"I am the wheat”, I am told by one of my interlocutors in Beirut, Lebanon as our discussion encompasses an eventual return to land in death amidst the violence in the region. The reference to ‘becoming’ the wheat is not just about the material conditions of the cycle of life and death and the challenges that may prevent this return to soil, but rather, also about how our way of being is understood and embodied. Amidst the financial and economic collapse that Lebanon is going through, waves of mass emigration is underway. However, I look at those who stay behind and how they theorize this conviction of staying through the practices that build and sustain a relationship to land, whether that may be traditional agricultural practices, burial rituals, or other sorts of affective means that bring into focus a political imaginary that invokes an alternative way of being and eventual hopeful future. My interlocutors are theorists themselves who produce and embody theories of survival, sumud (Steadfastness), and attachment to land through the political and ethical claims that they make. How, then, can those who stay create and embody a politics capable of envisioning futures and invoking hope through land when in situations of crises in Lebanon and the region? How do people, not just survive, but actively form alternative presents and futures? The ethical and political claims that people who remain behind make then can be viewed as a site in which the self, the communal, and the cosmic is understood and lived through, perhaps diverged from a hegemonic understanding. I look into the theories and practices that are evoked by those who stay behind through which a political imaginary can be formed and maintained in order to envision an alternative future and a radical detachment from coloniality. My methodology involves ethnographic work in two major sites: 1) the agricultural: grassroots organization that engage with traditional knowledge training in South of Lebanon as well as farmers and others who engage in these practices on an individual basis; 2) burial rites: exploring the Lebanese diaspora’s wish to return in death and to be ‘home’ and in ‘one’s land’ and the materialities involved in the practice of return and staying in the land after death, while also looking at how those who stay engage with death as a temporal practice and connection to land and belonging.