The cardinal at the feeder this morning was the wrong red — that low, brick-red of an old wound — and my chest knew before the inbox did. Be furious and tender today. Both. Not one, then the other.

Survival tactic for today: Before you read the news, name three things in your immediate field of vision by their actual color — not "blue," but cobalt, slate, the particular cerulean of a sky doing its job.

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Atlanta: 58°, mostly cloudy — dogwood petals on Ponce de Leon look like they've been there longer than they have.

Detroit: 43°, partly sunny with snow possible — May, and the lake still doesn't believe it.

Kansas City: 53°, sunny — 80s coming Sunday, then a thirty-degree drop Tuesday.

New York: 55°, mostly cloudy — Hudson under pewter light, undecided.

San Francisco: 54°, cloudy — marine layer holding the city the way a hand holds a small bird.

Miami: 85°, partly sunny — air thick enough to drink, salt on the railing by 7 AM.

Tha an talamh a' tionndadh — the earth is turning — and Bealltainn has come and gone, the old fire-festival between the planted and the ripening. An sgitheach ann am flùr — the hawthorn in flower — older than any nation that has ever tried to claim it.

First time here? Welcome to the Gathering.

Editor's note: When the man who started a war calls reporting "seditious" because the reporting is true, the word has stopped meaning what he thinks it means and started meaning the only fucking thing he has left.

Verbatim: "I see on stupid CNN — which I only watch because you have to watch a little bit of the enemy." The Hill

The spray-tanned fascist started this war February 28 with Netanyahu, and today is the 60-day mark the War Powers Act says is the constitutional limit. His narcissistic cesspool of a Defense Secretary claims a ceasefire pauses the clock. It doesn't. The kleptocratic criminal apparatus is improvising. Susan Collins crossed the aisle Thursday with Rand Paul and was beaten — sixth time. Mike Johnson said the U.S. is not actually at war, the kind of sentence a lie-vomiting charlatan writes when the math has stopped working.

The damage:

Cost: Gas at $4.39 a gallon, up from $2.97 before the war. $25 billion spent. Every working person paying rent on his vanity by the gallon.

Pattern: 67% of Americans disapprove. The Wall Street Journal — the Wall Street Journal — called him a sucker in print this week.

Action: Call your senator. The War Powers Resolution will return. Find them. Veterans were arrested at the Capitol last week for this. More.

The seditious thing was never the reporting. The seditious thing was the war.

Evidence:

Why blue is hard: A material has to absorb lower-energy red light and reflect the higher-energy blue back. Most compounds do the opposite. The world is built to swallow blue.

Scale: The first synthetic pigment in human history was blue. Every empire that wanted the color of the sky had to build chemistry for it.

Expert voice: Mas Subramanian, materials chemist at Oregon State, on cerulean: "The challenge is not just absorbing red light but shaping the absorption profile so that a small portion of green is also attenuated." Every cerulean Monet ever laid down on The Gare St-Lazare is a small empire of physics.

A regime that tells you the sky is not blue is asking you to forget how hard the species worked to prove the sky is blue. Nine thousand years of human attention spent on getting the color right, and the golf-addicted despot wants you to call the reporting seditious.

Action: Look up. Once today, deliberately. Name the blue you see.

The sky has been keeping its color longer than empires.

Stakes:

Pattern: The ADL has tracked this convergence for years — antisemitism and anti-LGBTQ hatred braiding together in the mouths of the same men. The Buffalo shooter cited it. The Poway shooter cited it. Webbon is not the outlier. He is the liturgy.

Timeline: 2022, Jonathan Shelley said he'd feel "lucky" if the Holocaust had happened. 2024, Pastors for Trump founder Jackson Lahmeyer prophesied an Antichrist of Jewish descent who'd be homosexual. 2026, Webbon adds low wages — because the script needed updating to blame somebody for the inflation his preferred party is delivering.

Listen. The trick is the same trick it has always been. When the bloated grifter in office cannot pay your rent, cannot lower your gas, cannot end the war he started, the men in pulpits will name the wrong enemy with a Star of David superimposed for the algorithm. Don't fucking forget what this is. It's not all Jews — he said the quiet part — but it's always Jews. That sentence is a gas chamber with the door painted to look like a church.

Movement: Bend the Arc mobilizes Jewish communities against this exact convergence. Support them.

The Star they put over his face is the same Star they put on coats. Existence keeps being the answer the haters cannot kill.

She said it from a body that had been broken at eighteen and never fully mended. Seventeen surgeries. A polio leg. She knew what endure costs the body that does it. She is not asking gratitude for the capacity. She is naming it. The capacity is real. The cost is real. Both. You have already endured more than yesterday's you would have believed.

