Wendy's Thoughts Before the World Gets Loud
Woke at five, window cracked, pollen already on the tongue — what the body knew before the phone did was this: something hollow has been put in charge of something enormous. Jaw clenched since February. Not metaphor. Data.
Survival tactic for today: Before you touch your phone, press your bare feet flat to the floor and count to ten. The ground is still there.
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Table of Contents
The Ground Beneath Your Feet — Weather & Earth
Atlanta: 72°, sunny, climbing to 87 — azaleas past peak, pollen yellow on every windshield along Ponce.
Detroit: 55°, mostly cloudy — rain Saturday, snow Sunday, lakes still deciding the season.
Kansas City: 72°, partly sunny — 79% precipitation tonight, the sky that means tornado weather close.
New York: 71°, sunny — magnolia bruised brown on the sidewalks, river running high.
San Francisco: 52°, pre-dawn clear — fog below the Twin Peaks line, eucalyptus dripping.
Miami: 76°, partly sunny — humidity doing July's work, mangroves standing in warmer water than they should be.
Tha an talamh a' dùsgadh — the earth is waking — and along the Appalachian ridges the dogwoods have opened into their four-petaled cross, the red clay after last night's rain smelling of iron and something older. She who holds does not forget.
The Part That Draws Blood
Three stories cross the desk today, and they rhyme. A government at open war with itself. An ocean that will not cool. A magazine naming queer lives as influential while the state works overtime to disappear them. The rot in the center is not incidental. The rot is the fucking method.
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Editor's note: The shit-spouting narcissistic liar in the Oval Office is losing what little cognition he had left, and the people who put him there are starting to admit it semi-publicly — a polite way of saying the building is on fire and the arsonists just noticed the smoke.
The House is On Fire With No Way Out
A former White House lawyer went on cable Wednesday night and said what the Beltway has been miming for months. Ty Cobb — 75, Trump's own first-term counsel — told Ari Melber on MS NOW that the president displays "the classic symptoms of Alzheimer's," including sleep-wake reversal producing four-a.m. Truth Social screeds and cabinet-meeting naps.
What Cobb said: "This is somebody who just is lost. He gets into these screeds at odd times. And one of the classic symptoms of Alzheimer's is the sleep-wake reversal."
The deterioration gets reported as spectacle while the governing gets reported as normal politics. It is not. Speaker Mike Johnson — the bone-spur coward held together by Louisiana ambition and prayer — has spent sixty days flailing between his Senate counterpart, his caucus's feral wing, and a diseased charlatan whose endorsement flips overnight. The DHS shutdown is the longest in U.S. history. And the pope — the pope — has become the latest target of the narcissistic serial liar's midnight rage because Leo XIV keeps objecting to the Iran war.
The damage:
Human cost: 60+ days unpaid at DHS — roughly 50,000 employees absorbing a party that cannot pass its own budget.
Pattern: Johnson has reversed himself twice on the same Senate bill in three weeks, tracking Trump's mood.
Action: Call your senator. By name. The 25th Amendment exists for a reason; cognitive decline is not partisan — it is medical.
The Song of The Sea Tells You She’s Suffering
March closed at 20.97°C average sea surface temperature — second-highest ever recorded for the month, behind only last year's El Niño peak. The European Copernicus Climate Change Service published the number Friday. It reads like a thermometer. It is actually a verdict.
Evidence:
Relationship breaking: The trade winds that carry warm Pacific water west are slackening again. When they slack, the eastern Pacific warms. When that warms, the jet stream wobbles. Droughts where there should be rain. Floods where there should be nothing.
Scale: The United States just had its warmest March on record. Finland too. In the Arctic — and this is the line you will remember in the shower — annual maximum sea ice extent was the lowest ever measured. Not second-lowest. Lowest.
Expert voice: Carlo Buontempo, C3S Director, called it "a sobering story … of a climate system under strain" — bureaucratic understatement that in a functional government would trigger a war footing.
And the kleptocratic criminal apparatus in charge is cutting NOAA funding while the buoys it needs to measure the next El Niño still float out there, beeping into a void.
