The morning came in cloudy at 72° and my chest knew before the news did — there is a particular way the body carries a Tuesday that ended with the Secretary of State calling another country's leadership insane in the brain on live television. And Ted Turner is Dead.

Survival tactic for today: Before you open any feed, put your bare feet on the floor and count to twenty. The floor is older than the news cycle.

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Atlanta: 72°, cloudy — pollen has finally stopped coating the windshields and the air smells like wet concrete and possibility.

Detroit: 52°, mostly cloudy — the lake still keeps May honest; people walking with jackets unzipped but not yet off.

Kansas City: 52°, cloudy — a cold morning that will become a warm afternoon, the prairie doing what the prairie does.

New York: 67°, rain — the kind of day that makes the city smell like wet asphalt and fresh bread.

San Francisco:56°, partly sunny — the fog burning off Twin Peaks the way it has every May since the city was a city.

Miami: 82°, partly sunny — the heat has settled in, the lizards back on the porch railings.

Tha am bealltainn a' losgadh — Beltane is burning — and the hawthorn is in full white flower across the southern half of the country, the old fire-festival blooming in trees that don't care which calendar we keep.

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Editor's note: We are watching a kleptocratic criminal apparatus dismantle the constitution in real time and the press corps is fucking grading them on whether they used a complete sentence.

This is what the bloated grifter's State Department sounds like when its boss takes a personal day. Rubio — VP-replacement understudy, 2028 audition act — used the briefing to trial-run the syntax of a man preparing to inherit a war he helped write the legal scaffolding for. The War Powers Act is now unconstitutional if you say it on camera with enough conviction. Sixty days became ninety. We are pausing a blockade Congress never authorized, holding a ceasefire that fires twice a day. (thehill.com)

The damage:

Human cost: Gas hit $4.54 a gallon this morning, and six small Iranian boats are debris in the Persian Gulf — each one had a person on it Monday morning.

Pattern: February — executive orders gutting agencies. April — the Strait closes. May — the Secretary of State calls foreign leadership insane in the brain on live television and nobody is fired.

Action: Call your senators. Demand a War Powers Act vote. (202) 224-3121.

The ceasefire is a press release. The bombs were never paused; they were rebranded.

Ninety-five percent. That is the number of European territory that ran above its historical temperature average in 2025 — not a region, not a season, the continent. The new State of the Climate: Europe report from the WMO and Copernicus confirmed the UK, Norway, and Iceland just had their warmest year on record. (earth.org)

Evidence:

The relationship breaking: Glaciers across the Alps lost more volume in 2025 than in any single year since measurement began — the ice is not retreating, it is vacating.

Scale: Spain logged its hottest summer on record. The Mediterranean ran a sea-surface anomaly that turned coastal fisheries into morgues. French firefighters were deployed into Spanish mountainsides because Spain ran out of bodies. Expert voice: "The evidence is unequivocal," said Samantha Burgess, ECMWF's Strategic Lead for Climate. "Climate change is not a future threat, it is our present reality."

The fascistic apparatus in Washington responded by gutting NOAA and pulling out of Paris for the second goddamn time. The truth-murdering lie-machine operative does not believe in measurement. Donate to Climate Defenders Fund.

The Alps remember every fire. The land keeps the receipts longer than the regimes that lit the matches.

Bemidji, Minnesota. A truck. A man named Arnold Dahl-Wooley, enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe — driving from town to town with educational pamphlets and the conviction that Two-Spirit was not a relic of an erased history but a present-tense identity that needed somewhere to land. That was 2006. Last year he opened a brick-and-mortar community center under the same name his truck once carried. (lgbtqnation.com)

Stakes:

Pattern: At least 360 federal databases have stopped tracking LGBTQ+ people since the spray-tanned tiny-handed tyrant's executive orders recognizing only two sexes. Two-Spirit identity — which predates the colonial gender binary by centuries — was erased from federal data overnight, and IHS clinics have begun refusing hormone treatment that remains legal.

What Dahl-Wooley built is what the obscene apparatus cannot delete: a destination. A door with a doorknob. The kleptocratic criminal apparatus thinks it can erase identity by deleting it from spreadsheets. It cannot fucking erase a brick building in Bemidji.

Movement: Two-Spirit Advocacy — Bemidji, MN.

The truck became a building. The network was here before the country.

What Parker named in 1978 about Black women's survival arrives in 2026 as a sentence Dahl-Wooley could speak from his community center in Bemidji, that you could speak from whatever room is holding your body right now. Survival is not the prize for grief. It is the evidence that the grief was real and the body refused to be its conclusion.

What part of yourself have you survived without ever stopping to name what it cost?

Set both feet on the floor. Hands open in your lap, palms up — not as offering, but as evidence. The chest where it has been holding all day; let it down two inches. The jaw where you have been clenching since the morning briefing; let it unhinge.

Tha sinn an seo — we are here. The fifth of May fell on a Wednesday this year and the hawthorn is in full flower, which is the old marker for Beltane fire even if the fire now lives in a Strait we cannot pronounce.

You will carry this. Not because it is light. Because the ones who came before you carried heavier — a work that began before the truck arrived in Bemidji and will continue after the small-handed despot is dust and footnote.

Anail an domhain — the breath of the earth — moves slower than your panic and asks you to match it for one minute, no more, no less.

