Wendy's Thoughts Before the World Gets Loud
Wendy's Thoughts About Today: The first American pope told the truth about war and the spray-tanned fascist called him weak for it. My chest hasn't unclenched since sunrise.
Survival tactic for today: Press both palms flat against the nearest wall. You are solid. The liars are not.
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Table of Contents
The Ground Beneath Your Feet — Weather & Earth
Atlanta: 67°, cloudy — the dogwoods along Moreland are dropping petals onto cracked sidewalks like confetti nobody asked for, and the humidity sits on your collarbone before eight
Detroit: 67°, overcast — gray river light off the Rouge, the kind of morning that smells like iron and unfinished questions
Kansas City: 70°, mostly cloudy — warm wind from the south carrying a restlessness that doesn't belong to April, not yet
New York: 59°, cloudy — the tulip magnolias in Prospect Park have already peaked and nobody stopped to notice
San Francisco: 50°, partly sunny — fog burning off slow, the bay holding its mirror at an angle that refuses flattery
Miami: 75°, clear and bright — relentless sun on the MacArthur Causeway, the kind that makes you squint until your whole face becomes a fist
Tha an saoghal a' tionndadh — the world is turning — and mid-April's dogwoods shed white against Georgia red clay, a tenderness the season offers whether or not we deserve it.
The Part That Draws Blood
The narcissistic spray-tan charlatan spent his Sunday night attacking the Bishop of Rome for suggesting that maybe — maybe — bombing an entire civilization into ash is goddamn immoral. Let that sentence sit in your mouth and taste it.
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Editor's note: When the president of the United States tells the pope to shut the fuck up about peace, we are not in a political disagreement — we are in a spiritual emergency.
A Pope Says Peace; A President Posts Himself as Jesus
credit: truthsocial.com
Pope Leo XIV — first American-born pontiff, a Chicago kid — stood aboard his plane to Algeria Monday and said it flat: "I have no fear of the Trump administration."
He said it because the bloated grifter spent Sunday night vomiting a Truth Social screed calling Leo "WEAK on Crime" and "terrible for Foreign Policy" after the pope condemned the Iran war as a "delusion of omnipotence." Then the festering carbuncle posted an AI image of himself in biblical robes, hands glowing, healing the sick. Eagles overhead.
The diseased charlatan claimed Leo owed his papacy to him: "If I wasn't in the White House, Leo wouldn't be in the Vatican." This from a felony-convicted authoritarian-wannabe tyrant whose Defense Secretary quotes scripture to justify bombing Iranian power plants.
The rot-souled apparatus keeps churning:
Swalwell collapsed — four women accused him of sexual assault; Manhattan DA investigating; expulsion votes for him and Rep. Tony Gonzales targeting Wednesday.
Congress returns to a bonfire— DHS shutdown, Iran war powers vote, FISA 702, SAVE Act all stacked on one docket.
ICE warehouse backlash metastasizing — even deep-red Social Circle, Georgia and Oklahoma City shutting off water and suing. $1.074 billion spent, seventy thousand detained.
Orbán finished — Hungary's Fidesz crushed, pro-EU Magyar wins supermajority.
Southern Command blew up two boats Saturday, killing five. No drug evidence presented. 168 dead since September.
The body count is the theology now. Read
From Hormuz to Hunger: How the Iran War Starves the Horn of Africa
The Strait of Hormuz carries twenty percent of the world's oil. That sentence is in every briefing. Here's the one that isn't: the Bab al-Mandab Strait, six hundred miles south, carries the food that keeps the Horn of Africa alive.
The U.S.-Israel war on Iran handed the Houthis their justification. Missile strikes on commercial shipping through Bab al-Mandab have opened a southern front — not strategy but strangulation. Every diverted vessel is a grain shipment that skips Djibouti, a fuel tanker that doesn't reach Berbera.
Trade severance: The strait handles 12–15% of global maritime commerce. Houthi attacks forced major shipping lines to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope — weeks added, billions in cost.
Famine math: Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti were already reeling from drought and displacement. This corridor's disruption pours accelerant on an existing fire.
The excrement-spewing orange-faced grifter's new Hormuz blockade tightens the entire chokepoint system while pretending collateral starvation is someone else's problem. Read
When you choke two straits, the people who starve are never the ones who gave the order.
