Bare ground does not stay bare. Tenacious plants called pioneer species find ways to spread and extend roots deep into the soil, providing homes for all kinds of other creatures and enriching the soil over their cycles of life and death. Many of the most common pioneer plants are the ones we are trained to see as weeds; plants like the dandelion whose strong taproot extends far below the depleted topsoil to the deep layers of subsoil that hold hidden minerals far underground. The dandelion pulls these up and incorporates them into its leaves and flowers; when it dies all the nutrients that were locked underground join the upper layers of soil and make them available to the next generations of plants.

We envision this project as a wild and unpredictable dandelion reaching into the fertile darkness of underground places and bringing up all kinds of important stories and wisdom that aren't so easy to find in the topsoil of mainstream culture. A lot of the ideas in this manual are taken from the cultural and political underground, and from the depths of our own experiences as the mad ones whose roots reach down into the darkness but whose voices open up into the light.

Pioneer plants tend to create thousands of tiny seeds that are lightweight, with fine hairs that act like parachutes, keeping them afloat in the wind and preventing them from succumbing too quickly to gravity. We see this little book as one of the many ways The Icarus Project is setting seed and releasing messages from hidden worlds that just might travel far and wide and colonize all the patches of damaged soil. We hope it helps keep people afloat but a little less likely to crash, navigating that space between brilliance and madness where all our hard-fought truths and visions can catch the wind and plant little seeds of revolution and community all over the world.