What part of yourself, today, are you afraid you don't have permission to grieve while you keep going?

Sit. Both feet on the floor. One hand on the sternum, one on the belly. Notice the temperature of the air on the back of the neck. Notice whether the jaw is holding what it does not need to hold.

The wheel has turned past Bealltainn — Bealltainn air seachad — and the hawthorn is in bloom and the bees are doing the work the bees have always done while empires argued about whose god to worship. The body that read the news this morning is the same body that watched the cardinal at the feeder. Both real. Both happening at once. The air your lungs are using right now was, three weeks ago, somewhere over the Atlantic — saltwater, gull, a fishing boat — and it is in your chest now, doing its quiet work without asking what kind of week you are having.

Anail an domhain, a' gluasad tromhad — the breath of the world, moving through you.

Spring asparagus, lemon, olive oil → Trim woody ends. Blanch ninety seconds in salted boiling water. Shock in ice. Dress with cold-pressed olive oil, lemon zest, flake salt while still bright green. First asparagus tastes the way a river tastes after thaw — gas-luachair as t-earrach — green, mineral, a little bitter at the tip.

Sourdough starter from your own flour and tap water → Equal parts flour and water in a glass jar. Loose lid. Feed once daily for seven days. Cost: fifty cents in flour. Replaces a $9 store starter and any future bread. There is a particular quality of light in the kitchen of someone making their first loaf. The wild yeasts respond.

Olive-oil egg over greens, lemon, garlic, parmesan, chili, toast (7 ingredients, feeds 4, 8 min) → Wilt three handfuls of greens in olive oil with smashed garlic. Crack four eggs in. Lid on. Two minutes. Lemon. Parmesan. Chili. Eat over toast. Beag is leòr — small is enough.

Color-naming as nervous-system practice → Look at three objects in arm's reach. Name each not by category but by its exact color — the cerulean of the cup handle, the dun-brown of the desk, the green of the leaf the cat keeps touching. Hold each color one full breath. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers. Color discrimination uses different neural pathways than threat-scanning. Naming colors interrupts the loop.

Permission to be furious AND tender → Write two sentences before checking the news. I am furious about ___. I am tender toward ___. Both specific. Both true. The lie is that anger and tenderness can't share a room. They have always shared the room. Frida knew.

Reach for one person who is also tired → Send the text that says I'm thinking of you and I have nothing useful to say. That sentence is more than most of us got this week.

You are not the first person to read the news this morning and want to lie down on the floor. The room you are sitting in has been, in some other version, the room a thousand other people sat in after the headlines tried to kill something inside them. You inherit the practice. You inherit the rope. Cleachdadh — practice — comes from the same root as to wear. You wear it. It wears you.

What practice — not feeling, not vow, but a thing your hands and breath actually do — are you willing to keep, even on the day you most want to abandon it?

Three proofs. Beauty has been a strategy of survival since long before any of us were here to need it.

Frida Kahlo painted her own pain into 143 paintings before her death at 47, most of them self-portraits made from a bed she couldn't always leave. She painted herself with cobalt skies and thorns at her throat — and made the color carry a body none of her contemporaries had the nerve to paint.

Tennessee Williams wrote 30 full-length plays while gay and Southern when the country was neither. A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947. The plays still run somewhere every night.

Saeed Jones — 41, Black, queer — won the Kirkus Prize in 2019 for How We Fight for Our Lives. His Vox podcast Vibe Check keeps a generation of queer people sane.

Bright Signals: Bealltainn fires lit at Edinburgh's Calton Hill Thursday — old fire surviving every state that tried to outlaw it. Read. Veterans for Peace brought their bodies to the Capitol last week to demand the War Powers vote. Their work. The Smithsonian opened a Frida Kahlo retrospective last month — first time since 1990. Visit.

These three made the work while the world told them not to. The work outlived the worlds that tried to silence it.

Tonight, when the day finally lets you go, the body you carry into your own kitchen — the one that read the news, made the bread, named the colors, held the small grief and the larger grief at the same time — that body has been homing all day. Air an taigh — toward home — not a place. A direction. A small returning, today, and tomorrow, until the practice is the country.

Where, in your own specific body tomorrow morning, will you feel yourself coming home — and what one small act will you do to mark it?

Stand if you can. Touch the ground or the floor with your fingertips. Let your eyes find the light wherever it is in the room.

Bealltainn has passed. The hawthorn is in bloom. The news will be terrible again tomorrow and the cardinal will return to the feeder anyway. Cum a' dol — keep going. Carry the fury and the tenderness in the same chest. Both are needed. Both are how the work continues.

Slàinte mhath, beannachd, agus tilleadh dhachaigh — good health, blessing, and a returning home.

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

Become a member: thistleandmoss.com/upgrade