The jaw tightens before the news does. I watched my coffee steam this morning and understood why my shoulders had been up around my ears since I woke.

Survival tactic for today: Put your palm flat on something cold — the sink, a stone, the refrigerator door. Hold it there for twenty breaths. The cold is real. Your hand is real. What the televangelist said is not.

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Atlanta: 58° to 82° — oak pollen lacquers every windshield yellow, dogwoods still white despite the heat coming.

Detroit: 49° to 74° — the lake exhales cold through morning; willows downtown have finally admitted spring.

Kansas City: 66°, cloudy — prairie green rushing up, wind carrying dust from fields short on rain.

New York: 49° to 72° — the last warm day before the weekend crashes back into the forties.

San Francisco: 52°, clear — fog burned off early, cypress holding moisture the sky has stopped giving.

Miami: 74°, partly sunny — humidity already resident in the lungs, no spring here, only the pause before summer.

Tha Bealltainn a' tighinn — Bealtaine is coming. The nettle is knee-high at the fence line. The festivals knew what the body knows: light returns whether anyone permits it.

First time here? Welcome — thistleandmoss.com

Editor's note: They are not pretending anymore, and I am not pretending with them — this is the theocratic phase, on camera, book tour and all.

Paula White-Cain signed books this week in the flat fluorescent light evangelical events love, and told a podcast host how God had assigned her to Donald Trump years before anyone considered him a candidate.

What she said: "It was about an assignment. To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God. And I won't do that."

The pustulent charlatan running the White House Faith Office sells $1,000 crystal crosses promising "seven supernatural blessings" and has marketed miracle cures to the sick. This is not fringe. She is the authoritarian mafia's designated spiritual mouthpiece, installed by a spray-tanned fascist who shared an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ earlier this month, and her job is to rebrand every cruelty he invents as obedience to the divine.

The damage:

Human cost: 64% of white evangelicals approve of the president per a March Fox poll — the infrastructure for theocratic deference is already built.

Pattern: February 2025, Faith Office by executive order; April 2025, "anti-Christian bias task force" at DOJ; April 2026, Easter lunch comparing Trump's legal troubles to the crucifixion.

Action: Call your senators — 202-224-3121. You are not off the hook because it makes your chest tighten.

LGBTQ Nation on Paula White-Cain

This is how empires manufacture their gods: by promoting the smallest men to the biggest altars and daring you to call the lie by its name.

In the late 20th century, the green sea turtle population dropped by 48–67%. Hold that number against the next one: the IUCN announced in 2025 that the same species is now classified "least concern," populations up roughly 28% from their 1970s–80s floor.

Evidence: Relationship breaking: Commercial fishing, plastic, illegal trade, and warming seas took the turtle to the brink. Scale: Twenty species downlisted from the Red List. Twelve bird species including the Rodrigues fody and Alexandrine parakeet. The sailback houndshark, not recorded since 1970, rediscovered in Papua New Guinea through conversations with local fishers. Expert voice: Roderic Mast, IUCN Species Survival Commission — decades of coordinated conservation restored a long-lived marine species. Care at scale works.

The obscene apparatus currently strip-mining federal environmental protections needs you to believe recovery is impossible, because despair is cheaper than regulation and every turtle that comes back is a receipt.

Action: Local habitat restoration groups need volunteer hours more than donations. Coastal Conservation Association chapters operate in every coastal state. Earth.org on conservation wins

The turtles did not know we had given up on them. They came back anyway.

A six-year-old watches The Loud House on a Tuesday and sees a character who happens to be nonbinary. Tuesday becomes the day the federal government wants a warning label on that episode — the category reserved for violence and sex.

What they said: FCC Chair Brendan Carr posted a public notice that the Media Bureau will seek comment on whether TV Parental Guidelines should flag "transgender and gender nonbinary programming."

Stakes: Pattern: Five GOP senators floated this proposal in 2022. It died — the ratings system is voluntary and industry-run. Carr revived it under federal letterhead — broadcast networks cannot afford to antagonize the truth-murdering buffoon who controls their licenses. Timeline: The sewage-spewing monster issued an executive order in January 2025 defining sex as binary at conception. April 2026, the FCC moves to categorize our existence alongside graphic violence.

The fecal-tongued bureaucrat heading a federal agency is telling networks that a trans kid existing on a cartoon is content to warn parents about — equivalent, in the regulatory state's eyes, to blood and adult themes. This is how you disappear a population: you do not outlaw them, you label them until the market decides erasure is cheaper than the warning.

Movement: Public comments open through May 22, 2026, under MB Docket No. 19-41. LGBTQ Nation on the FCC proposal

A child who sees themselves onscreen is harder to convince they do not exist. That is the whole fight.

Thematic voice: witness. The regime is manufacturing forgetting at industrial scale — a televangelist forgetting the first commandment, a chairman forgetting that six-year-olds have been watching queer characters for decades. Delany's instruction is not to shout. It is to stay specific. To name the thing while it is being disappeared. That is the artist's work. Today, it is also yours.

What did you see this week that you have not yet let yourself name out loud?

Set your feet on the floor. Let your weight down. Notice the temperature at your fingertips — whatever it is, it is a fact, and you are allowed facts right now.

