What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, the interior experience and emotional truths of the women of Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

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This is the introduction from the chapter about OWLs (old white ladies) and how we embraced our white privilege as a super power during the surge. I hope you enjoy.

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Lake Wobegone

“Hello, and welcome to A Prairie Home Companion, coming to you live from the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota.”

Garrison Keillor’s voice echoes from the top of Linda’s avocado-green fridge at the family cabin up north. It’s Saturday night in June, and she’s rolling dough for pies at the counter while her mom sits at the kitchen table, embroidering herb plumes onto flour dish towels.

“How many you got left, there?” Linda asks.

“I finished the rosemary, basil, and lavender. I just have the thyme, mint, and sage left to go.”

“Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown…

The rest of the family is outside. Linda’s husband, Dad and the uncles at the fire pit, somebody’s transistor radio out there too, the Twins game is on low underneath the sound of the lake settling into evening. The occasional loon call punctuates the air as the younger kids chase fireflies around the edges of the yard.

The screen door bangs every few minutes — someone coming in for bug spray, someone else going to use the bathroom — and each time it bangs, the someone says “smells good, when’s the pie gonna be ready?” and Linda always answers “Almost”.

Mom doesn’t look up from the dish towel. Linda doesn’t look up the dough. Outside, someone laughs at something. The screen door bangs again.

We all know that up-north kitchen. Even if we didn’t have a cabin in our own families, we all got invited to spend a weekend at one at some time or other. If the appliances weren’t avocado green, they were autumn gold, and the kitchen table was always a wobbly worn wood, or some form of sparkled formica.

Garrison Keillor’s voice came on the radio every Saturday evening, blending stories of Lake Wobegone with the smell of Grandma’s best recipes wafting from the oven. And in that voice, week after week, was a made-up town on a made-up lake, that became famous for nothing special across the world.

We listened to gossip in the aisles of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, where if you can’t find it at Ralph’s, you can probably get along without it. We heard about the Sons of Knute lodge, where serious men gathered to discuss matters of grave importance and ended up talking about the weather and the price of corn. And we grimaced at the sermons given at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, where the congregation shuffled in every Sunday because you still go to church every Sunday, even if you are on vacation. It’s just what we do.

We knew that congregation. We were that congregation.

Keillor tells us about the quiet week, where nothing much happened but everything mattered. He tells us about the Tollerud family and how they found their lost cat, and the Bunsen boys latest not-quite-run-in with the law, and Pastor Ingqvist’s latest attempt to say something meaningful to people who would rather he kept it brief. He tells us about the Norwegian bachelor farmers who eat their meals standing over the sink and about the Swedish farmer who loved his wife so much he almost told her.

Almost.

We are, all of us, fluent in almost.

We Minnesota women are known to almost say something, and be glad we didn’t. We almost ask for help, and are grateful when someone notices and offers without our request. The almost is just part of the air in Minnesota, like lake humidity that almost forms into rain but never quite does.

Garrison Keillor’s radio show is slow and steady, with a tinge of melancholy, finding the humor in the sadness and the sadness in the humor. And, like a hymn we already know by heart he reminds us every week that in Lake Wobegone, all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Linda pulls the pie out of the oven as Mom sets down the embroidery hoop and holds the dish towel up to the kitchen light to check her stitching. They have each other’s hands.

Of course the women are strong. What else would they be?

Outside, the screen door bangs. Somebody holler that pie’s ready.

We are Lake Wobegon women. White women. We are women who grew up fluent in the language of almost — we almost said something, almost made a fuss, almost asked for what we needed, we almost told someone how much they mattered.

Then ICE came to Minnesota in Operation Metro Surge.

And we white women tossed the almost into the trash like an over-burnt pie.

ICE broke our almost wide open and we started saying something, making the fuss, asking for what we need, and telling everyone how much they matter.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

Today, America crosses the threshold of 250 years since its birth.

And we are giving birth to a New America.
We’ve been in labor for months.
We have to own this.

It’s time to push this baby out of our wombs
and hold HER skin to skin to our souls...

Kelly

The People are rising and lighting the way. We are the Americans that hold the spirit of what this country can be in our souls. No government, regime, or asshole gets to tell us how to think, nor how we choose to move in this world.

We guard this spirit with our lives. We will take care of our humans, and we will not be robbed of our joy in the process. We will sing, dance, rejoice, and love one another because this 250th birthday of America is not a death, it is a profound transformation, and we are the ones ushering that in.

Six months ago, ICE showed up on the streets on Minneapolis, and they were here to teach us a lesson. They were here to cause destruction, create chaos, and to sew more division.

We had lessons of our own to dish out. We are a kind, generous, and hearty people. But as the world has now experienced, we are also a people that will not stand by and let our neighbors be hunted. We are a people who will tell you “Hey Dude, I’m not mad” before being shot dead. We are not a people that run.

I’m one pissed off American right now. I have rage in one hand, tightly held in a balled up fist. But the other hand, that one is open and constantly extended, pulling anyone up that needs a hand. Both hands have a task. You can’t ignore the dark when searching for the light, you must acknowledge it. You must pierce that darkness, and that takes a lot of might. But together, we can do anything. We only need one pinprick and the light is there, ready to expand and flood the dark with its brightness. It all starts with that one pinprick.

The United States of America doesn’t feel so united these days. But, I invite you to zoom in. We’re usually told to zoom out... not this time. Zoom in!

Get local. Hyper local. The Magick that is happening on the local level, all over this country, is the true, and unbreakable spirit the citizens of this country carry.

We carry this spirit in our DNA. The blood of my Rosie The Riviter Grandma flows thru my body. We have generations of examples of how this America spirit continues to live in all of us. Immigrants make us the melting pot of America, words I was taught as a child. Words that are now sacred to me.

This spirit lives in the donations for rent money, in the supply drop-offs, in the groups of emotional support being formed. It’s alive in the schools where there is strong debate, and civil actions being taken by our children. It’s happening as neighbors meet, and ask “are you OK?” It’s happening in every single corner.

Fuck red or blue, the lesson is universal. We’re not colors, we’re humans.

They came to teach us a lesson. We learned the lessons, just not the ones they thought they could force onto us.

We learned that WE are America. We are showing one another what this country really is, daily. We are writing, speaking, yelling, protesting, praying, and connecting.

We are guarding the light. We are not dimming. We are not shrinking. We are certainly not surrendering. We are fucking Americans, so we are fighting! We are creating. We are profoundly shifting.

That’s cause for hope and celebration. Never forget how much one human can do to change the world. Now... activate all of us, and a new future will quickly be upon us.

Celebrate that.

~Kelly

TeriLeigh💜

We are fed up.

Not just me, but all the WOMN of Minnesota that I’ve been talking to and writing about for months.

You know that line about hell and wrath and a woman scorned? Yeah, that’s a tiny little campfire in a portable fire-pit compared to the barn-fire we have burning inside us these days.

But today I realized what this is that is burning inside us. I thought it was rage, but it’s bigger than that, and it’s growing. And kicking, and elbowing, and punching at the walls of our wombs.

We have been pregnant, for well over a year, and now we are getting ready to give birth to a New America! And now the contractions are starting, and we can’t complain about our backaches and our foot cramps anymore.

We’ve spent the last months getting all our screaming and raging and fighting and yelling and moaning and pissing out of our systems because this new baby demands all the things that WOMN know is the core of humanity.

Now listen, you all saw glimpses of this New America that is raging inside us to get out in Minnesota this winter. You saw us march 75,000 strong in 30 below zero temps. You watched our faith leaders get arrested while singing Amazing Grace while kneeling on the concrete at MSP in sub-zero temps. You watched our mothers and teachers and nurses chase ICE away from schools and bus stops while organizing food and supplies deliveries to tens of thousands of immigrant families who were sheltering in place.

And you watched Renee Good and Alex Pretti die.

That’s the kind of Fierce Love that is begging to be unleashed in America today.

And Kelly was right, it’s not about zooming out, it’s about zooming in. Zoom in to that itch and pain and ache happening inside you to be the antidote for all this cruelty. Get hyper-local.

Be a helper.

Be a lover.

Be a care-giver.

~TeriLeigh💜

We love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,

TeriLeigh💜 & Kelly

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summary written by claude.ai

I’m an ally and he’s a force. Reverend Kevin Taylor and I have been talking in comments and on Zoom for a while now, and we finally sat down together to talk about the corruption of law enforcement and how it’s shaped the way our whole society is shifting right now.

This one got heavy. It also got hopeful. Here’s what we covered.

A Jeep in a Parking Lot

I opened by telling Kevin about the ICE vehicle I saw that morning on my way to walk my dog. No front plate, windows blacked out so completely, even the windshield. The windshield was total black! It was parked in a strip mall parking lot facing the street, lights on, surveilling the street I drive to my dog-walking park every morning. It was not normal. I went through a whole gamut of emotions in about half a second: first that’s an ice vehicle, then fear, then rage, then this is our normal now.

Kevin pointed out that the vehicle didn’t have to do anything. It just had to be there. And that’s the whole point of it.

History Doesn’t Repeat, It Rhymes

Kevin brought Mark Twain into the conversation, walking through the parallels between what’s happening now and the post-Reconstruction era, when Black voter turnout hit 90% before disenfranchisement tactics like poll taxes and black codes brought it back down to single digits.

His point: the tools have changed, but the strategy hasn’t. Voter ID laws like the SAVE Act, he explained, aren’t about preventing fraud that barely exists. They’re about making it harder for the people most likely to vote against those in power to get to the polls at all.

We talked about how the same dog whistles get recycled with new packaging. States’ rights. Compassionate conservatism. The caravan. AI as the boogeyman. Different decade, same playbook, designed to make people vote with fear instead of their actual interests.