Gif by LAvsHate on Giphy
A trans person in Kansas had a corrected driver's license. Had. Past tense. The goddamn state reached backward into completed paperwork and revoked it — the bile-spouting sadistic regime reaching into your wallet and rewriting who you are.
Nine states banning license corrections now. Nine. And the fecal-tongued incompetent grifter's Project 2025 architects orchestrate it while the sludge-breathing insecure autocrat claims ignorance.
Scale: Nine states banning corrections; Kansas retroactively revoking already-issued documents. Trans military bans, healthcare restrictions expanding, LGBTQ+ history scrubbed from government websites, Pride funding gutted.
But his grip is crumbling. Orbán fell. No Kings protests drew hundreds of thousands. A new poll shows almost all Americans support equal rights for trans people when the question isn't wrapped in culture-war packaging. Vote in the midterms. The candidates won't be perfect. They'll be better than the people who revoke your goddamn license for existing.
They can revoke the card. They cannot revoke the person.
The Witness — What We Carry From What We Just Read
"I live in this body. I die in this body. I was not given a map to find my way out of its wilderness, nor do I desire one." — Assotto Saint, Haitian-American poet and queer activist, Stations (1989)
The body is the first country they come for. Before legislation, before executive orders — the body is contested territory. Assotto Saint wrote from inside a pandemic killing his community while the government watched. Today the pandemic is legislative. What changes is what you do with the body that remains — whether you let it be evidence of survival, or hand it to people who never deserved it.
When was the last time you trusted your body to know something your mind refused to name?
The Turning — Where the Breath Comes Back
Sit where you are. If your feet touch ground, let them. If not, press your hands against your thighs and feel the warmth of a body that carried you through every headline you just read.
This is April's second week. An t-Earrach — the spring — is not gentle this year; it is insistent, pushing green through clay that hasn't thawed in places. The redbud along the Eastside BeltLine opened yesterday — tiny magenta fists unclenching into something the eye cannot refuse. Your nervous system has been clenched too. The jaw. The shoulders. The place behind your sternum where the news lives after you close the tab.
Let one breath follow the dogwood petals down — not to peace, but to ground.
The Nurturing — Food As Medicine
Radishes → Slice thin, toss with good butter and flaky salt on warm bread. Meacan dearg — the red root. April's first defiance from the garden — ready in twenty-five days from seed, asking nothing of you but water and a strip of dirt the landlord hasn't paved over yet.
Sovereignty hack → One windowsill pot of cut-and-come-again lettuce costs three dollars and replaces bagged greens for six weeks. The light in a kitchen where someone is growing their own food changes the room — not metaphorically, literally, the green shifts the spectrum.
Pantry meal: Lemon-garlic pasta → Spaghetti, olive oil, four cloves garlic, one lemon (zest and juice), red pepper flakes, parmesan, salt. Twelve minutes. Feeds four. Nobody goes hungry because the week was brutal.
The Breathing — Herbs As Curing
Blue Vervain — Verbena hastata
Pharmacology: Nervine bitter that works the tension out of a clenched nervous system — iridoid glycosides and verbenalin act on the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, downregulating the cortisol loop stress welded shut. Luibh a' chiùineis— herb of quiet.
Use: Dried flowering tops, one teaspoon steeped fifteen minutes. Intensely bitter — that's the medicine talking. Tincture: 1–3 mL, three times daily.
Caution: Stimulates uterine contractions — absolutely contraindicated in pregnancy. May interfere with blood pressure medications and hormone therapies. High doses cause nausea.
Gentian — Gentiana lutea
Pharmacology: Bitter glycoside that wakes a stress-shut gut — secoiridoids stimulate gastric acid and bile, restoring motility through the enteric nervous system.
Use: Tincture, 10–20 drops in water, fifteen minutes before meals. The bitterness is the mechanism; don't mask it.
Caution: Contraindicated with gastric ulcers and pregnancy. Increases absorption rate of co-administered drugs.
Mullein — Verbascum thapsus
Pharmacology: Respiratory demulcent — saponins thin mucus while mucilage coats inflamed bronchial tissue. The lungs carry what the mouth won't say; mullein loosens both.
Use: Dried leaf infusion, strained through fine cloth to remove irritant hairs. Mullein flower oil for earache — two warm drops.