Action: One climate-adjacent call to a representative this week. One dollar to a frontline group — Climate Justice Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network. One dinner-table conversation that does not end in well what can you do. Read the data →
The land keeps the receipts. It always has.
They Name Us, Erase Us, But We Will NEVER Leave Or Disappear, We Will Persevere
Shannon Minter has the kind of face that goes unnoticed in a grocery store and the kind of voice that does not. On Wednesday, Time magazine — mid-administration that has spent fourteen months trying to legislate trans people out of federal existence — named the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights one of the hundred most influential people in the world.
Shannon Minter, Legal Director for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights | NCLR Credit: time.com
Stakes:
Pattern: Minter has argued four separate lawsuits against Trump's two trans military bans across eight years, winning preliminary injunctions on most.
Timeline: He came out in 1996, when "trans lawyer" was not a job description — it was a small grenade you walked into a courtroom holding. Thirty years later he is still on the list.
At least six openly queer people made the 2026 Time 100 — Minter, Chanel creative director Matthieu Blazy, and Olympic hockey forward Hilary Knight among them. The spray-tanned fascist has spent his second term trying to cancel us by decree, and the country's oldest mainstream outlet just put a trans lawyer who keeps beating him in court on a list of the most powerful people alive. Good.
Movement: NCLR represents plaintiffs in Talbott v. USA, fighting for transgender service members. Read Time's citation →
To be named is to be remembered. To be remembered is to refuse the erasure.
The Witness — What We Carry From What We Just Read
"The moment of change is the only poem."
What the quote holds against today: Rich wrote that line inside a war she could not stop, in a language just beginning to include her. The change she meant was not triumphant. It was the moment the mind refuses to accept what the world has just told it. We are in that moment now. What we refuse to accept is the seam where the next work happens.
What have you been looking directly at without yet letting yours
The Turning — Where the Breath Comes Back
Find a chair or a floor. Put something living within reach — a plant, an animal, your own warm palm on your sternum.
Tha sinn an seo — we are here. The wheel has turned to the hinge between Bealltainn and first full green — the week the old Highland women used to walk cattle between two fires for luck, and the witnesses were birds. You have a kitchen light and the spring outside it. Your body is the temple and the forest both, a chridhe — my heart — and the news has taken up residence between your hips and your throat.
Let it loosen slowly, the way a wet towel dropped on a wooden floor releases its weight — in the small honest minutes of standing in the kitchen, jaw remembering it is allowed to soften.
The Nurturing — Food As Medicine
Asparagus → Snap off woody ends where they break naturally. Blanch 90 seconds in salted water until the color jumps to a violent green. Ice bath, drain, quick sear in hot butter with lemon zest and flake salt. Lus-asparag — asparagus herb.
Sovereignty hack → Regrow scallions in a glass of water on the windowsill. Trim the white root, submerge, change water every three days. Cut again in ten days. Cost: fifty cents. Yield: infinite.
Pantry meal, 10 min, feeds 4 → Olive oil, garlic, rice, canned tomatoes, salt, one egg per person, fresh herbs. Toast rice in oil and garlic ninety seconds. Pour tomatoes and equal water over it. Simmer fifteen. Crack eggs on top the last four. Tear herbs over everything. Nobody in your house goes hungry tonight.
The Breathing — Herbs As Curing
Passionflower — Passiflora incarnata Pharmacology: GABA-A modulator with mild serotonergic action. Sedative, anxiolytic, no next-day fog. Use: 1 tsp dried aerial parts per cup boiling water, covered steep 10 min. One cup 30 min before sleep. Caution: Potentiates benzodiazepines, barbiturates, alcohol, sedative antihistamines. Contraindicated in pregnancy — uterine stimulant. Avoid with MAOIs.
Hawthorn — Crataegus monogyna Pharmacology: Oligomeric proanthocyanidins improve coronary flow and cardiac contractility; lower peripheral vascular resistance. Use: Tincture 2–4 ml three times daily, or 1 tsp dried flowering tops per cup tea twice daily. Effects compound over six to eight weeks. Caution: Potentiates digoxin and cardiac glycosides. Hypotensive — coordinate with BP meds. Long-tonic herb; not for acute events.