The Rage of Women Finding Their Voice

I told Kevin what I keep hearing from the women I talk to: fear, then rage, then a fierce protectiveness for their kids and their people.

Kevin and I agreed that this anger, especially among white women who’ve held it in for decades, is becoming a real force. He was honest that not every woman channels that energy the same way, and that some have been taught to surrender their voice entirely. But the women showing up here are doing the opposite. We’re writing. We’re speaking. We’re using our words like spells, and it’s working.

Substack as Sacred Space

We both talked about why Substack feels different from other platforms. It’s a place for authentic voice, not algorithm-chasing. Kevin shared the story behind his publication, the Unpaid Ledger, named for the part of Dr. King’s 1963 speech that came before the dream, the part where he called America’s promise of equality a check that bounced. He also told us about his second Substack, a space for people who are grieving, struggling, and need to hear they’re not alone.

I shared a little about Fierce Love and the WOMN Project, the fifteen Minnesota women I’ve interviewed who showed up during Operation Metro Surge. Their stories aren’t about what happened. They’re about how it felt, and how it changed them.

The Bricks on the Corner

Kevin and I also talked about George Floyd, about the memorial near his and Renee Good’s, and about something I haven’t talked about publicly very much: what it was like here in Minneapolis during those days, watching cars without plates flood streets that were nearly empty because of COVID, and seeing pallets of bricks appear on corners with no construction in sight. Kevin affirmed that this fits a documented pattern of outside actors using moments of unrest to deepen division.

Where We Landed

For every 3,000 ICE agents, there are 300,000 people who love each other. That ratio is the whole hope of this thing. The real power isn’t power over someone else. It’s love with someone else.

Thank you for being here, for staying for the whole conversation, and for giving a shit.

I love you fiercely.

Thanks for giving a shit,

TeriLeigh💜

What you are about to read is full chapter from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to someone next to you.

Share

Fort Snelling

It’s been too long since I’ve been…

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If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

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Silent Walk for Justice. Hosted by Twin Cities Buddhist Communities.
All Are Welcome. Sunday, February 8th, 3–4:30pm.
Gather at Powderhorn Park West Playground.

All are welcome to join this mindful walk in solidarity with those harmed by ICE, and to bear witness to all who have been harmed by state violence. There will be no speeches. After we gather we will walk to the sound of bells through the neighborhood to be fully present and to manifest compassion. As we walk, we invite you to rest your attention on your feet on the ground, your breath, the people and places around you, and all that you see and hear.

The Handmaids are here.

Alice didn’t actually say the words, she just thought them as she elbowed her husband and pointed in the direction of eight women dressed in heavy red cloaks and stark white bonnets. They stand in two lines of four, perfect posture, heads forward, red gloved hands folded over their bellies.

But what makes Alice shiver a bit is their red masks. This is a silent walk, and seeing their masks makes Alice somehow mute, even though everyone else around her is still speaking in low rumbles as they wait for the signal to start.

Even though it is a nice warm upper-twenties winter day, Alice is chilled from the inside. She wishes she had worn more layers and her warmest winter coat. As she glances at the handmaids once again, trying not to stare, she feels a sort of ripping at the seams of her thoracic spine, like a breeze is getting in underneath her shoulderblades and chilling her from the inside where she can’t get warm again.

Alice recognizes the feeling as her unwelcome-new-friend Grief, who had taken up residence inside her weeks ago.

I guess my silence starts now.

Grief had first arrived with the helicopters in early December.

Because Alice lived close to the Minnesota State Capitol, the helicopters were relentless during the surge. They flew low over her neighborhood, and Alice’s heart decided to match their rhythm. She’d press her palm flat against the th-th-th-thumping behind her sternum, and she’d try to breathe it down, but her heart had tuned itself to the rotors and wouldn’t let go.

At first it just felt like anxiety and confusion with a dash of disbelief. But once Renee Good was killed, it was like all her emotions twirled around in a cloud of dust and a flurry of a dark grey wizard’s cloak, revealing Grief as the master of ceremonies.

When she saw the handmaids, Grief crawled inside her ribcage and was pounding on the walls to be let out.

Ahead of the handmaids, the clergy members and faith leaders gather. Pastors, ministers, rabbis, chaplains, dozens of them, wearing their stoles over their coats in greens and purples, and carrying processional banners, the kind that would be carried into a church. So many different denominations.

Are some of them the ones who kneeled on the pavement at MSP that day?

The cluster of volunteers wearing yellow reflective vests over their coats has started to spread themselves out amongst the crowd, guiding people with smiles and hand gestures to line up, two-by-two, like cars zipper-merging from several lanes into two.

How many people are here? Must be over a thousand.

Then the bells rang, and the low rumble of the crowd went silent.

Alice’s grandmother’s bell was small and heavy, heavily patina-ed. It had a loop just big enough to fit on her pinky finger to the first knuckle where it dangled as she started walking. The clap of metal against metal rang with the natural swing of her arm. A steady pulse she could just feel as she walked.

Grandma, I need you here with me now.

Her husband walked beside her. It took a long time to move into their space in the line. She had a knot in her throat. It wasn’t the I’m-about-to-cry knot. It was more of a pressure from the unzipping feeling between her shoulderblades pushing up through her neck.

Grief refusing to let go.

Once out on the city streets in a long snaking line of walkers, Alice noticed things she normally wouldn’t notice in the city. Mainly, the signs. Sad signs, old worn-out ones, brand-new ones, humorous ones, and stop-you-in-your-tracks signs.

Love for Renee.

It Takes a Village.

ICE OUT.

Give Peace a Chance.

Pretti Good

The pace for the walk was much slower than Alice’s usual walking stride. Every couple of blocks the line slowed to a stop because the front needed to wait for traffic before crossing a street. Reflective-vest volunteers holding their arms out, as patient drivers put their cars in park to let the long line proceed. A thousand people in noble silence, stopping and starting like a pulse.

At a moment when the line stalled almost to still, Alice stopped on a street corner in front a bus shelter in front of two boys who didn’t look a day over fifteen, but were probably in their young twenties. They wore identical black ski caps pulled down over their eyebrows. Thick gaiter masks were pulled up over their noses and ears so that the only skin showing was the whites of their eyes.

They stared straight ahead — not at the walkers, but over them, noses up in a posture that said we know better than you and we are better than you and you are stupid and beneath us. They wore identical heavy black winter coats and heavy black pants and boots. Almost militaristic. Definitely a uniform.

Is this what White Christian Nationalists look like?

One of them broke his stare and looked Alice right in the eye, almost like he’d heard her thinking and wanted her to know she was right.

She smiled.

She actually smiled.

Like her smile could do something to shift him.

He narrowed his gaze for a moment, then quickly looked back up over her head. His nose went slightly higher than before.

Alice felt a shudder run through her body that she literally had to shake off by rattling her bell louder for that one moment.

She went back to reading signs to block the vision of his ice blue eyes piercing into hers.

ICE Agents - Stop Crashing Grindr

Alice chuckled as she read the sign stapled high up on a telephone pole three or four times.

I needed that. Whomever posted that there, thank you.

As the line moved into a more residential area, the signs multiplied. Yard signs. Window Signs. Garden flags. Every house had some kind of sign. Some for the children of Annunciation School. Some for ICE OUT. Some for local political candidates. A few Harris/Walz leftovers. Some professionally done, most handmade.

One house with a front porch that reminded Alice of her own home had several simple black-Sharpie-on-cardboard signs, one for each pane of glass. She didn’t remember what any of them said except the one in the top left corner.

HOW MANY WEREN’T FILMED?

Her back unzipped some more and that familiar breeze rushed through the back of her heart just as the line slowed to a stop right there. Alice stood staring at that sign, reading it and re-reading it, dozens of times in the minute or so they were still.

The only thing that distracted her was the dog two house up..

A pitbull, peeking through the curtains of the picture window, wagging its tail, barked a happy bark. Alice watched her and hoped the dog would bark at her when she saw her, and then went back to reading the sign. Again and again. Each time the dog barked, Alice looked at her. Each time the dog went quiet, Alice looked back at the sign.

Sign. Dog. Sign. Dog.

How many weren’t filmed?

How many are able to go back home?

How many are gone forever?

How many are still safe because of the whistles and neighbors?

Across the street, a tiny hand pulled back the heavy drape just enough to reveal half of a child’s face. Alice waved, and the tiny hand quickly closed the drapes.

Then the front door to the house opened and a young father stepped out, a toddler on his hip. He waved, squinting at the crowd like he hadn’t seen daylight in days.

Or weeks.

The walkers kept moving, ringing their bells. Some waved back. They were only a few blocks from Renee now.

One block away from the memorial site, a woman came out onto her front porch. It had been almost exactly one month since Renee’s death, and this woman was crying big, verbal sobs as she thanked them, over and over and over.

I love you guys! I just love you all so much! Thank you!

No one responded. But Alice was grateful she verbalized what a thousand silent walkers were thinking.

Alice felt her bell wanting to ring more and louder as they approached the memorial.

But there wasn’t time to stop and take in the everything of everything. They were a crowd of a thousand walking in a line two by two. They had to keep moving. So Alice breathed it all in quickly — the flowers, the photos, the messages, the candles, the stuffies, and the prayer flags.

And then she stopped. Holding up the people behind her. What stopped her was the firewood, a pile stacked twenty feet high next to a burning fire pit.

A man sat in a lawn chair beside it, tending to a portable fire pit on his other side.

That fire had been lit the day she died, and someone had tended it 24/7 ever since, for a full month.

Does he live here?

