#druid

In North Georgia the black gums started it. One branch at a time going red in green woods, three weeks before anything else dares. Goldenrod up along I-20. The light comes amber at seven now instead of eight.

Tha a' bhliadhna a' tionndadh — the year is turning. It does that without asking permission, and it did it the year the tariffs didn't exist and it will do it the year they're gone.

Tomorrow I'm walking down to the fence line before the heat sets in and eating muscadines off the vine until my fingers go purple and my jaw aches from the skins. That's the whole plan. I dare anybody in Washington to find the line item.

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What's turning early where you are?

#Phenology #Nature #Seasons #Autumn #Georgia #Gàidhlig #Gaelic #Druid #Folklore #Photography #Gardening #BloomScrolling #Solidarity #Books #MutualAid #MutualAidRequest #StarvingArtist

The tulip poplars on my street started dropping their tired yellow leaves weeks early this year, out of pure August exhaustion, and the clay under them has gone the color of dried brick.

Before you argue with one single soul today, go put your bare palm flat on something the empire didn't build. A porch rail. A tree. The hood of your own beat-to-hell car. Hold it there until your shoulders drop. You cannot out-think a nervous system that believes it's being hunted, and that's the one fight all week you're guaranteed to win.

The earth has never once needed a federal form to know how many of us there are.

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#Grounding #Nature #Druid #Folklore #Seasonal #Georgia #Photography #Herbalism #MentalHealth #Solidarity #Gàidhlig #Community #Autumn

The dog days are breaking here in Georgia. Goldenrod up in the ditches along the county roads, ironweed with it — that purple so saturated it looks like a mistake somebody made.

The cicadas have changed shift. Long afternoon drone thinning out, the evening insects coming up underneath it. Muscadines going from green to bruise-colored on the fence line.

Tha an talamh a' cuimhneachadh — the earth remembers.

None of it asked permission from anybody in Washington. The season does not give a damn who won the primary, and that is the closest thing to good news the calendar hands out.

What's turning where you are?

Today's issue → https://thistleandmoss.com/p/new-letterhead-same-fuckin-leash-a-rebranded-cure-an-all-caps-siege-with-a-limp-dick-and-water-gives?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Wendy-New-RSS

#Gàidhlig #Gaelic #Nature #Goldenrod #Wildflowers #BloomScrolling #GardensOfMastodon #Photography #Georgia #Phenology #Druid #Folklore #Autumn #Plants

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Two tablespoons of dry lentils in a quart jar. Cover with water overnight, drain, then rinse and drain twice a day. Lay the jar on its side, out of direct sun.

Three or four days later you have a jar full of food. Cost: pennies. Equipment: a jar, a square of cheesecloth or a scrap of window screen, a rubber band.

Nothing in the produce aisle in February is fresher than something you grew on the counter and ate the same hour. No yard. No sun. No landlord's permission. A bag of dry lentils keeps you in greens for a month.

There's a particular light that comes into a kitchen where somebody decided to feed themselves well on purpose. This is the cheapest way I know to switch it on.

What's the first thing you'd grow on a windowsill?

Today's issue → https://thistleandmoss.com/p/new-letterhead-same-fuckin-leash-a-rebranded-cure-an-all-caps-siege-with-a-limp-dick-and-water-gives#the-nurturing-food-as-medicine?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica

#FoodAsMedicine #Sprouts #Cooking #FoodSovereignty #Gardening #GardensOfMastodon #BloomScrolling #Herbalism #Photography #Nature #Frugal #Plants #Kitchen #Druid

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Three weeks past Lughnasadh and the light has already changed its angle. Gold coming an hour earlier. Shadows longer across the red clay by four. Ironweed violent purple in every Georgia ditch and the goldenrod just breaking.

The black gums always turn first. They're turning now, one branch at a time, weeks ahead of the rest of the field — the way some bodies always know before anybody asks them.

And they aren't letting go because they made peace with anything. They're letting go because holding on through the cold would kill them. Release isn't serenity. It's the oldest survival technology on this continent.

Tha an talamh a' cuimhneachadh — the earth remembers.

What's turning early where you are?

Full issue → https://thistleandmoss.com/p/there-is-a-blue-wave-coming-our-salvation-fuck-trump?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Wendy-New-RSS

#Phenology #Nature #Autumn #Gàidhlig #Gaelic #Druid #Folklore #Georgia #Trees #BloomScrolling #GardensOfMastodon #Photography #Herbalism

Don't bin the heels. Four or five hard slices, torn by hand — never a knife, the ragged edges are the whole point — crushed coarse, then dry-toasted in a wide skillet over medium with a spoon of oil.

