Survival Tactic for the Day: If you've been holding your breath around someone who makes you shrink — and you know who they are — exhale the moment you leave the room. Audibly. Let your lungs hear themselves. You don't owe quiet to anyone who costs you air

Sit where you can smell the dirt. Outside if you can — on a step, a patch of ground, anywhere the earth hasn't been paved over. If you're indoors, open a window. Let April in. It won't ask permission anyway. Spine straight, palms down on your thighs.

Today is the fourth of April. Saturday. The wheel has turned past the equinox and leans now toward Beltane, toward the fire-month, though we aren't there yet. We are in the thick of the quickening — tha an talamh a' dùsgadh, the earth is waking — and she is not waking gently. Pollen coats every surface like a yellow confession, the land saying: I've held this in all winter and I am done being careful about it. Dogwood blooms white against red clay. The redbud hasn't finished yet. The air is warm and unsettled, the kind that breeds thunderstorms by late afternoon.

Three breaths. The first one shallow — let it be what it is. The second deeper, from the belly. The third: hold it at the top for four counts, then let it go like you're setting something down. Hands still. Eyes soft or closed.

Màthair na talmhainn, tha mi an seo. Mother of the earth, I am here. I come carrying two things today and they don't sit well together: the impulse to guard — to wall, to close, to cover the throat — and the radiance that keeps pushing up through the cracks like those damn redbud shoots that split asphalt. I lay them both here. A' ghàradaireachd agus an soillse. The guarding and the light. I do not ask you to fix the contradiction. I ask you to hold the ground while I stand in it.

If there's wind, face it. If there's sun, don't turn from it even if it makes you squint. Place your palms flat on whatever surface holds you — soil, wood, concrete. Press down. Feel the thing that doesn't move.

Here is what April knows that we keep forgetting: the dogwood blooms by wounding. Each bract — what we call the petal — is a leaf that scarred itself open, a piece of tissue that tore at its margin and healed into something people drive across counties to witness. Guarded and radiant. Not one then the other. Both, in the same white face of the same flower, at the same time.

Is aithne dhan chraoibh seo. This tree knows. It knows that the part of you that flinches before you enter a room — the part that checks the exits, reads the faces, calculates who is safe — that flinch is not weakness. It is the bark. It is what grew over every place you were cut and what keeps the sapwood alive underneath. Chan eil nàire ann a bhith air do dhìon fhèin. There is no shame in having defended yourself. The shame belongs to whoever made the defense necessary.

And the radiance. The impossible, inconvenient radiance — the one that makes you want to speak your name loudly in public, to wear the color that makes people look twice, to love in broad daylight without apology. That is the blossom. It grows from the scar tissue. Not despite it. From. The same cells. The same wound-response, redirected outward — petal instead of bark.

I have watched queer people do this with such ferocity it makes my chest hurt — build walls to survive Monday, then on Tuesday walk into a room incandescent, crowned, draped in a beauty so specific to their body that no one else could wear it. Tha e na mhìorbhail. Tha e na fhìrinn. It is a miracle. It is a fact. Those are not different things.

A pine warbler is singing somewhere in the canopy right now — one note, repeated, insistent. Not varied. Not performative. Just: I am here. I am here. I am here. That is both the guard and the radiance. The same note.

Pick up something small — a stone, a twig, a coin, anything that fits in the closed hand. Hold it in your left palm. Close your fingers around it. Feel the edges of it against skin. Now open the hand slowly. Don't drop it. Just — let the fingers unfold.

Dùin, fosgail. Close, open. That is the entire practice. Not staying closed. Not forcing yourself open. The movement between — the willingness to do both, the way a bud remembers it is also a bloom and a bloom remembers it was also a bud. You are not your walls. You are not what you show. You are the hinge — the creak and give of it, quiet as a breath, ordinary as a hand opening over a stone on an April afternoon while somewhere close a redbud bleeds pink against a sky that cannot decide whether it will storm, the light catching your open palm the way light catches everything that has just stopped hiding, which is to say: without comment, without reward, only the plain fact of illumination falling where a moment ago there was a fist.

Stand if you were sitting. If you were standing, shift your weight. Touch the ground once with your fingertips — brief, deliberate, the way you'd touch a shoulder in passing. Then walk away.

Gum bi thu sàbhailte far nach eil sàbhailteachd ann. May you be safe where safety is not. May your bark hold. May your bloom be rude and gorgeous and exactly the color they said was too much. Go carry your two things — the shield and the shine — and do not bother sorting which is which. Beannaich an là seo. Bless this day. It is already blessed. It is already hard. Both, at once, like everything that matters.

The voices woven into this work:

🌿 Poetry and Feelings: thepoetmiranda.com
🌿 Personal Queer Journey: thistleandfern.org
🌿 Life Banter: brandonellrich.substack.com
🌿 Lisa's Porch Talk: wuzzittoya.org / wuzzittoya.substack.com
🌿 Presence Not Permission: presencenotpermission.beehiiv.com

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