Renee’s memorial was right in front of an apartment building — the same building where the man who filmed her death had been standing. Alice’s heart reached toward the people inside. All of them, living with this on their front lawn. So many strangers coming and going from their home, every day, for a month. And someone, or many someones, keeping that fire going through sub-zero nights, wind, and blizzards.

All those hearts.

All that passion.

All that pain.

All that rage.

So much emotion in that one small space.

Alice stopped and time stood still for that moment in front of the fire because she suddenly felt warm. The fire reached past her coat and her skin and found the place where her thoracic spine had been ripped open for weeks, and it zipped her back up, sealing the seam.

The fire’s warmth, of trees giving their life force in honor of the dead, pushed Grief’s cold fingers away from the stitching and pressed everything back together from the inside.

Her husband gently nudged her hand, ringing the bell, and she started walking again.

The warmth lasted for the entire walk back to the park.

Grief had taken her hand and helped her to swing it to ring the bell with more gusto. He wasn’t inside her anymore. He was beside her, walking with her, swinging her hand the way you would a child on the way to the playground.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

Share

These are the things that kill my kids.

Lorraine feels the heavy weight of the handgun resting in her open palm on her lap. The cold metal of the barrel, the roughness of the patterned grip, and smooth curve of the trigger. She tried to curl her fingers around it, but they refused. Like so many times since her husband had died, her body betrayed her, acting more from emotions and hormones than from directives and demands.

“We’re just going to sit here. We don’t even have to go to the range,” Allen said to her as she felt the rigidness of the gun grip on her palm.

These are the things that kill my kids.
Gun violence is the number one cause of death for children in this country.
How am I even considering getting a gun?

She couldn’t see him, or the gun, or even her own hands with any clarity. Everything for the last few months had been distorted by the watery vision of salty tears floating just below the surface of her lower eyelids. Widowhood had gifted her a year of firsts, but holding a handgun wasn’t one of the firsts she ever imagined.

But when ICE agents shot a man at 24th and Lyndale, in her neighborhood, just a couple blocks from her home, nothing felt safe anymore. She drove through that intersection every night on the way home from the dog park. The clouds of smoke from the tear-gas and flashbangs reached her home, four blocks away, and hovered for four days.

Nothing felt safe anymore.

She’d texted Allen that night, as the altercation with ICE and the neighborhood rapid response teams continued.

I think it’s time to go to the gun range.

Allen understood Lorraine’s relationship to gun violence. He’d also been one of those super-friends who had been with her since her husband died. She knew he’d be tender with her, and firm. He was safe.

The gun in her open-palm on her lap was not.

They did eventually make it to the gun range, but she couldn’t get herself to enjoy anything about it. The whole scene, even with Allen’s steady support, just felt unsafe. Her legs felt numb, and her fingers tingly, and her vision cloudy, and her brain foggy. Just like the first weeks of COVID. And just like when George Floyd was killed. And just like when Renee Good died. The sensation of unsafe had become way too familiar.

“Do you want me to go with you to look at getting a gun for yourself?” Allen asked as they walked out of the gun range.

“Hell no, I got a Doberman. That’s more responsible.”

“That’s fair.”

Poppy, fifty pounds of sleek black Doberman wiggles, greeted her when she got home from the range. She’d gotten Poppy in October, because every widow needs something warm that breathes in the house. And, with all the wobbles of feeling unsafe in recent years, Lorraine wanted a dog that commanded a sense of safety just by their physical appearance.

Poppy provided more than a sense of security, she was a breathing compost bin that transformed all Lorraine’s sadnesses into joys with just a few slobbery kisses. Poppy absorbed every wave of Lorraine’s grief that she could, sleeping against her back at night, following her from room to room, pressing her lanky paw into Lorraine’s leg when the crying started, as if she could hold the broken pieces together by applying pressure.

My little grief dog.

Lorraine is a 43 year-old queer woman teaching in an urban high school where she is often the only white person in the room. As the advisor for the gay-straight alliance her classroom is the safe space for a very specific population of students.

Lorraine knows what unsafe feels like, so she does everything she can to provide a sense of safe to her kids.

“I love you, I am proud of you. Get home safe.” is how she sends her students off at the end of every class.

“I got home safe, Poppy.”

Lorraine pats Poppy’s head as she sits down at the kitchen table. Poppy puts her paw on Lorraine’s thigh, the same place where the gun had rested a few hours earlier.

And Lorraine gets a flash of déjà vu. She was sitting in the exact same chair, wearing the exact same outfit, with Poppy’s paw on her thigh just like this when she picked up her phone a few weeks earlier to call her boys’ school, the day Renee Good was killed.

She stares at her phone on the table, feeling all the same feelings she felt that day.

She was still off work recovering from a hysterectomy. Coming down from a ketamine trip at a mental health clinic, Lorraine was still a bit loopy when the nurse said, “I hope you get home safe.” That wasn’t how the nurse usually sent her off.

“Safe?” was the only word Lorraine could squeak out.

“Haven’t you heard the news?”

A half hour later, Lorraine sat at her kitchen table, Poppy’s paw pressing into her thigh, talking to the receptionist at her boys’ school.

“Please be gentle,” she had said to the receptionist on the other end of the phone. “The last time they got a call that mom was coming to pick them up in the middle of the day . . . was when their dad died.”

“I remember.”

“Just let them know I need them. Like, I just want to make sure they get home safely tonight because I don’t know what’s going to happen because I know the people of Minneapolis and we’re not going to take this.”

“I agree.”

An hour later, both boys were home, safe.

Then, in the middle of the afternoon, a news alert buzzed on her phone, and all three of them started getting texts from friends. ICE agents had clashed with students and teachers at Roosevelt High School during dismissal.

During dismissal.

The moment of the school day when teachers stand at the door doing exactly what Lorraine does — looking each kid in the eye and releasing them into the world with whatever words they use to say get home safe.

Come to the kitchen, please.

Lorraine texted her boys who were in their separate happy-places in the house. Then, she set her phone face-down on the kitchen table and sat in that same chair for the third time that day. Poppy bounced over and put her paw in that same spot on her thigh once again. The pressure of her paw was warm and soothing.

My people are home safe.

She reminded herself as the boys trudged into the kitchen.

As a family, they drew up a safety plan — what to do if. . . which routes to take, how to communicate, where to go as a backup home, who their backup people are. When they were done, the boys pushed back from the table. Poppy followed them out of the kitchen, her nails clicking against the floor.

Lorraine sat alone at the table, her palm open on her thigh, where a gun had once rested. The place where Poppy’s paw had pressed. The place where her phone had been when the receptionist said I remember.

She could hear her boys settling into the tv room, the familiar sounds of home — a can of pop opening, the TV turning on, Poppy’s tags jingling.

My people are home safe.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

is a film and video producer and Substack writer behind Stories That Matter.

Stories That Matter

Journey with me as we explore and hear stories of personal business transformation. Stories of how individuals have overcome great odds and huge obstacles, giving us hope, inspiration, and love.

By Eddie Burns

He and TeriLeigh met through Creator Retreat in 2025, where he developed his publication from its original name, Think on This, into a home for hidden human interest stories and leadership lessons. Twenty-nine people joined today’s live conversation.

How This Friendship Started (And Why Goat Videos Matter)

When the ICE surge hit Minnesota in January, TeriLeigh posted on Substack that her neighborhood wasn’t okay and that she needed people to check on their Minnesota people. Eddie, joining from Texas, did exactly that. He started texting her daily, and then the goat videos started arriving.

• TeriLeigh says those videos were the one thing that made her smile when her neighborhood felt like a war zone

• Eddie reflected that he’d learned years ago how to show up for people — checking in, not overwhelming, just being a steady presence

• That simple, consistent care deepened into a real partnership: Eddie is now TeriLeigh’s AV collaborator, helping translate her written stories of Minnesota women into video format for YouTube

The through-line of the whole conversation: the tiniest things are the biggest connectors.

The Mycelial Network of Mutual Support

TeriLeigh described what she and the women she writes about have come to understand about mutual support — that when you reach out to help someone else, you often receive the very thing you needed without knowing you needed it.

• She and Eddie talked about the “infinity symbol” of mutual holding — two people in different kinds of pain, supporting each other, and watching the healing compound

• Eddie introduced the concept of seva (selfless service) from his years volunteering with a spiritual teacher’s touring organization, where he and his wife served the volunteers themselves

• TeriLeigh connected seva to the mycelial network metaphor: the underground web where big trees feed baby trees, and energy moves intuitively to where it’s needed most

The science backs it up, too. TeriLeigh referenced the work of Haven Watch, which has documented that detainees received with community support within five to ten minutes of leaving Whipple Detention Center experience dramatically less trauma than those who walk out alone.

Stories of What’s Happening on the Ground in Minnesota

TeriLeigh shared several stories from the book she’s writing about women and quiet acts of fierce love since the surge began in December:

• The mobile home park neighborhood watch: Neighbors near a Latino mobile home park organized through Signal Chat, going by handles like “Sad Fat” and “Mud Raker,” standing watch in reflective vests through bitter cold — and still doing it. Every Friday they bring day-old bread from a nearby bakery and share it together. A week ago, 100 of them had a picnic and finally learned each other’s real names.

• A family’s self-deportation: A mixed-status family on that same street, facing impossible uncertainty, packed a van and drove to Mexico. When neighbors found out a “we buy ugly houses” company was going to take three months to clear the home, the whole street mobilized — cleaning out the house, holding garage sales, and selling things on Marketplace. They had it done in two weeks and sent the money to the family.

• First aid kits in backpacks: After ICE showed up at a school during dismissal and tear-gassed high schoolers, one woman began making and distributing first aid packs for students to carry in their backpacks. When she saw that protesters at Delaney Hall in New Jersey didn’t have basic supplies, she packed five oversized suitcases, flew out, and set up a proper medic station.