Spring asparagus → roast at 425° for twelve minutes with olive oil, lemon zest, and crushed black pepper. Pull when the spears bend without breaking. The first asparagus is bitter the way the season is bitter — creamh-feòir, the green that tastes of sun returning to soil.

Sovereignty hack → window-box salad greens from a $4 packet of seeds, six weeks from soil to bowl, on any windowsill that catches four hours of light. The plate that came from your hand cannot be priced by a grocery chain.

Pantry meal — Egg-and-Spinach Skillet: olive oil, garlic, baby spinach, four eggs, salt, lemon, crusty bread. Wilt the spinach in oil and garlic, crack the eggs into the wilted greens, lid the pan three minutes, lemon over everything — ten minutes from cold stove to four full plates. The week was hard. The dinner does not have to be.

Hawthorn — Crataegus monogyna Pharmacology: Cardiotonic and vasodilator. Flavonoids and oligomeric proanthocyanidins act as positive inotropes — strengthening cardiac contractility while gently lowering peripheral resistance. Use: Dried flower-and-leaf tea, 1 tsp per cup, steep covered fifteen minutes, twice daily for at least six weeks. Tincture: 2–4 mL three times daily. Caution: Potentiates digoxin, beta-blockers, antihypertensives. Speak with your prescriber before adding to cardiac meds.

Calendula — Calendula officinalis Pharmacology: Topical anti-inflammatory, lymphagogue, vulnerary. Triterpenoid saponins and carotenoids accelerate epithelial regeneration; the gentlest skin medicine on the apothecary shelf. Use:Infused oil — fresh blossoms covered in olive oil, sun-steeped two weeks — applied to minor wounds, dry skin, eczema, post-radiation burns. Caution: Asteraceae allergy contraindicates use. Avoid internal use during pregnancy.

Chamomile — Matricaria recutita Pharmacology: Carminative, antispasmodic, mild anxiolytic via apigenin's GABA-A receptor binding. Acts on GI smooth muscle and lowers the floor of anxious arousal. Use: Hot infusion, 2 tsp per cup, covered fifteen minutes, before meals or at bedtime. Caution: Asteraceae allergy contraindication. Coumarin interacts with warfarin — separate dosing or consult your prescriber.

Somatic practice → The Hawthorn Hand. Find a tree near you — any tree, but if it is a hawthorn in flower, even better. Place one palm flat on the bark. Stay there for ninety seconds without checking your phone. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers — the way the cardiovascular system slows when the hand finds a steady surface.

Cognitive tool → The One-Sentence Inventory. Tonight before bed, write one sentence about the day. Not a list. One sentence. The constraint is the medicine. What you find when the sentence ends is often what you were too tired to know all day.

Relational action → The Five-Minute Voice. Call one person today and stay on the phone for five minutes. Not a text. The vagus nerve cannot tell the difference between safety and a beloved voice. Sin an leigheas — that is the medicine.

Doty wrote that line carrying the weight of a generation he watched die, and he meant it as instruction — the dark places are not the obstacle to your treasure, they are the location of it. What Dahl-Wooley built in Bemidji is a dark place made bright. What you build in your kitchen tonight, in your phone call tomorrow — these are dark places. They contain your treasure.

What dark place have you been refusing to enter, and what is waiting for you on the other side of that refusal?

Arnold Dahl-Wooley drove a truck around northern Minnesota for nineteen years offering Two-Spirit education, then opened a community center in Bemidji that hosts ceremonies, suicide-prevention groups, and family arts nights. Twin Cities Pride's BIPOC Leader of the Year, 2025.

Samantha Burgess runs climate strategy at ECMWF and co-authored the report confirming 95% of Europe ran above-average temperatures in 2025 — a sentence she spoke with the precision of someone who has stopped softening data for political comfort.

Sharice Davids, lesbian Ho-Chunk Nation member and Democratic congresswoman from Kansas, has served four terms and remains one of the loudest voices for Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQ+ visibility despite a district the GOP redrew twice trying to erase her.

Bright Signals:

California gubernatorial debate drew 2.3 million live viewers Monday — the largest state-level political audience of 2026.

Indiana primary turnout broke records for a non-presidential year.

Lily Gladstone has three Indigenous-led films greenlit for 2027.

What these names share is the refusal to wait for permission — the truck before the building, the data before the policy shift.

Moraga meant passing on the way a runner passes a baton — hand to hand, body to body, story to story, until the story is in the hands of someone who can carry it further than you can. Somewhere a young Two-Spirit person in northern Minnesota is hearing their identity named with reverence for the first time, and the naming is the inheritance, and the inheritance is what survives the regime.

What have you been given that you have not yet passed on, and to whom does it now belong?

Stand. Open your eyes. Touch the doorframe or the table or the ground beneath you.

The hawthorn is in flower. The Strait is on fire. The truck became a building. Your body read all of it and is still here, and that is not a small thing — chan e rud beag a tha sin. Carry it the way the river carries the spring melt: forward, inevitably, without asking the channel for permission.

Slàn leat, a charaid — beannachd ort gus an coinnich sinn a-rithist. Farewell, friend — blessing on you until we meet again.

The voices woven into this work:

🌿 Poetry and Feelings: thepoetmiranda.com
🌿 Personal Queer Journey: thistleandfern.org
🌿 Trip The Light Cosmic: keiraofthestars.org
🌿 Lisa's Porch Talk: wuzzittoya.org / wuzzittoya.substack.com
🌿 Presence Not Permission: presencenotpermission.beehiiv.com

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