, not performative, but rooted in the visible, messy, magnificent tangle of our interdependence.
Let this be where we design for the flood, not just for the fair weather.
Let this be where we tell the truth about how we stay — by leaning, by loosening, by holding, by knowing that endurance is not noble when it comes at the cost of our well-being.
We were never meant to brace alone.
We were never meant to carry the shoreline on our own backs.
What holds us is not resolve or grit.
What holds us is one another.
What holds us is the choice to entangle — to move toward each other when the waters rise, to build systems that bend, to reach without waiting for collapse. Our grip does not come from perfection; it comes from relationship, from rhythm, from choosing, again and again, to stay connected in the soft ground.
This is not the conclusion of our work.
This is the truth beneath it:
That no one remains because they are unshaken.
We remain because we are not holding alone.
Grip-game strong in tangled roots and good company,
Ms. K