Texas, Political Shifts, and James Talarico

Eddie brought in the Texas perspective. He’s been watching James Talarico, a young Texas state legislator running for Senate who is drawing attention across party lines. A Christian who attends seminary and was formerly a teacher, Talarico pushed back publicly against Christian nationalism and the Ten Commandments classroom mandate — and memorably caught the bill’s sponsor on the floor by asking whether they were aware they were passing the law on the Sabbath.

• Eddie sees Talarico as a voice that could reach moderate Christians who feel the Greg Abbott version of conservatism has gone too far

• Both Eddie and TeriLeigh reflected on how their perception of Texas had shifted — TeriLeigh noted that during the January surge, some of the loudest responses and support she received came from blue dots inside the red state of Texas

• TeriLeigh also named Minnesota’s current reality: it’s more purple than people realize, with a 50-50 state legislature and deep rural-urban division

The Closing Thread

Both Eddie and TeriLeigh circled back to the conversation’s central question: what do we do with the instinct to connect?

• Trust it. When someone comes to mind, text them. You don’t know what they might be carrying.

• Find the thing that comes naturally to you — whether it’s first aid kits, goat videos, mutual aid organizing, or telling stories — and do that thing.

• Eddie summed it up: “The tiniest little things are the biggest connectors.”

• TeriLeigh closed by pointing to their own friendship as evidence: goat videos during a surge became a collaboration connecting Texas with Minnesota, and 29 people listening on a Tuesday morning.

Find Eddie’s library of interviews and hidden human interest stories at Stories That Matter on Substack. TeriLeigh posts stories from Minnesota women every Tuesday at fiercelovemn.com*. Video versions are coming soon to YouTube.*

Subscribe now

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

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I wish I could bring my gun to work.

A cluster of protesters screamed at her. Did they assume she was ICE?

I can’t believe I just thought that.

Marie shakes her head, trying to shake the idea out of her brain. She is a licensed gun owner, but she has never, ever, carried her gun in public. It stays locked in its case at home.

Do I need to wear a sign that says “I’m a nurse”?

Instead of just having her keys out ready to unlock the car as soon as she gets within range, she has started holding one of the keys wedged between her fingers, a potential weapon, just in case.

I can’t believe I am holding my keys like this. I’m a nurse. My job is to heal people, not harm them with my keys!

Before the surge, this was just a normal employee parking lot, an extension of the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. But somehow this average parking lot had turned into a place where Marie had to be on high alert. She’d always been one to pay attention to who’s sitting in a parked car with the engine running, who was walking the same direction as she was, and the distance between herself and the nearest lit entrance. Like all women, Marie has been doing this math her whole life, but during the surge, the calculation had become much more complex.

The old math was simple: Is that person a threat to me?

The new math had variables she was never trained for: Is that person ICE? Is that person a protester? Is that person someone who, like me, just works here? And the unknown variable that changed everything, who do these people think I am?

Her building sits directly across from the Whipple Federal Building, ICE’s Minneapolis headquarters and detention center. Before the surge, the parking lot was a nothing-space. She parked, she walked, she went inside. She recognized the majority of the cars parking there, and she knew many of the people who walked the lot with her.

After the surge started, there were fifty or more cars and dozens of people she didn’t know. She didn’t trust any of them, and she wondered if any of them trusted her.

She is a nurse. Her job is to serve every single one of them with the same compassion. The veteran, the protester, the federal agent — if any of them collapsed in this parking lot right now, Marie would be the one running toward them.

But no one in this parking lot knows that.

Inside, sitting quietly at her desk, on the phone with a veteran, Marie jumped out of her seat when the first bang cut through the wall.

Was that gunshots?

It wasn’t. It was flashbangs fired by ICE agents in the parking lot, just outside the building where Marie sat with a veteran’s file open on her screen. The same parking lot she’d just crossed with a key between her fingers. The nothing-space was no longer nothing. She looked out the window at clouds of smoke. She’d never seen an actual war-zone before, but this is what she’d imagined it might look like.

Marie abruptly ended her patient call and promised to call him back.

“We are taking care of veterans,” she said to no one in particular, “Giving them our best. And they are disrupting how we care.”

She stopped speaking, stared off into space for more than a moment, knowing she was talking to the no one. And then she continued, because her words needed to go somewhere.

“What do they expect the outcome to be?”

The next day, her supervisor told her to work-from-home.

She didn’t know when she’d go back.

When Marie saw the video of Alex’s death on social media, she could hear the helicopters overhead indicating this was close. Nine blocks close.

Marie thought working from home would be safer, but now, with Alex’s death in her own neighborhood, nowhere was safe anymore.

She watched it once. Then she watched it again. Then she did what we all did that Saturday, she scrolled, looking for the next piece of information to arrive, hoping the details that might make the thing she’d just watched make sense, even though we all knew that nothing was going to make it make sense.

He was 37.

His name was Alex Pretti.

He had seen a woman being pushed to the ground by ICE agents, and he had run toward her.

He was a nurse.

. . . Marie stopped scrolling. . .

He was a VA nurse.

. . . She set her phone down. . .

He was her colleague.

. . .

He was her colleague. . .

She had never met Alex Pretti, but that didn’t matter. She knew him the way every nurse knows every other nurse.

Alex Pretti ran toward a woman who needed him, just like any and every nurse would do, out of instinct, training, and automatic reflex.

And they shot him for it.

She paused the recording.

They killed the helper.

Her thumb hovering over the play button.

They murdered the helper.

That could’ve been ME!

When the VA announced the memorial service for Alex Pretti, Marie joined on Teams from her kitchen table, with Grief sitting next to her, a cold hand on the rim of her tea-cup.

Her laptop screen filled with faces, over a thousand of them.

The room on the other end was packed — standing room, people crowded in doorways as the online boxes kept multiplying, name after name, department after department, colleagues she recognized and colleagues she didn’t, all of them logged on from nurses’ stations and break rooms and desks and home offices, all of them doing the same thing Marie was doing: stopping.

She wondered if even the custodians and the nursing assistants were able to stop and watch from their phones in the middle of the shifts. Did the whole hospital, every floor, every unit, every function, stop for this moment? Did the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, a federal institution that runs on schedules and shifts and the absolute non-negotiable forward motion of patient care, completely stop?

It did.

Alex’s nurse manager spoke first. She was emotional, and she didn’t try to hide it. No one tried to hide it, which is remarkable in a building where the job requires you to hold yourself together in front of people who are falling apart.

And then the VA Nurse Honor Guard came forward.

Marie watched them enter the room in their traditional nurse uniforms including the white caps that no one wears anymore. Each one held a Florence Nightingale candle, a callback to the Nightingale ceremony given for all new nurse graduates.

The Honor Guard lit the candle.

One of them stepped forward and the room went quiet, both in-person and online, a thousand people holding the moment in noble silence.

Alex Pretti, RN —

She read his license number..

— report to duty.

A bell rang.

Alex Pretti, RN, report to duty.

The bell rang again.

And then the third time.

Alex Pretti, RN.

You are . . . released from duty.

The bell rang.

The candle went out.

Silence.

Everyone was listening.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

summary written by claude.ai

Making Friends with Grief

I have this image of grief in my mind that I’ve never really talked about publicly until Amanda Saint and I went live together last week.

He’s tall. Bony. Ancient-looking, with cold clammy skin and gnarly knuckles. He wears a cloak. And when I was writing my novel The Shadows Shine — about a 12-year-old girl who watches her best friend die — I realized the main character had to stop running from this cloaked figure and actually go out into the woods and talk to him.

Because he wasn’t going anywhere.

That’s the thing about grief. We can’t make him leave. And the Western approach — the sterile funeral home, the casket on a button, the pastor who didn’t even know the person, the fake grass placed carefully over the hole so you can’t see the actual dirt — is designed to pretend otherwise. To contain the feeling rather than express it.

Amanda’s processed 19 bereavements since 2016. Seven of them came in 24 months. She talked about how writing a tribute to her friend Tim — four years after he died by suicide — was the moment she finally understood what their friendship had actually given her. All the things she’d never said out loud. Even the things that drove her crazy, like his electronic music with no discernible rhythm. Writing it made him more alive to her, in a way she couldn’t access just by thinking.

That landed for me. Because I’ve been doing that with Julie’s irises.

Julie was my best friend for decades. I got the call on my birthday in 2019 that she’d fallen and broken her neck. I fed her breakfast almost every day for six months until she was gone. She’d planted an iris garden right before she fell and never got to see it bloom. So I took some of those bulbs. I’ve been tending them for five years now, and last year they didn’t bloom after I transplanted them — which was its own grief, another losing of Julie. But this spring they came back in abundance. I go out with my coffee every morning and name them and find personalities in their little faces and hear her voice saying things like oh, that one’s got a fuzzy tongue. I share them on my Substack. And now readers are telling me they have irises too, and wanting to send them to me. Julie is becoming someone my readers almost know.

Writing does that. It makes the dead more present.

Amanda brought up something that stopped me cold — she described a grief ritual from Bali that a friend witnessed, where women danced with familial daggers pressed to their chests while a cacophony of drums and clanging pots drove them into an altered state so they could embody their ancestors. And then she told me about the Famadihana ritual from Madagascar, where a year after a loved one dies, the family exhumes the body, dresses it in beautiful clothes, and dances with it before reburying it. That ritual inspired a flash fiction story Amanda wrote that got accepted by a literary journal in half an hour. Because she wrote from what was really there, really felt.

What I keep coming back to is this: expression means to push out. All of these practices — dancing, drumming, shrine-building, writing — are forms of pushing the grief out of the body so it doesn’t twist up inside you.