Keep them moving. Seven or eight minutes, until they go the color of a paper bag. Salt them hot. Two weeks in a jar.

A dollar of bread that was headed for the trash is now the thing that makes four dinners taste like somebody cared.

What's the cheapest thing in your kitchen that does the most work?

Full issue → https://thistleandmoss.com/p/there-is-a-blue-wave-coming-our-salvation-fuck-trump?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Wendy-New-RSS

#Cooking #Food #FoodAsMedicine #NoFoodWaste #Frugal #Kitchen #Herbalism #Druid #Folklore #Photography #Nature #QueerNews #LGBTQ

For the tooth that starts up on a Friday night, when every dentist in the county has gone home until Monday.

One or two drops of clove oil into a teaspoon of whatever carrier's in the cupboard — olive, coconut. Cotton ball or the corner of a clean cloth, held against the gum by the sore tooth, a few minutes. Never neat from the bottle. Never swallowed. Not for children.

Clòbha — clove. The compound is eugenol and it's a real topical anesthetic; dentists were using it long before anybody patented anything, and a diluted version is still in dental cements.

It doesn't repair a thing. It buys you the weekend. That's the honest claim, and a tooth that goes quiet is not a tooth that healed.

What do you reach for when the clinic's shut?

Today's issue → https://thistleandmoss.com/p/new-letterhead-same-fuckin-leash-a-rebranded-cure-an-all-caps-siege-with-a-limp-dick-and-water-gives#the-nurturing-food-as-medicine?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica

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The goldenrod is up yellow along every ditch line in the county now, and the pokeweed has gone magenta at the stem.

The cicadas have dropped out of that high electric saw into something slower and more tired. Late in the dog days. The light is already leaving three minutes a day and nothing consulted you about it.

The goldenrod does not know what a studio decided about who gets seen. It comes up the same as the year you were born and the same as it will the year after the last executive in this argument has become a name on a stone nobody in the family bothers to visit.

An talamh fo do chasan — the earth beneath your feet. It has not moved.

What's turning where you are? I answer every one of these in the comments under the piece.

Full issue → https://thistleandmoss.com/p/todd-blanche-is-still-trump-s-ass-monkey-trans-erasure-continues?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Wendy-New-RSS

credit: picture I took a few months back on the west side of atlanta.

#Phenology #Nature #Goldenrod #Wildflowers #LateSummer #Gaelic #ScottishGaelic #Druid #Folklore #Herbalism #Photography #Gardening #Solarpunk #QueerNews

The goldenrod along every ditch is standing up green and shut, holding its yellow, waiting for the nights to drop before it spends anything.

This is the deep hinge of the year — after the fireflies thin, before the first cool morning. Ninety-seven million people under heat advisories from the Plains through the Southeast.

An talamh fodhad — the earth beneath you. Holding the heat. Patient. Keeping its own record of what this summer was.

What's still shut where you are?

Today's Gathering → https://thistleandmoss.com/p/what-survives-the-morning-trump-is-dying-and-we-all-get-to-watch#the-nurturing-food-as-medicine?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Wendy-New-RSS

#Nature #NaturePhotography #Goldenrod #Phenology #Wildflowers #Summer #Druid #Pagan #Herbalism #Plants #Gaelic #ScottishGaelic #Photography #Earth #Seasons

Two tennis balls in a knotted sock. Ninety seconds. That's the whole protocol.

Lie on your back and set them under the ridge at the base of your skull, one either side of the spine, on the soft shelf above the neck bone — never on the bone. Let your head's full weight go down into them.

First thirty seconds feel like nothing. Second thirty feel like an ache with an opinion. Somewhere in the last thirty the shelf gives and your eyes water for no reason you can name.

Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers. Those are among the smallest and most overworked muscles you own, and they've been braced since Monday.

Where does the news land in your body first?

#Somatics #Selfcare #ChronicPain #BodyWork #Gaelic #Gàidhlig #Herbalism #Druid #MentalHealth #Photography #Wellness #Solarpunk

The black gum turns first. The rest of the woods won't admit to it yet.

Goldenrod budding. Pawpaws dropping in the dark, not one person having approved it. And one tree flagging a season nobody else is calling.

