My titanium leg knew before the wire services did — that low ache before a front, the same one that arrived the morning the DOJ filed its 197-page love letter to discrimination. The body keeps its own ledger.

Survival tactic for today: Before you open the news, press both palms flat to the kitchen counter. Feel the cold. Count five exhales.

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Atlanta: 59°, cloudy — pollen on the hood like a yellow pelt, dogwoods still throwing white into the gray

Detroit: 43°, cloudy — May arrived with snow in tomorrow's forecast, a sentence that should not be possible and is

Kansas City: 48°, sunny — yesterday's cold front still has its hand on the back of the neck

New York: 53°, sunny — light angled wrong for the season, sharper than May should feel

San Francisco: 53°, partly cloudy — fog burning off slow, the way grief does

Miami: 79°, sunny — air thickening toward August, hurricane season's overture rehearsed early

Tha Bealltainn an seo — Beltane is here — and the red maples along Ponce de Leon have set their first impossible green into air that still bites at dawn. The wheel turns whether or not the empire grants permission.

First time here? Welcome to the Gathering.

Editor's note: The bile-spouting administration's idea of religious liberty is the freedom to evict me from a hospital bed and call it virtue — and the DOJ just made it federal doctrine.

Watch: Rubio on Cuba's "zero hour"

Direct from the orange-faced serial lying grifter's mouth: "Taking Cuba in some form, yeah. I think I could do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth."

Trump's January executive order declared Cuba a national security threat and slapped tariffs on nations supplying its oil. The blockade has cratered an island already on its knees — water systems failing, hospitals on fumes, infants reportedly dying when the power cuts. GDP down 23% since 2019. The kleptocratic criminal apparatus calls this liberation. Regime change assembled in public, the small-handed fascist saying the quiet part on Air Force One while reporters take notes.

The wreckage:

Human cost: 8 million Cubans facing blackouts, food shortages, medical collapse under the U.S. fuel choke.

Pattern: January — Maduro captured. February — Khamenei assassinated. March — "Taking Cuba." April 17 — Trump tells a Phoenix rally "a new dawn for Cuba" is coming.

Action: Call your senators. The War Powers Resolution exists. Vox has the dossier.

The empire never asks the people whose island it is taking. That has always been the entire point.

Watch: Amsterdam's fossil ad ban explained

Evidence:

What broke: The pretense that fossil fuel and industrial meat advertising are neutral. They are the social licensing engine that makes climate collapse feel like background music.

Scale: Fossil ads = 4.3% of Amsterdam outdoor advertising. Meat = 0.1%. The signal: a capital city, on May Day, told JCDecaux and the airlines and the burger chains no, not on our walls.

Expert voice: Andrea Mancuso of Creatives for Climate said advertising "grants social licence, shaping what we see as normal and acceptable." The Hague went first in 2024. Florence followed.

The vote was 27-17. The treason-breeding seditious junta running the United States can't even ban a chemical that bleaches children's brains, and Amsterdam just banned the public face of fossil capital on the morning workers march.

Action: Push your city council. The Hague's ban survived a tourism-industry lawsuit. Earth.org coverage.

The land does not consent to what the billboards demand.

Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQ Nation: a 197-page DOJ report dropped Thursday, labeling pro-LGBTQ+ Biden-era policies as anti-Christian bias. The framing is the engine. The framing is the warning shot.

Watch: legal analysis of the DOJ report

Stakes:

Pattern: Bondi's December cash bounties on trans activists. Bureau of Prisons mandating conversion therapy in 2026. Kansas voiding trans IDs in February with no grace period. The infrastructure is pouring concrete.

Timeline: January 2025: Trump rescinded EO 13988. April 2026: HUD moves to strip trans housing protections. Yesterday: DOJ pledges to erode further what protections remain. Not slippage. Policy.

The fascistic authoritarian machinery has decided that my existence — pansexual, partnered to a trans-woman, walking the red Georgia clay with a titanium leg — is a violation of someone else's freedom. That is not religious liberty. That is a license to evict me from public space, to call International Trans Day of Visibility an attack on Easter. The Christian neighbor whose porch I water plants for? She is furious. She knows scripture better than the bile-dripping narcissistic predator weaponizing it.

Movement: Lambda Legal, ACLU, Williams Institute, Interfaith Alliance — all need bodies and dollars. LGBTQ Nation reporting.

We were here before the empire gave itself permission to name us.

The DOJ report is the table Janet Mock named. The administration sets the meal, calls it religious liberty, and asks us to sit politely while our protections are eaten in front of us. Mock's refusal is the one a Black trans woman has had to make every morning of her public life: I will not pretend this is a place set for me.

What have you watched eaten in front of you that you have, until this morning, called dinner?

Sit where the morning light can find your hands. Let the palms open, face up. Notice what your jaw is holding — and let it loosen.

Today is Bealltainn — Beltane, the cross-quarter day, halfway between equinox and solstice. The old people lit two fires and walked the cattle between them, eadar dà theine Bhealltainn, between the two fires of Beltane, to bless what would carry them through summer. An saoghal a' tionndadh — the world is turning. The hawthorn is opening. The wild ginger has lifted its red collar in the woods behind the old Druid Hills church. The earth is keeping every promise the empire breaks.