In my ancestral work with my shaman, I had this moment in the woods upstate New York where I’m in full regalia banging on a stick (representing my grandpa Edgar) and a stool (representing my grandma Alice) with another stick, yelling at them to go fix my failing yoga studio. And at some point I became very aware that I was wearing feathers and hitting furniture in the middle of the forest and I just started laughing. And then I’d switch back to grandma and start sobbing. Laughing, crying, laughing, crying. I’ve never felt so profoundly both at the same time in my life. And within six months I’d filed bankruptcy and was traveling the country teaching yoga — set free.

That’s what the full expression of grief actually does. It opens something.

If you feel grief you’re not recognizing as grief — for a job, a version of yourself you thought you’d become, a home, a friendship that changed — that grief is real and it has nowhere to go unless you give it a channel. Writing is mine. What’s yours?

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Pass it to the woman next to you.

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Fort Snelling

It’s been too long since I’ve been here.

Alice stands at Great Uncle Clint’s headstone with an old ice cream bucket full of supplies in one hand, her other hand empty at her side. Years of dirt and grime had discolored the recessed letters of Clint’s name. It’s been several years since she’s been here to clean it, and the guilt of that lands on her chest like a palm pressing down.

Damnit, I forgot to stop at the good spigot to get water on the way in. . . Grandma, why didn’t you remind me?

Alice thinks, looking up at the sky. It’s been nearly twenty years since her grandmother passed. Which means it’s been a quarter-century since Grandma taught her how to tend to the graves.

She dumps the supplies out of the bucket at the base of the grave and walks several rows back to the good spigot. The gushing water splashes up the sides of the bucket and onto Alice’s linen pants.

I guess I earned that.

She makes a mental note that she probably will need an extra dose of water medicine before the day is done and decides to head over to the Fort Snelling hiking trails after she finishes with Clint’s grave.

Back at the grave, Alice wonders what he did in the war. She’d never asked, and now everyone who would’ve known is long dead.

So many dead.

Her eyes glaze over and Clint’s single headstone dissolves into the whole cemetery, 260,000 identical white headstones stretching in every direction around her. Her eyes unfocus and the whiteness blends into a blurred tunnel.

How many died by war? How many are underneath these graves, without headstones?

She’d never thought about it before this winter. Fort Snelling was just where Clint was buried, a cool military cemetery where everything felt precise, ordered, and clean. But now, it doesn’t feel clean at all. It felt as dirty as the green-black grime settled into the letters of Clint’s name.

This winter, when the Dakota erected their tipis at Coldwater Spring during the surge, Alice started reading about the history of the land. As she looked out over the graves, she felt sick to her stomach thinking that they may have been buried over the unmarked graves of the Dakota women and children and elders who were held in a wooden stockade on the riverbank below this bluff through the winter of 1862–63.

Am I standing on top of them? Why is there no headstone or even placard about them?

Now that she knows, and she can’t unknow it. She can’t separate her love for Clint from the sickness she feels about the ground he’s buried in, and both of those feelings are churning inside her at the same time with nowhere to go.

This land is so full of grief, and I only have one bucket and two hands.

Her knees buckle underneath her as she feels that sensation of standing at the edge of the ocean where the waves lap in and pull the ground out from under you, and you’re not sinking, the earth is just leaving. Her feet had nothing solid underneath them anymore, so she collapsed onto her knees.

She sets the bucket beside her and lines up the tools at the base of the headstone in the order her grandmother taught her. Stiff brush, sponge, butter knife, shears. She doesn’t think about why this order, she just does it, the way a granddaughter does what she’s told long after the grandmother is gone. Then, she picks up the stiff brush, dips it into the bucket and starts scrubbing away at the letters of Clint’s name.

My hands look just like yours, Grandma.

The bristles push the grime out of the C, and then the L, and Alice can almost hear him laughing, like a little boy who is just excited that someone is giving him attention. Alice doesn’t remember any real concrete details about her interactions with Clint, but she can always recall his laugh. He was always the old guy sitting in the corner at Grandma’s house with his not-wife Therese, laughing like everything in life was one big joke.

You find this funny Clint? Maybe you want to help me by making this grime a little less sticky?

And just as she thought that, a big chunk of grime flaked off from the letter N.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

And she heard him laugh again.

Once she finishes scrubbing, she drops the brush and picks up the sponge, dunking it into the water bucket. She looks to the left and to the right of his headstone, other vets had their wives next to them, but not Clint. Therese was buried in a small Catholic cemetery next to her nephew because the Catholic Church wouldn’t allow Clint and Therese to officially marry, so the military wouldn’t bury them together.

It’s not right, Clint. She should be here with you.

But the world isn’t about right and wrong. Alice wondered if Dred and Harriet Scott had walked this spot where Clint’s body lay. The Scotts were enslaved here in the 1830s even though slavery was illegal in Minnesota at the time. Their marriage wasn’t recognized by the government, and, like Clint and Therese, they weren’t buried together either.

Alice squeezes the sponge over the top of the gravestone and watches the water wash away the last of the debris. She looks at Clint’s name, clean now, sharp white letters carved into stone.

She dunks the sponge again and starts washing down the whole headstone, running the sponge across the top and down the sides, letting the water carry the last of the loosened grime away. As she wrings the sponge out, her eyes drift toward the direction of the Whipple Federal Building.

Ugh, I can feel it from here.

Alice’s stomach turns as she thinks about ICE’s headquarters. She can feel the retch rising in her throat, that physical revulsion at how utterly horrible humans can be to each other. The complete lack of respect — for the Dakota, for the ground, for the people being detained inside.

You know what they named that building, Clint? They named it after the one white guy who actually tried to save the Dakota. The one guy who told the truth. The Dakota called him Straight Tongue. And now ICE is using his building to disappear people. Nothing has changed in 164 years. We haven’t gotten any better as a society.

Alice had been invited by friends many times to attend resistance and activism events at Whipple, but she could never bring herself to go because the worst of the worst conflicts with ICE were always reported from Whipple. She felt like the building was cursed, and it wasn’t a safe place for her to be.

Visiting Uncle Clint’s grave was the closest she’d come.

She wrings the sponge hard and watches the dirty water hit the grass. She then picks up the butter knife and starts working it under the dead grass matted against the base of the headstone, prying it loose the way her grandmother showed her. As she works, she thinks about the Dakota prayer camp tipis that went up nearby at Coldwater Spring in February.

As her right hand works the butterknife at the base of the headstone, Alice realizes that fingers on her left hand have started drumming on the side of the marble. She can feel it even now, the Dakota prayer camp drumming coming out in her own fingers, all these months later.

Drumming is a rhythm, like an effort to resuscitate the heartbeat of humanity.

Alice drops the butter knife and uses both of her hands to drum on the marble headstone. She feels the vibration move through her arms and into her heart, and that emptiness she had been feeling is rattled like the inside of a drum. Suddenly, the grief inside her, that empty place that wanted to vomit out all the pain felt different, more alive. She kept drumming, harder and harder, pushing all her grief and pain from the last months onto the gravestone. Even though she knew it was impossible, it felt like she was trying to drum Clint right out of the grave. But that’s not what she wanted. What she wanted was for her drumming to open the doors of Whipple and bring the disappeared back to the community.

Alice knows that the Dakota campout itself wouldn’t undo what’s been done, and it couldn’t bring back the disappeared. But she understood now that the intention behind the campout was to awaken humanity into an awareness, shake them into some kind of realization and plant a seed for new things to eventually grow out of all this turmoil.

And then she suddenly stops.

She sits back on her heels until her hands stop tingling and her breath comes back to a quieter pace.

Alice picks up the shears and trims the loosened grass back from the base of the headstone. She gathers the clippings and dead brush into a small pile and carries it to the nearest trash bin, then comes back and stands over the grave for a moment, looking at her work.

She picks up the bucket and pours the rest of the water slowly over the top of the headstone, watching it stream down like tears.

Then, she puts the tools back into the bucket, in the same order she used them: stiff brush, sponge, butter knife, shears.

I followed your protocol, Grandma. Every tool, every step. Even got the water from the good spigot.

Alice reaches into her pocket and takes out a small rose quartz stone, a ziplock bag, and a tiny silver spoon. She uses the spoon to dig a tiny hole at the base of the gravestone, just big enough for the stone. She puts the dirt into the ziplock bag, zips it up and shoves it back in her pocket with the spoon. Then she carefully places the rose quartz in the soil bed.

I’ll bring this home, Clint. I’ll put it on the shrine. You’ll be closer to me there.

She gets in the car and drives the few minutes to Fort Snelling State Park so she can walk to the tip of Pike Island, where the Minnesota and the Mississippi Rivers converge. Bdóte.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

What you are about to read is full chapter from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,

Pass it to the woman next to you.

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“We need micro joys. Micro joys get us through the macro grief.”

~Kelly Wilson, founder of the Do’Gooders, a Minnesota Mutual Aid effort

“Would you like to hear a G-rated joke?”

In the produce section at Trader Joe’s an elderly man who looked to be well into his eighties holds a pile of leaflets and a peculiar sparkle in his eye.

Target was always the go-to everything store in Minnesota. Especially when SuperTargets came to be and groceries were brought into the department store.

But Target had betrayed us, allowing ICE to stage in their parking lots and use their restrooms. Target no longer felt safe, especially since we’d seen and shared the viral videos of high school kids working as cart-retrievers being abducted from their jobs at Target while insisting they were U.S. citizens.

So, we started shopping at Trader Joe’s instead. The more claustrophobic parking lots at TJ’s were too cramped for a caravan of unmarked SUVs.

When we adjusted our vision from bullseyes to hibiscus flowers, we found ourselves greeted by a community atmosphere that included a jokester giving a warmer welcome than we knew how to handle.