Elderflower — Sambucus nigra Pharmacology: Diaphoretic and anti-inflammatory. Quercetin and rutin support mucosal integrity and capillary tone. Use: 2 tsp dried flowers per cup boiling water, covered 15 min. Hot, three times daily for fever or upper respiratory congestion. Caution: Only flowers and cooked ripe berries are safe — unripe berries, leaves, bark, and roots contain cyanogenic glycosides. Mild diuretic; caution with prescription diuretics.
The Tending — Survival Protocols for Your Actual Body
Somatic practice → Stand at a doorway. Press the backs of both hands into the frame, shoulder-high, sixty seconds. Release. Your arms float upward on their own — a trick the nervous system plays for grounding. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers. The lifting is involuntary. The evidence is the point.
Cognitive practice → When the catastrophic thought arrives — and it will — ask it: is this happening, or am I rehearsing it? The rehearsal is not prophecy. It is the nervous system preparing for a wound it has not received.
Community action → Text one person today whose name makes your chest warm. Not a check-in. A specific sentence: I was thinking of the time you—. Memory, offered backward, is a form of love that does not require reply.
The Practice — Armor You Can Wear Tomorrow
"People don't just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us."
What Jones is handing you in one sentence: the self you are now was paid for. In losses you chose and losses you did not. In the people you became visible to and the people who could not bear your visibility. Defiance is not loud. Defiance is the quiet accounting of what you have already survived. You are standing on the receipts.
What are you no longer willing to pay for — and who, specifically, are you no longer willing to become to keep the peace?
Heroes & Bright Signals — The Ones Who Showed Up and the Proof It's Working
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997 with a public letter naming the bankruptcy of awarding poetry while cutting welfare. Fifty years writing lesbian existence into the literary center across twenty-one books.
Saeed Jones built a Black queer poetic voice from Memphis outward — 2019 memoir How We Fight For Our Lives won the Kirkus Prize and Stonewall Book Award. Substack Vibe Check reaches tens of thousands weekly.
Carmen Maria Machado broke a memoir form nobody thought was broken — In The Dream House (2019) invented a structure for writing queer domestic abuse, translated into thirteen languages.
Bright Signals:
Shannon Minter on the 2026 Time 100 — trans civil rights attorney at the exact moment the administration is trying to legislate him out of visibility.
Hilary Knight took gold with Team USA women's hockey at the Milan Winter Olympics — fifth Olympic appearance.
Matthieu Blazy, openly queer French-Belgian designer, creative director at Chanel.
What these three women and these three signals share is one word: still.
Gathering History — The Roll Call of Those Who Were Here First
April 17, 1961: Bay of Pigs. 1969: Sirhan Sirhan sentenced for killing Robert F. Kennedy. 1975: Phnom Penh falls. 1982: Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms signed, grounding later LGBTQ+ legal victories. 2004: Argentina's Néstor Kirchner dismisses military-academy human-rights violators. 2014: Gabriel García Márquez dies in Mexico City
History is the thread that does not break because we keep tying it again at the frayed places
The Carrying — What Your Body Knows When You Close This Tab
"I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound."
What Machado is giving you at the close of a hard day: the story you tell may land in a place that does not echo back, and the not-echoing is not proof of nothing. The stone still fell. The crevice still received it. Somewhere down there, the small sound is measuring a space that existed before you spoke — and the measurement itself is the work.
Carmen Marie Machado credit: Instagram
When tomorrow morning comes, what is the one small sound you intend to make that belongs only to you?
Beannachd Dheiridh — A Blessing for the Road Ahead
Stand if you can. Touch the ground one last time — floor, dirt, your own thigh, whatever is reachable.
The dogwoods finish this week, the first fireflies will test the dusk, and you will still be here carrying what you carried in. Gabh ceum — take a step. The world did not get kinder while you were reading. The ground did not forget you either. Cuimhnich — remember.
Beannachd leat, a charaid — a blessing with you, friend — agus an talamh fodhad fhathast — and the earth still beneath you.
✨ 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