The news is real and so is your chest, and both have been holding too much today. Tha an talamh a' cuimhneachadh — the earth is remembering. She remembers the turtles, she remembers the ones who crowned small men as gods, and she remembers which of us laid our hands in the dirt anyway — planting tomatoes and calling senators in the same afternoon, because the world we are told is ending keeps handing us things to love.

An t-seachdain ron Bhealltainn — the week before Bealtaine. The older calendar knows the light is climbing. The body can hold both.

🌿 Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca) — cardiovascular/nervous Pharmacology: Leonurine and stachydrine — cardiac tonic and smooth-muscle relaxant, where stress-driven palpitations live. Use: Tincture 2–4 mL up to 3x daily; or tea, 1 tsp dried herb per cup, covered ten minutes. Bitter. Caution: Avoid in pregnancy — uterine stimulant. Interacts with cardiac glycosides, anticoagulants, thyroid medications.

🌿 Cleavers (Galium aparine) — lymphatic Pharmacology: Lymphatic mover; stimulates lymph flow, gently supports kidneys. Traditional spring tonic for clearing winter stagnation. Use: Best fresh. Handful of green tops in a quart of cold water overnight in the fridge; strain, drink through the day. Cold infusion only — heat destroys the action. Caution: Diuretic action can interact with lithium and blood pressure medications. Avoid in acute kidney conditions.

🌿 Violet (Viola sororia) — respiratory Pharmacology: Mucilaginous, mildly expectorant, cooling. Moistens dry lung tissue and moves stagnant lymph with the same soft hand. Use: Leaves and flowers raw in salad; dried tea, 1 tbsp per cup, 15 minutes. Flower syrup soothes dry coughs. Caution: Avoid large doses in pregnancy. Rhizome is emetic — leaf and flower only. Source from unsprayed ground.

Spring greens → Tender dandelion leaves, young nettle tips (blanched thirty seconds to tame the sting), violet leaves. Wilt in olive oil with garlic ninety seconds, salt, lemon. Glasraich an earraich — the greens of spring. The bitter principle kicks the liver awake after winter's heavy food.

Sovereignty hack → Start one herb from cutting on your windowsill — basil, mint, or rosemary. Snip a four-inch stem from a grocery bunch, strip bottom leaves, stand in water until roots appear (seven to fourteen days), transfer to soil. One dollar becomes a lifetime supply.

Pantry meal → Eggs, spinach, feta, lemon, olive oil, red pepper flakes, garlic. Wilt spinach with smashed garlic and flakes, crack four eggs onto the greens, cover until whites set (three minutes), crumble feta, squeeze lemon. Feeds four, eight minutes, under twelve dollars.

Somatic → One hand on your sternum, one on your belly. Breathe until the bottom hand rises before the top. Four counts in, six out, for three minutes. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers. Lengthened exhales are the only voluntary way to address the vagus nerve. You are not performing calm — you are rewiring the signal the news made.

Cognitive → When a headline lands in your chest like a stone, name the exact feeling in two words before you name the news. Terror dressed as obligation. Grief dressed as fury. The naming is triage, and triage is how people in burning buildings get out alive.

Community → Text one queer elder today. Not to process — to check in, say their name, let them know they are held. Tha sinn ann còmhla — we are here together.

Thematic voice: reckoning. The turtles are the future's eyes. So is the six-year-old whose cartoon they want to label. Williams wrote this after watching a bird sanctuary flood and her mother die of cancer downwind of nuclear test sites. The future has faces, some alive already, watching how we vote, how we plant, how we speak when no one is recording.

What will you do this week that the eyes of the future would recognize as belonging to them?

These are our people this week. Not symbols — workers.

Samuel R. Delany built a career writing Black queer science fiction nobody knew how to market and everybody eventually had to reckon with. Hugo and Nebula winner across four decades, professor emeritus at Temple, who theorized contact — the surprising exchange between strangers — as the civic infrastructure a healthy city runs on.

Terry Tempest Williams has spent forty years refusing to be quiet about the Great Basin, the downwinders, the public lands. Writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School, author of Refuge and Erosion — who knows land and lineage are the same sentence.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, at 85, still runs the House of gg in Little Rock, a retreat for Black trans women and their chosen family. Stonewall survivor. Former director of TGI Justice Project. The elder who has been taking care of her girls since before some of their parents were born.

The thread between them is a refusal to be small.

Thematic voice: tenderness. Tenderness is not softness — it is the decision, under pressure, to reach toward another body instead of away. Miss Major has been making that decision for sixty years, through Attica, through AIDS, through the paperwork of survival for Black trans women. What she offers is not comfort. It is technology — the map of how we have gotten through. Not through government. Through each other.

Who are your people — really — and have you told them out loud this week?

Bealtaine a' tighinn — Bealtaine is coming. The fire-wheel turns and the earth climbs, and you are allowed to love the world in the specific week trying to teach you not to. Biodh sìth leat — peace be with you. Drink the water. Plant the thing. Call your senator. Check on your elder. The turtles came back. The children are watching.

Is sinne a' chlann a bha sinn a' feitheamh ris — we are the children we have been waiting for.

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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