“Sure,” we say, hesitantly. We want to be polite, but we also want to be left alone, a perfect example of Minnesota Nice.

Long winters have trained us into staying humble and not making a scene, because a scene requires heat and energy and effort, all things in short supply in the deep cold of winter. So we endure, and keep things in, and swallow reactions, soften edges, and use polite phrasing.

In Target, we could move through an entire errand and through the self-checkout without anyone making eye contact. That was the deal, and we were fine with it. But in Trader Joe’s during Operation Metro Surge, this little old man somehow enters our protected inner-shopping-world without violating it.

“You can take this one home to the toddlers in your family. They’ll love it!” he says with the eagerness of a preschooler racing toward his own punchline.

We add a polite nod, which outsiders might construe as passive-aggressive. But, the truth is that the Minnesota Nice Golden Rule — if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all — is so deeply coded into our bone marrow that we don’t know how to relate any other way.

“Why did the boy take a job at the bakery?” he asks.

“Why?” we say with a smile, relaxing a bit into the moment.

“Because he kneaded the dough.”

He belly-laughs at himself and his punchline, and then introduces himself as a former preschool teacher and a current Sunday School teacher.

We exhale a soft sigh. He really is harmless, and so we accept his leaflet filled with a couple dozen more G-rated jokes and thank him kindly.

“You betcha,” he says in that perfect Minnesota-Scandinavian accent.

After filling our cart with non-name-brand things while uttering a half dozen “well, that’s different” under our breath, we get into the checkout line. Instead of pulling out our phones, we pull out his list and start reading, because he might notice and we want to make him feel good.

On the front: G-rated food jokes.

On the back: ways to save democracy and the Constitution, complete with progressive news sources, action steps, and phone numbers for elected officials.

“That guy has been here for hours,” the checkout clerk says. “I’ve been laughing at his silly jokes all day long. Best day ever!”

Our Minnesota Nice makes us come off to outsiders as a people too polite to push back, too pleasant to be dangerous. ICE didn’t realize the stubbornness that lives inside that kind of self-restraint. We are most certainly not a people to submit to an unreasonable demand.

ICE made the mistake of invading a winter people in the winter.

Read more

The World Needs Mothering Right Now

I got together with my friend Jeannie Ewing this week for a live conversation on her Substack publication, Ghost Mother, and we talked about how our culture is starving for the kind of love that mothering brings into the world, and the women (and men) who are showing up with that energy right now are the quiet heroes.

Jeannie and I have a maternal connection that goes both ways. She held space for me over Zoom during the worst of the ICE surge in Minnesota, when the trauma was so raw I could barely think straight. And I helped her see that her essay about ghost mothering could become an entire community. We mother each other. That is the whole point.

Documenting the Quiet Heroes

I shared with her audience how my work on Fierce Love has evolved into documenting the stories of everyday ordinary women who are stepping up as helpers in the midst of all this collective pain. Every Tuesday I publish one of their completed stories, and every day I share a small excerpt as a Substack note. These women are anonymous. They do not want attention. They just want their stories told so other people can remember what love looks like when everything feels like it is falling apart.

Mothering Energy in Unexpected Places

We talked about Senator Andy Kim from New Jersey, because his energy is such a clear example of what mothering looks like in a public figure. After January 6th, he was photographed alone on the Capitol floor in the middle of the night, picking up debris, cleaning up the mess. And this week, he stood between ICE officers in riot gear and protesters outside the Delaney Detention Center with his hands up, trying to de-escalate. That is mothering energy. That is someone saying, I love this space and these people, and I want us to figure out how to come together.

Collective Trauma and the Healing Power of Oxytocin

Jeannie and I went deep into what collective trauma is doing to all of us right now. She sees it in Indiana, in the faces and body language of people at the grocery store and the doctor’s office. I see it everywhere in Minnesota. There is a grief that hangs in the air, and it is weighing people down. And one of the most important things I have learned through interviewing the women for my book is that love and trauma can exist in the same moment, and the presence of love actually decreases the impact of the trauma on the body.

I brought up the research on oxytocin, the hormone that floods a mother’s body when she gives birth. The baby rips you open and then lands on your chest, and suddenly you feel nothing except this enormous wave of connection and euphoria. That oxytocin goes straight to everything that is broken and starts healing it. And it gets released when someone touches you, when someone speaks to you calmly, when someone simply says, I am here. Jeannie connected this to the work of Peter Levine, who wrote about how the presence of a calm, nurturing person at the moment of trauma can change whether someone develops PTSD or processes through it.

Julia’s Story

I told the story of a teacher I am calling Julia, who delivers mutual aid to families from her school in Minneapolis. One night during the surge, she arrived at an apartment just blocks from a shooting, and the mother she was delivering to was having a panic attack. The father had already been taken by ICE. Julia held this woman and told her that 200 people in the neighborhood had provided the food she was carrying. That many people love you. And the teacher told me afterward that she needed that connection as much as the mother did. Sitting with her for three hours every delivery was reminding her of how beautiful humanity can be.

Just Show Up

Jeannie closed by saying something I want everyone to hear. You are the essence of love and light, and it does not matter what your circumstances look like right now. You do not have to perform or have it all figured out. You can simply show up with an open heart, moment to moment, and respond from a place of goodness. That is fierce love. That is what mothering looks like when the whole world needs it.

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We Are Documenting History of the Ordinary People

A conversation with on Substack Live

Today I went live for the first time on Substack — and I did it with Jill Swenson, author of The Land of Everlasting Sky: A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods, which comes out June 2nd from She Writes Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster. Someone dropped Jill’s book in one of my comments and said, “You’ve got to meet Jill.” So I DM’d her. And an hour later, 35 people watched us have the kind of conversation I wish happened more often.

We connected because we are both documenting history of the ordinary people through some really significant historical times right now.

The History She Didn’t Know She’d Inherited

Jill’s book traces her journey back to her family’s roots in Warroad, Minnesota — where her Swedish immigrant great-grandparents homesteaded on land that had been part of the diminished Red Lake Reservation. As a kid, she met an Ojibwe medicine man named Kakagisik, and when she went back in 2014, she discovered a new Seven Clans casino was being built on the land that had been allotted to him. She didn’t understand the history she’d inherited, so she started learning. She met the great-grandson of Kakagisik and began hearing the stories of ordinary people and life that wasn’t written down anywhere.

When Jill first tried to share this story, the reaction was typical: “It’s in rural Minnesota. Doesn’t count. Flyover country. Who cares?” She also had to figure out why she cared so much — and that reckoning led her through her own grief, privilege, and a decade-long process of coming to terms with what it means to grow up white in a country built on stolen land. She told a story about how her parents tried to teach her privilege at the dinner table — eat everything on your plate, there are starving children in Korea — and she never thought those peas were privilege. It took her until recently to really understand how her life was relatively unobstructed because she was white.

“I Have Been Marjorie Taylor Greene”

Then Jill said she was watching Marjorie Taylor Greene yelling at President Biden and thought, “Oh my gosh, I have been Marjorie Taylor Greene.” She saw instantly how ineffective her own political protest had been. “That is not effective,” she said. “So I had to start thinking about what is effective.”

And that’s where our conversation caught fire.

OWLs, COWs, and Leveraging Privilege

The women I’ve been interviewing for the WOMN Project are calling themselves OWLs — Old White Ladies. Jill emailed me and said her group up in northwestern Minnesota calls themselves COWs — Changing Our Ways. And that is exactly it. We’re leveraging our privilege to change the ways of the world around us.

Jill described how her group has no problem calling up another white person to say, “What? Did I hear you correctly?” — using whiteness to call out whiteness so the onus doesn’t fall on the people being subjected to those comments. Her group has even created a monthly column in their local newspaper called “Towards a More Perfect Union,” because there are almost no local news outlets up there anymore. As Jill put it, “We’re not perfect yet. We know it. So what can we do to be working towards that more perfect union?”

Because We Can’t Not

I shared some of the stories from the WOMN Project — like Frances, the protest frog, who has a severe chronic health condition that has put her in the hospital five times since January. She gets out of the hospital and the first thing she does is text the signal chat of her ladies and say, “Where’s a protest I can go to?” She’s faced death in the eye many times and now she’s just like, “Fuck it, I’m going.”

And Kelly Wilson, the only non-anonymous woman in the book, who has raised $80,000 by herself — paying rents for 70 families, providing groceries, Easter baskets, supplies. She showed up the day after she got out of the hospital with pneumonia and sepsis.

It’s not just because we can. It’s because we can’t not. There’s something so in us that says this is the time to show up.

The Never Give Up Mentality

Jill drew the connection to Ukraine — this never give up mentality — and how she’s been reading and listening to stories of ordinary Ukrainians who stayed when the war came. “They weren’t rich people. They weren’t exceptional people. They were people who thought, okay, what do I do? Someone here immediately needs my help, and I help.” She sees that same mentality at work in Minnesota all the time, rooted in survival instinct. Your car doesn’t start in the parking lot? People help. You don’t have to worry you’re going to be stuck there.

Healing Through Connection

We talked about trauma, too — about Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands and how our entire nation is in trauma right now. About how human, heartful, loving connection in the midst of trauma lessens its long-term impact. About how the people coming out of Whipple Detention Center in Minneapolis are immediately received by Haven Watch, and how that act of receiving drastically reduces the chance of long-term PTSD. That’s scientifically, neurologically proven.

We need to keep having this conversation. We need to keep waking people up to the concept of being connected and speaking from community and serving from love and showing that the world needs to heal from this grief and this trauma — or we’re just going to keep perpetuating cruelty on each other. We need to find that mycelial network of community in everything we do and keep working towards that.

