Roots Before the Storm
Wendy's Thoughts Before the World Gets Loud
The president posted a profanity-laced threat to bomb Iranian power plants on Easter morning, and my hands haven't stopped shaking since I read it. The chest knows before the headline loads.
Survival tactic for today: Put your bare feet on the floor. Count five textures you can feel beneath your toes before you open a single app. Your body existed before this news cycle. Let it remember.
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Table of Contents
The Ground Beneath Your Feet — Weather & Earth
Atlanta: 66°, thunderstorms rolling through before noon — the azaleas along Ponce de Leon bowing under the weight of rain they didn't ask for, petals bruised pink against the asphalt
Detroit: 48°, overcast and stubborn — the kind of gray that sits on the riverfront like a lid on a pot, holding the cold in close
Kansas City: 55°, partly cloudy — prairie wind carrying the wet-metal smell of a season that can't decide what it owes
New York: 52°, low clouds and drizzle — visibility at JFK dropped to instrument-only, the city sealed inside its own weather like a letter nobody opens
San Francisco: 56°, fog burning off by midmorning — the Outer Sunset still wrapped in gauze while downtown pretends it's already spring
Miami: 79°, humid and bright — heat pressing its thumb against the back of your neck, salt air thickening before afternoon convection
Tha an talamh a' gluasad fo ar casan — the earth is moving beneath our feet. April's first full week and the dogwoods have cracked open overnight, white bracts thrown against dark bark like surrender flags nobody ordered.
The Part That Draws Blood
What Woke Me Up Angry This Morning
The man with nuclear codes spent Easter Sunday threatening to obliterate Iranian infrastructure in a post so unhinged that his own former allies are calling for his removal. Christ is risen. The Strait is closed. The bombs keep falling.
First time here? Welcome to The Gathering.
Editor's note: He wrote "Praise be to Allah" while promising to destroy power plants in a nation of 88 million people — on the day his religion celebrates resurrection. I don't have a word for that yet. Give me a goddamn minute.
The 25th Amendment Wasn't Built for This. But Neither Was Silence.
"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran."
That's a direct quote from the addled generalissimo's Easter morning Truth Social post — complete with the invocation of Allah and a casual promise of what Amnesty International called a threat to commit war crimes. Senator Chris Murphy told the spray-tanned warmonger's cabinet to spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene broke ranks: he's "gone insane," she wrote, and everyone around him is complicit.
The machinery: the bellowing demagogue bombed Iran on February 28 without congressional authorization, assassinated its supreme leader, triggered retaliation that choked off the world's most critical oil corridor — a corridor that was open before he started bombing. He broke it. Now he demands someone else fix it.
The damage:
3,500+ dead, 4 million displaced since February
Only 14% support sending troops; 62% oppose
Prediction markets put 25th Amendment removal at 35%
The gilded fraud's own former White House counsel called him "clearly insane" on national television. The cabinet won't act. Cowardice is the governance strategy now. Time
Uruguay Did What We Won't: 98% Renewable and Nobody Had to Bomb Anything
credit: earth.org
A country of 3.4 million people with no oil reserves and no nuclear plants now generates 98% of its electricity from renewable sources. Uruguay did it in under two decades. Not with war. Not with sanctions. With wind turbines and political will.
Evidence:
Wind power went from zero to 40% of national capacity in less than a decade — faster than any country its size
Now a net energy exporter to Brazil and Argentina, selling surplus power generated by state-owned infrastructure financed through private investment
Ramón Méndez Galain, the architect of the transition, credits a regulatory framework that paired public ownership with private capital — the kind of boring, competent governance that doesn't make headlines because nobody dies
And here's where Thompson grabs the microphone: while the unhinged commander-in-chief threatens to bomb power plants in Iran over an oil corridor his own war closed, Uruguay quietly proved that energy sovereignty doesn't require a single barrel of crude or a single body in a flag-draped coffin.
Action: Support the UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 campaign for universal clean energy access. Tell your representatives that renewable infrastructure is national security. Earth.org
The wind doesn't care who you voted for. It turns the blade regardless.
The Man Who Wrote About Christian Sexual Ethics Raped His Own Child
A Baptist university professor. Father of ten. Author of Marriage as Covenant and peer-reviewed articles on Christian sexual ethics. John Kent Tarwater, 55, was indicted on eight felony counts including rape, sexual battery, and gross sexual imposition — against a victim who was ten years old when the abuse allegedly began.
His own child.
Stakes:
Six years of alleged abuse, from 2019 through 2025, at a Cedarville, Ohio address prosecutors want forfeited as an instrumentality of the crimes
Tarwater co-authored "Business Ethics in the Marketplace: Exploring Transgenderism" — a paper that framed trans people as a threat to Christian morality — while allegedly raping a child in his own home
Let me be explicit about the pattern because the bloviating autocrat's evangelical coalition depends on you not seeing it. These are the people who scream about drag queens reading books to children. These are the people who call queer families groomers. These are the people who write laws to "protect" kids from knowing gay people exist — while the churches they attend and the universities they fund keep producing men who rape children and get protected by institutions that care more about reputation than justice. Pastor Robert Morris molested a twelve-year-old and served six goddamn months.
Movement: RAINN provides support at 1-800-656-4673. Baptist Press | LGBTQ Nation
The predator was never in the library at drag story hour. He was in the pew. He was writing the curriculum.
The Witness — What We Carry From What We Just Read
"It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence." — Leslie Feinberg, transgender activist, author of Stone Butch Blues (1993)
The silence around who actually harms children is shaped like a shield. It protects institutions that wield morality as a weapon while practicing its opposite behind closed doors. The tightness in your throat reading about Tarwater's writings on marriage while his child lived in terror — that tightness is your nervous system refusing the lie. Sit with it.