Caution: Unstrained leaf hairs irritate mucosa. Mild diuretic; hydrate accordingly.
The Tending — Survival Protocols for Your Actual Body
Somatic reset → Stand in a doorway. Place both hands on the frame at shoulder height. Press outward — hard — for ten seconds. Release. Feel the blood rush back into your palms. Tha neart annad fhathast — there is strength in you still.Your hands remember what your mind forgets: that resistance is a physical act before it becomes a political one.
Cognitive reframe → Write one sentence that begins "I am not required to—" and finish it with whatever obligation the week tried to tattoo on your forehead. Read it back. The sentence is the boundary; the paper is the proof.
Community reach → Text one person you haven't spoken to in thirty days. Not "how are you" — something real. A memory. A thank you. The thing you thought of saying last month and didn't. Càirdeas — kinship — lives in the reaching, not the arriving.
The Practice — Armor You Can Wear Tomorrow
"I write to create that extra space — the space a reader can enter and feel less alone." — Sarah Waters, British novelist, interview with The Guardian (2014)
You are reading this in a body that survived the week. That bare, ordinary fact is the space Sarah Waters means. Not a room with better furniture. The space between breaths where someone else's words land and you think: they know. Tha fios agam — I know. You are not building a fortress today. You are building a doorway wide enough for one more person, and that has always been enough.
What would you make room for if you stopped believing the lie that your survival takes up too much space?
Heroes & Bright Signals — The Ones Who Showed Up and the Proof It's Working
These are the names that held the line.
Assotto Saint (1957–1994): Haitian-born, New York-forged poet who edited The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets— first anthology of its kind. Published it while dying of AIDS, because the archive mattered more than the archivist.
Sarah Waters (b. 1966): Welsh novelist whose books rewrote the historical novel with queer women at the center. Six novels. Three TV adaptations. She made lesbian Victorian England real enough to touch.
Andrea Gibson (b. 1975): Nonbinary spoken-word poet, first Women's Poetry Slam winner. Currently living with cancer and writing about it without flinching. Over 100 million views across platforms.
Bright Signals:
Orbán falls: Hungary's Péter Magyar won a supermajority — voters rejected authoritarianism at the ballot box
Idaho's backfire: Boise, banned from Pride flags, projected rainbow light onto City Hall
No Kings: Three consecutive days of nationwide protest, hundreds of thousands marching
Tha solais bheaga ag lasadh anns an dorchadas — small lights kindling in the darkness — and what these people share is the stubborn insistence on being visible when disappearance was the easier path.
Gathering History — The Roll Call of Those Who Were Here First
Assotto Saint published The Road Before Us (1991); Stonewall 25th anniversary march drew one million (1994); Andrea Gibson won the first Women's Poetry Slam (2008); Hungary elected its first pro-EU supermajority (2026).
The Carrying — What Your Body Knows When You Close This Tab
"You can't find your voice if you don't use it." — Andrea Gibson, spoken-word poet, Lord of the Butterflies(2018)
The voice is not the volume. Not the platform, the follower count, the viral screenshot. The voice is the part of you that vibrated reading about a trans person in Kansas losing a license and thought — below the ribs — that could be someone I love. Andrea Gibson has used theirs from stages and hospital beds for twenty years, saying the same thing differently each time: silence is not safety. It is the room where the thing you didn't say grows teeth. Bruidhinn — speak. Tomorrow morning, in your specific body, survival looks like the sentence you finally stop swallowing.
What is the one thing you keep almost saying — and what would it cost to finally let it out?
Beannachd Dheiridh — A Blessing for the Road Ahead
Stand if you can. Open your hands. Let the weight drain through your fingertips into whatever floor holds you.
April thirteenth. Dogwoods shedding. The pope airborne. The president shouting at the sky. And you — thusa, a charaid— you, dear one — still here, carrying the specific grief and defiance that belong only to your body at this exact turn of the year. I don't have a resolution. I have a redbud that bloomed while nobody watched, and this: what grows in silence is not nothing. It is root.
Gum beannaich an talamh do chasan, agus gum beannaich do chasan an talamh. — May the earth bless your feet, and may your feet bless the earth.
✨ Who Is In The Gathering? ✨
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