That’s Fierce Love.

Thanks for giving a shit. I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

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What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,

Pass it to the woman next to you.

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“Song is a vehicle for us to grieve.
It’s a vehicle for us to feel rage.
It’s a vehicle for us to strengthen ourselves.”

–Sarah, a Singing Resistance Organizer anonymously speaking to Anderson Cooper

Alice isn’t a crier.

She says she cried her well-of-tears dry during her divorce and hasn’t cried since. It’s been over a decade.

She didn’t even cry when Renee Good was shot. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t feel it. Not having tears isn’t exactly a good thing. Tears are one of the best and most natural ways for the human body to process grief. The shaking action of sobbing helps the nervous system expel the emotions, and the tears themselves push stress hormones out of the body as well. So, when one doesn’t have tears, processing grief becomes a challenge.

For Alice, she gets all the feelings of wanting to cry, but her body simply doesn’t respond in the natural grief-through-tears way. Instead, the salty tears quietly stream down her insides, stinging through her tear ducts, her sinuses, her throat, and right down into her heart where she feels a pressure squeeze that won’t release. She wishes for the wetness and shudders to express outward, but instead, they just burn through her insides.

This is what happened when Renee Good died.

Alice watched the video of Renee’s death, over and over again, begging for the tears to come. But instead she sat paralyzed by the pressure and the sting. That pressure lasted for days.

And then, January 11th, a few hundred people gathered at Renee’s Memorial in the Phillips neighborhood for a singing vigil. A call-and-response

This little light of mine…
I’m gonna let it shine…
Let it shine,
Let it shine,
Let it shine…

And Alice felt a single tear squeak out of her left eye and stream its way down her left cheek. It felt cool, and soft, refreshing even. She didn’t wipe it away. She just let it stream and air-dry, savoring the salty feeling of release.

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”
Isak Denisen

A week later, the singing movement had a name, The Singing Resistance, and hundreds of singers were gathering in the streets, walking and singing in call-and-response.

This is for our neighbors who are locked inside…
Together,
We will…
Abolish Ice…

Alice watched the videos on social media on repeat, and let the single slow-tears stream, one-at-a-time. She felt tiny little shudders of sobs. It was the one way she could feel release through the pain. Everything else in her life felt frozen by the ICE. But the warmth of the voices in these videos melted the paralysis she felt, in tiny bits.

Then, on January 23, clergy, labor organizers, and community leaders across the Twin Cities called for a statewide general strike, “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth & Freedom.” Across the metro, people stepped into the streets together to pray, march, and sing.

One of those events was a planned protest at MSP airport, where 109 clergy members and faith leaders staged a profound act of civil disobedience, knowing they would be arrested. They had a permit for a handful of protesters, and they showed up with thousands, purposely impeding airport function.

It was -30 degrees below windchill, and clergy and faith leaders of all ages kneeled on the hard cold pavement outside the airport, sweetly singing Amazing Grace as police officers kindly and gently, one-by-one, zip-tied them and escorted them to a bus under charges of disturbing the peace.

As Alice watched, her body erupted in full-body-ugly-cry sobs.

After over a decade of dryness, Alice ugly-cried for over 20-minutes. Tears gushed, and sobs gurgled, and she felt like her sternum unzipped and her heart turned inside out as it pushed itself outside her body. She didn’t recognize the sounds that emerged from her throat, wails and moans and guttural groans she’d never felt before, even in the worst of crying fits during her divorce.

Alice’s husband came running upstairs to see if she was okay. He wrapped his arms around her, not to take away or soothe the tears, but to support them, and encourage her to experience them.

While these were tears and sobs of grief, they sat together and relished in them.
It felt so damn good!

It didn’t just feel good because it had been so long. It was deeper than that.

The beautiful sweetness of the sound of human voices singing Amazing Grace, the vibration of sounds was so much more than a way to process grief. It generated a frequency of hope and love in a time when everything else in the world felt like evilness and pain.

The Singing Resistance was healing, on deep spiritual levels.

After 20-minutes an a half-dozen more plays of the video, Alice’s throat cleared enough for her to speak.

“I don’t even know what I’m feeling?” she looked up at her husband whose face was as wet and reddened as her own. “It’s like it all has been hurting so bad, that it’s such a relief to finally cry. But the music is just so beautiful! Am I crying for the beauty, or for the sadness?”

She heaved a big heavy inhale and continued.

“Or am I crying for the anger and rage I feel inside about all of this SHIT!” She pounded her fist into her leg, and her husband caught it before she could pound again.

She took another full inhale and spoke again.

“It’s just so fucking beautiful! That expression of LOVE! It’s so fucking beautiful!”

And then, out of nowhere, her shuddering sobs transformed into deep full belly laughs.

A month later, Amber invited Alice to attend a Singing Resistance event at the Central Park where Alice had experienced her own encounter with ICE.

Only Alice couldn’t sing.

Every time she opened her mouth to sing, a deep guttural frog-sob emerged instead.

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This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

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A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.” — Will Rogers

“Is this your first bridge brigade?” Amber says to the older gentleman standing next to her on a bridge overpass in Minneapolis.

He looked like a man who had been sent on a mission that he didn’t quite understand.

“Yeah. I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t exactly know what I’m doing.” He had thick hunting gloves, a bushy beard, an ear-flapped hat, and a simple NO KINGS sign written in thick black marker on the back of a poster for an unrelated event.

“Well, you look like you know what you’re doing. You at least dressed for the weather and the part.” Amber smiled warmly.

“My wife sent me. She says it’s important we be here, but it’s too cold for her.”

“Your wife is right. It is important…”

Before Amber could finish her sentence, three cars passed underneath them honking loudly, and the crowd cheered.

Over 150 bridge brigades from Duluth, Minnesota to Dallas, Texas participated in the #NOKINGSHighway Bridge Action during rush hour on Thursday, March 26, 2026. Organizers called I-35 “the spine of the Midwest” and wanted to connect the country as a warm-up for the massive No Kings rally planned for the following Saturday.

Amber was the reason this particular bridge was on the map for the event. She’d posted the location on the official Democracy Bridge Minneapolis website, promoted it, and invited everyone she knew.

But she didn’t know this little old man, and he looked like he didn’t know anyone there.

Amber was there with her adult-daughter Sasha, and her disabled son, Seth. Protest events had become a couple times a week family outing for them in recent weeks.

Seth stood like a statue in the wind with his LOVE CONQUERS HATE sign, too shy to speak to anyone except his sister and his mom, but displaying a smile that said he was proud to be there with everyone.

Protestors fanned out along both sides of the bridge so they could reach commuters heading in each direction. The day before had been seventy degrees and sunny, a classic Minnesota false spring, and now it was back to wet-chill cold. The wind held the protest signs flat against the fence, which meant the protesters just had to stand there and be present. Apparently Minnesota weather got Amber’s invitation and decided it was important to contribute.

The honks came in waves. Each one saying, I see you up there, and I’m with you, roughly twenty-five honks per minute. Someone counted, and calculated. That’s fifteen hundred in an hour. There was also an occasional middle finger stuck out a car window. Someone else counted those, about four total.

And then there were the semi trucks.

If you’ve ever been a child in the backseat of a car, you know the gesture: the arm-pump, the universal signal to truck drivers that means please, please honk your big beautiful horn. When a US Postal Service semi truck came onto the overpass, a kid started pumping his arm before any adult even registered what was happening.

The driver obliged.

A long, low, glorious HOOOOOONK bounced off every surface. The rumble vibrated the whole bridge, and a hundred people squealed like children and jumped up and down waving their signs, including the old man next to Amber.

“It’s almost like we are so warm that we’re melting the ice,” she says once the truck is gone and her voice could be heard.

The stoic old man smiled back at her.

“I’m glad I came.”

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This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

Good News: Mother’s Day Edition

Sunday, May 10, 2026

I spent yesterday with my mom.Today’s good news is a list of simple pleasures of being like-mother-like-daughter.

• Mom was in Arizona for the winter. I’m grateful she wasn’t here for the worst of the surge. She tells me she wishes she had been, to stand in solidarity.

• Mom wore a rebel loon sweatshirt she bought off Etsy, careful to make sure it was produced by a small Minnesota business.

• On the drive to Renee’s Memorial, she asked me about the legal cases stacking up against ICE. She wants to see justice.

• I introduced her to my friend, Stephanie, who is one of my local Fierce Love ladies who is up on all the things.

• I told her several of the stories I’m collecting about Minnesota WOMN in the Resistance.

  • The teacher who has come to know her student’s unique cries.

  • The mother who raised $84K for mutual aid by herself.

  • The “quarter fairy” who delivered rolls of quarters to immigrants in apartment buildings with coin-operated laundry.

• Mom is an expert in the women of the Bible. So we talked about the book I just read Separation of Church and Hate that details what Jesus actually teaches and how it doesn’t match what the Christian Nationalists are trying to do to this country.

• At Alex’s Memorial she stopped for extra long at the stethoscopes left by medical professionals.

• I pointed out one of the “ghost shoes” left around the city to represent all those who were taken.

• We talked about how Dad refuses to talk with us about politics, and continues to confuse us with his vote (which doesn’t match his values or behaviors).

• We got a donut at Glam Doll.

• We finished the day with a trip to the Tulip House, and she talked about how she grew up in South Minneapolis.

I hope, in whatever way you can today, you celebrate the WOMN in your world and the true meaning of Mothers’ Day (note the apostrophe placement).

If you haven’t read it yet, go see Heather Cox Richardson’s historical explanation of Mothers’ Day.

5/11/26

Good New: FireArms Legislation

Monday, May 11, 2026

Minnesotans have been fighting to change firearms legislation to protect our youth.