What truth has your silence been protecting — and whose safety did that silence actually serve?
The Turning — Where the Breath Comes Back
Sit somewhere the air can reach you. A doorway. An open window. Feel the April damp on your skin — the season turning, not yet warm, not still cold, the earth in her own uncertainty.
Leig às e — let it go. Not the feeling. The performance of holding it together. Your hands were fists through those last three stories. Open them now.
The dogwoods don't know about the 25th Amendment. The rain doesn't care about prediction markets. Your heartbeat — that steady, animal thing — was keeping time before any of this and will keep time after. The wheel turns past Ostara's echo into early Beltane stirring, sap running whether or not the republic is.
Breathe like the land breathes: slow, through the belly, tasting the iron-wet air that thunderstorms leave, following the exhale into a stillness that asks nothing except that you remain.
The Tending — Survival Protocols for Your Actual Body
Somatic practice: Press your palms flat against a wall. Push. Feel the resistance travel through your wrists, up your forearms, into your shoulders. Hold for ten seconds. Release. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers. The wall pushes back the way the world does, and your body already knows how to meet force with structure.
Cognitive tool: Write down one sentence about what angered you most today. Then write the sentence again, replacing every abstraction with a specific image. "I'm angry about injustice" becomes "I'm angry about a ten-year-old in Cedarville whose father wrote about God's design for marriage." Precision is not cruelty. It is the refusal to let language protect the guilty.
Community action: Text one person today — not about the news. Ask them what they ate for breakfast. Cuir fios — send word. The smallest bridge holds weight the grandest rhetoric cannot.
Food as Medicine
Spring radishes — pull them from the dirt if you've got them, buy them with tops on if you don't. Slice thin, toss with flaky salt and good butter on warm bread. Ràidis — the bite is the season announcing itself, sharp and clean and unwilling to be ignored.
Corporate bypass: One packet of seeds, $2.50. A window box. Radishes germinate in four days, harvest in three weeks. The light in a kitchen where someone has chosen to grow their own food shifts the air quality of the whole room — something about agency made visible, made edible.
Ten-minute supper: Eggs scrambled with whatever greens are wilting in the crisper, sharp cheese grated over, served on toast rubbed with a garlic clove. Feeds four. Costs less than a gallon of gas. Nobody goes hungry because the week hit like a fist.
The Practice — Armor You Can Wear Tomorrow
"I am my own best thing." — Gloria Anzaldúa, Chicana queer theorist, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)
Your body is not a battleground for other people's legislation. You are not a talking point. An duine a th' annad — the person that you are — existed before any law tried to define you and will outlast every executive order signed by men who cannot spell the communities they target. Today, the practice is this: stand in front of a mirror and name one thing your body did today that kept you alive. Breathing counts. Eating counts. Getting out of bed counts — especially today, when getting out of bed is its own defiance.
What would you protect about yourself if no law or institution told you it needed defending
Heroes & Bright Signals — The Ones Who Showed Up and the Proof It's Working
Not everyone is burning. Some people are building.
Leslie Feinberg (1949–2014): Transgender activist who wrote Stone Butch Blues when no publisher wanted it, self-published and distributed copies by hand. The novel has been translated into 12 languages and remains the most widely read trans narrative of the 20th century.
Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004): Chicana queer feminist who invented the concept of mestiza consciousness — the survival skill of living between worlds. Borderlands/La Frontera rewired how an entire generation understood identity, language, and the body as a site of knowledge.
Eileen Myles (1949–present): Poet who ran for president in 1992 as an "openly female" write-in candidate, blurring the line between art and political action decades before it was fashionable. Over 20 books published. Still writing. Still furious. Still tender.
Bright Signals:
Uruguay hits 98% renewable, proving fossil fuel dependence is a political choice, not an inevitability
25th Amendment support at 35% — a number that moves
Solas anns an dorchadas — light in the darkness. What these people share is exhaustion that decided to keep going anyway.
Gathering History — The Roll Call of Those Who Were Here First
Christine Jorgensen became the first widely known trans woman in America (1952); Bayard Rustin organized the March on Washington while closeted (1963); Sarah McBride won the highest U.S. office held by a trans person (2024); Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and was called hysterical for being right (1962); The Stonewall uprising began with a brick and a breath (1969); Danica Roem became the first openly trans state legislator (2017).
The Carrying — What Your Body Knows When You Close This Tab
"I'm not a saint. I'm a writer. I'm a woman who lives here." — Eileen Myles, poet, Chelsea Girls (1994)
Here is what today cost: one Easter Sunday watching a man with nuclear codes threaten to bomb power plants while his allies whisper about his sanity. Here is what the body knows — the trembling after reading about a child in Cedarville and the trembling after reading about bombs in Tehran is the same nerve, the same recognition that power without accountability is just violence in a suit. You carry that not as despair but as information, a gàirdean briste — a broken arm — that teaches you where the bone is weakest.
When you wake tomorrow, what will your hands reach for first — the phone,
Beannachd Dheiridh — A Blessing for the Road Ahead
Stand if you can. Feel the floor receive your weight — the whole of it, the anger and the tenderness both.
Today the rain moved through Atlanta and the dogwoods kept blooming and somewhere in Uruguay a wind turbine turned in clean air and somewhere in Ohio a child is finally, finally being believed. The earth holds all of this without choosing. So can you.
Gum bi thu sàbhailte. Gum bi thu fallain. Gum bi thu beò — may you be safe. May you be well. May you be alive.
Alive is enough for today. Tomorrow we do it again.
✨ 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