When I stop being furious long enough to look, I understand that being early to the truth is not the same as being wrong.

This publication runs the way that tree does — no advertiser, no billionaire, no venture ghoul waiting to strip it for parts and sell your reading habits to a broker. Nine outside sources went into today's issue. Readers cover it, weekly, in small amounts, on a rail that isn't owned by anybody:

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What have you been early about that people are only now catching up to?

#Nature #Phenology #Autumn #BlackGum #Trees #Georgia #Photography #Solarpunk #Druid #Folklore #MutualAid #Gardening #NatureScrolling

Shake the trunk. Take what falls.

Asimina triloba. Our largest native fruit and the only one here that thinks it's tropical — bottomland shade, Georgia to Michigan, late August into September. Ripe means soft, the give of a peach three days past the store. Scoop the custard off the flat seeds and eat it standing up.

Then save a seed, because a pawpaw seed cannot be dried — let it dry and it dies. Rinse it, seal it in a bag with barely damp sphagnum, put it at the back of the refrigerator for ninety to a hundred and twenty days. Plant it an inch down in spring. Five to seven years later you're eating fruit no corporation ever priced.

The light in a kitchen where somebody puts seeds in the fridge for a tree they'll eat from in 2032 is a particular light.

What's the longest thing you've ever planted on purpose?

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#Pawpaw #Foraging #Gardening #Nature #Georgia #FoodSovereignty #Herbalism #SeedSaving #NativePlants #Solarpunk #Photography #Druid #Folklore #BloomScrolling

Kudzu is blooming along every roadside and the whole thing smells absurdly like grape soda — you catch it the first time and look around for a spilled cup.

The cicada shells are still gripping the pine bark where the bodies climbed out of them. The figs are going soft faster than anybody can get to them. And the tulip poplars have started dropping yellow leaves in the middle of August, because the ground went dry and the tree made a decision about it.

Fanaidh an talamh — the earth waits. It has done this before.

What's quitting early where you are?

Today's issue → https://thistleandmoss.com/p/firesale-everything-blanche-must-go-also-the-uss-lincoln-is-an-awolfest?utm_source=PixelFed&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica

#Nature #Phenology #Summer #Trees #Georgia #Kudzu #Cicada #Photography #Gaelic #Druid #Seasonal #Foraging #NatureWriting

Nine feet up in the tallgrass, leaves turned north and south to duck the midday sun. That's how it got the name, and it's how lost people once took a bearing on open ground.

Silphium laciniatum. Blooming right now through September. Children of several Plains nations chewed the hardened resin off the upper stalks as a mouth-cleaning gum; Pawnee practice used the pounded root as a tea. Nineteenth-century doctors made claims I won't repeat as advice — so let me be plain: this is a plant to plant, not a plant to dose.

Everything you can see of it is built to be burned off. The taproot runs fifteen feet down into ground that hasn't been broken since before there was a state there. Some of them live close to a century.

Prairie is among the most destroyed habitats on this continent. Putting one in the ground is a fifteen-foot root laid into soil that will outlive you.

Cha bhris am freumh — the root does not break.

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#BloomScrolling #GardensOfMastodon #wildflowerhour #NativePlants #Prairie #Gardening #Herbalism #Druid #Folklore #Nature #Botany #Photography #DailyGathering

The cicadas changed their song last night. That high electric whine drops into a long exhale and you feel it in your back teeth before you name it.

Tomatoes cracking their own skins from drinking too fast. First goldenrod up along the ditch line. Three minutes of light gone every day now, and nobody consulted about it.

An talamh fo do chasan — the earth beneath your feet. It hasn't gone anywhere.

What's turned over where you are this week?

https://twp.ai/4hueeE

#Goldenrod #Wildflowers #LateSummer #DogDays #Nature #Photography #Druid #Pagan #EarthBased #Cicadas #Seasonal #BloomScrolling

The cicadas changed their song last night. That high electric whine drops into a long exhale and you feel it in your back teeth before you name it.

Tomatoes cracking their own skins from drinking too fast. First goldenrod up along the ditch line. Three minutes of light gone every day now, and nobody consulted about it.

An talamh fo do chasan — the earth beneath your feet. It hasn't gone anywhere.

What's turned over where you are this week?

https://twp.ai/4huecZ

#Goldenrod #Wildflowers #LateSummer #DogDays #Nature #Photography #Druid #Pagan #EarthBased #Cicadas #Seasonal #BloomScrolling