You have been holding the news in your shoulders. Let those places notice they are still inside a body that is still inside a world that is still — somehow, against everything — still turning toward green.

Wild greens for May → Young nettles (deanntag), dandelion crowns, lamb's quarters — blanch sixty seconds, shock cold, fold into eggs with butter and a hard pinch of salt. The first bite tastes like iron and chlorophyll. Beltane on a plate.

Sourdough discard crackers → Roll discard thin on parchment, score, scatter rosemary and flaked salt, bake 12 minutes at 400°. Cost: pennies. Replaces $7 boxes of artisan crackers that taste of cardboard and longing.

Pantry meal — ten-minute lemon-garlic pasta, feeds 4 → Pasta water boiling. Melt 4 tbsp butter, add 6 sliced garlic cloves, zest of one lemon. Drain pasta, toss with butter-garlic, lemon juice, parmesan, parsley, black pepper. Seven ingredients. Nobody in this house goes hungry because the week was hard. That is the whole policy.

Linden flower (Tilia cordata / americana) Pharmacology: Mild vasodilator, sedative-hypnotic via flavonoids and volatile oils. Acts on the parasympathetic nervous system; lowers blood pressure modestly, eases sympathetic overdrive. The cardiovascular nerve. Use: Tea — 1 tbsp dried flowers in 8 oz just-off-boil water, steep covered 10 minutes. Two to three cups daily. Tincture: 2–4 ml, three times. Caution: Avoid with prescription antihypertensives (additive hypotensive effect). Frequent long-term use has been linked in case reports to cardiac issues — rotate, don't dose daily for months.

Cleavers (Galium aparine) Pharmacology: Lymphagogue. Moves stagnant lymph through gentle stimulation of interstitial flow; mildly diuretic via the kidneys. The drainage nerve. The body's spring sweep. Use: Fresh-plant juice or cold infusion — chop 2 tbsp fresh aerial parts, cover with cold water overnight, drink in the morning. Heat destroys the active glycosides; never boil. Caution: Avoid in diabetes (mild blood-glucose-lowering action stacks with medication) and on blood thinners (mild anticoagulant). Skip if pregnant.

Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca) Pharmacology: Cardiac tonic + nervine. Leonurine relaxes vascular smooth muscle; iridoid glycosides slow tachycardia driven by anxiety, not pathology. The heart-and-grief nerve. Use: Tincture is the workhorse — 1–3 ml in water, up to three times daily, especially for stress-driven palpitations. Bitter beyond tea. Caution: Strongly uterine-stimulant — never in pregnancy. Avoid with cardiac glycosides (digoxin), beta blockers, or sedatives. Can intensify menstrual flow.

The vagal stretch → Lie on your back. Knees to chest. Hold ten slow breaths, exhale twice as long as the inhale. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers. The vagus nerve answers the long exhale the way old fields answer rain.

The naming practice → When the chest tightens, name three things present in the room you are inside. The cup. The dog. The square of light on the floor. The mind that can locate its own body cannot be drafted into a panic that belongs to no one in particular.

One call, today → Reach toward someone whose name has been sitting in your chest for a week. The person you have been almost-calling. Connection is a verb the body remembers when the news has tried to make you forget you have hands.

You are allowed to be unwell about the news without it becoming the whole shape of you. Almodóvar built a body of work on the idea that pain — held with color and music and the company of women — does not destroy the self; it teaches the self where its edges are. Let the pain of yesterday's report be felt without letting it be your only weather.

What pain have you been refusing to feel because feeling it would mean admitting how much you have already lost?

Names that kept showing up this week.

Faefyx Collington — They wrote yesterday's Williams Institute review for LGBTQ Nation, documenting the U.S. is in violation of international human rights law on three fronts against trans people.

Andrea Mancuso — Creatives for Climate. She organized the open letter from 100+ creatives that pushed Amsterdam's council to vote yes. One letter. Twenty-seven votes.

Karla Saenz — Released this week after a federal judge ordered ICE to free her, citing detention "arbitrary and capricious."

Bright Signals:

These three women and these three signals share the refusal to wait for permission.

This is the line that vibrates in the sternum on a day like today. Andrea Gibson — who left us in 2025, who knew they were leaving and wrote into it — understood that the most radical love is the love that stays past spectacle. The DOJ report is spectacle. The Cuba threats are spectacle. What you carry is the practice of loving the people in your house, the green in the dooryard, the body that keeps you.

Who in your life are you going to love tomorrow morning when no song is playing — and what specifically does that love look like, in your hands, before you check your phone?

Stand if you are able. Open your eyes. Touch the ground or the floor one final time, the way you would touch the shoulder of someone you trust.

It is Beltane. The fires are lit. Gum bi do chridhe làidir agus do làmhan socair — may your heart be strong and your hands gentle. Carry today's news the way the river carries the spring — only knowing it is moving, only knowing it is alive.

Slàinte mhath dhuit, a charaid — good health to you, my friend — gus an coinnich sinn a-rithist — until we meet again.

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