• On August 27, 2025 August 27, 2025, during a morning Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church and School connected to the first week of school two children, Fletcher Merkel (8) and Harper Moyski (10), were killed in a mass shooting, and many others were injured when the shooter fired through the church windows while students and parishioners were gathered inside.

• On May 4, state senators voted 34-33 to pass comprehensive gun safety bill banning assault-style rifles weapons and high-capacity magazines. This bill closes the ghost gun loophole and directs $20M into school safety and mental health resources. The bill now sits on Speaker Lisa Demuth’s (R) desk. She controls whether it goes to the House floor for a vote before the legislative session ends on May 17.

• In recent polling, the majority of Minnesotans support this bill. 51% of rural Minnesotans oppose, while 69% of urban residents support.

• One Senator who was resistant to banning firearms, Grand Hauschild of Hermantown, changed his mind because his cousin’s children were in Annunciation when the shooting occurred.

• Last September, Harper’s parents, Mike Moyski and Jackie Flavin, invited Lisa Demuth into their home. When they asked her “if the gun safety bill came to the House, would she block it from getting a floor vote?” She said yes. They have an email documenting her agreement.

• Lisa Demuth is now running for governor and has not responded to emails this week regarding the bill. Flavin has stated “Refusing to engage the bill while also offering no alternative path forward is not leadership.”

• This Mothers’ Day weekend, parents and students from Annunciation Catholic School stood on the street corners near their church holding signs asking passersby to honk their support.

• On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy held a press conference calling on the House to act on more than a dozen Senate-passed bills, including guns and ICE. She stated “We are ready to negotiate, and at times we’re not finding willing partners because they’ve not been able to do the work in the House.”

• Jackie Flavin is still writing emails.

If you live in Minnesota now is the time to contact your House representatives and pressure them to bring this legislation to a vote.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

GOOD NEWS: Minnesota ICE Legislation

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

• SF 3699 passed the Minnesota Senate 34–33, a one-vote margin that shows that Minnesota is a purple state that works closely across party lines to debate things carefully. Supporters, including senators like Ron Latz and Omar Fateh, say the bill is about making sure people can access school, health care, and the legal system safely. Opponents argued enforcement limits and the broader direction of state policy.

• The bill centers on what happens at “sensitive locations” like schools, hospitals, nursing homes, child care centers, and colleges—places where everyday life happens. SF 3699 would require a judicial warrant signed by a judge before immigration enforcement can enter those spaces, bringing court oversight into decisions that affect students, patients, and families. This part of the bill reinforces Constitutional rights.

• The bill also requires schools and hospitals across Minnesota to create clear, written policies for how to respond if immigration agents arrive, giving staff guidance instead of uncertainty. It includes provisions to ensure that administrators and legal counsel are notified when enforcement is attempted, adding structure and communication into high-pressure moments.

• Another section focuses on courts, aiming to limit civil immigration arrests around court proceedings so people can show up, testify, and participate without fear. This also reinforces Constitution rights to due process.

• Because the vote was so close, every single senator’s position mattered, showing a legislature where individual voices still carry real weight. The bill now moves to the Minnesota House, where it will be debated again, amended if needed, and either passed, changed, or reconciled before reaching the governor

This is what a functioning system looks like, both sides debating, arguing, and working together to discuss proposals openly.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

GOOD NEWS - How Mutual Aid Works in Minnesota

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Some people saw chaos this winter and froze. Some people saw chaos and started organizing grocery deliveries from their living room. Kelly Wilson turned grief into motion.

• Ten days before the election, Kelly lost her younger sister to aggressive kidney cancer. Days later, after the election, she decided: “When they take stuff away, you’re going to work really hard to give stuff back.”

• In November, Kelly organized a hoodie drive for unhoused LGBTQ youth in Minneapolis, raising roughly $1,000 in hoodies and another $1,000 in grocery gift cards before Thanksgiving.

• She created a Minnesota mutual aid group centered on “radical joy as resistance,” bringing together neighbors to support marginalized communities through direct action.

• Kelly helped organize weddings for 12 LGBTQ couples after posting a simple Facebook invitation asking friends to meet at a coffee shop and hear her idea. Eight people showed up. Within 24 hours, the group had a location and a Star Tribune interview lined up.

• During an earlier government shutdown, she organized a neighborhood bean drive for TSA workers impacted by SNAP disruptions.

• After hearing about a Honduran mother taken by ICE while breastfeeding her infant, Kelly mobilized her community to deliver food and supplies to the family within hours. Neighbors arrived at her door carrying Costco, Cub, and Target bags full of beans, rice, and groceries.

• Within 24 hours of posting a broader mutual aid request online, Kelly’s living room, dining room, and a neighbor’s garage were overflowing with donated food.

• During one subzero week, roughly 50 neighbors gathered in an unheated garage to pack more than 100 food boxes for families sheltering in place.

• Kelly and a network of volunteer drivers initially delivered about six food boxes a day. At peak periods, they reached as many as 12 households daily.

• As churches and larger organizations began handling food distribution, Kelly shifted focus toward rent support, diapers, formula, toddler snacks, and infant supplies.

• After Kelly posted an emotional video responding to violence in North Minneapolis, the video went viral, reaching roughly one million people in a day and growing her network from about 1,000 followers to more than 15,000.

• Donations poured in from around the country and the world. In roughly three weeks, Kelly’s grassroots effort raised more than $73,500 through direct giving.

• Kelly’s network has now helped 75 families, delivered more than 75 loads of groceries and supplies, and helped cover rent for 48 families through partial or full rent payments.

• One donor family repeatedly arrived with roughly $1,000 worth of Costco meat, milk, eggs, and cheese—supplies mutual aid groups often struggle most to provide.

• A donor connected through LGBTQ community networks quietly dropped off a $10,000 check after Kelly simply answered honestly when asked what was needed. That single donation helped cover rent support for 10 families.

• Kelly coordinated directly with social workers, schools, churches, and neighborhood organizers to respond rapidly to emergencies, including helping an 11th grader caring for younger siblings after their mother was hospitalized.

• People from outside Minnesota also reached out to help. One small town in Scotland offered to organize Zoom friendships for families isolated inside their homes during peak ICE activity.

Yesterday, Kelly received a message from a neighborhood elder, the kind you don’t say no to, requesting her presence on her front porch at 3:45pm. An elder Kelly doesn’t know well. Kelly went, and 10minutes after her arrival, nine other neighbors arrived. They were there to sing in her presence and bring healing. The video below is the result.

Minnesota is still being traumatized. We are grieving, and we are healing. All these things can happen at the same time.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

RAGE NEWS in Minnesota

I’m feeling angry this morning. And anger means action, which eventually leads to change.

Do people not care about dead children?

• On Monday I posted this Good News list about a gun violence bill passing the Minnesota Senate. It got the lowest engagement of any of my Good News lists ever. By a lot.

• The evenly split red/blue MN House passed a gun legislation bill that 80% of Minnesotans support.

• This legislation has been brought forth as a direct result of children dying in the Annunciation School and Church shooting in August in Minneapolis. The parents of the children who died invited elected officials from both sides of the aisle into their home to discuss this kind of action. The Speaker of the House, Lisa Demuth, promised these parents to bring the bill to the House. She has now put that bill in a drawer with no intention of fulfilling her promise to the parents of this child who died.

When mass shootings happened in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, similar legislation was passed, and the results of those laws changed history.

• Australia (1996, Port Arthur massacre, 35 killed) — within 12 days the government passed national reforms banning many semi-automatic weapons, creating a licensing system, and buying back 600,000+ guns, followed by decades with dramatically fewer gun deaths and no mass shooting at that scale

• New Zealand (2019, Christchurch mosque shootings, 51 killed) — within weeks the government banned military-style semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, created a national registry, and implemented a buyback, with near-unanimous parliamentary support

• United Kingdom (1996, Dunblane school shooting, 16 children and a teacher killed) — passed the Firearms Amendment Acts of 1997 banning most private handgun ownership, after which school shootings became extraordinarily rare.

If MN Representative and Speaker of the House, Lisa Demuth, doesn’t bring this bill to the House floor by 5pm tonight, members of MN Congress will be staging an all night sit-in. Anger means action. Minnesotans are angry about dead children.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

P.S. As a former high school teacher, I have attended way too many funerals for children in my life. One is too many. I’ve attended more than one. This issue cuts deep.

GOOD NEWS - Minnesotans are fighting for children’s rights to not die by guns.

Friday, May 15, 2026

The number one cause of death for children in the USA is gun violence. Minnesotans showed up en masse yesterday to simply ask the House of Representatives to have an honest debate about this issue and consider a bill that is similar to ones already passed in Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

• Thousands of Minnesotans signed petitions demanding a House vote on the gun violence prevention package. Advocates delivered more than 7,000–8,000 signatures directly to Speaker Lisa Demuth at the Capitol.

• Students from across Minnesota traveled to the Capitol and spent the day meeting lawmakers face-to-face, telling personal stories about lockdown drills, school shootings, and growing up under the shadow of gun violence.

• Families who have lost children to gun violence continued showing up with their grief, publicly week after week, including parents and survivors who have become some of the strongest voices pushing for action.

• Resistance singers and community choirs held a public “sing-in” at the Capitol, using collective singing as a form of witness and pressure during the gun safety push.

• Faith leaders and community members organized a public “pray-in,” bringing spiritual ritual and collective mourning into the Capitol alongside the legislative fight.

• Emergency room workers and medical professionals staged demonstrations showing the aftermath of gunshot trauma, using medical role-play and firsthand experience to communicate what firearm injuries actually do to human bodies.

• Minnesota House DFL members repeatedly asked from the House floor where the bill was and why it had not been scheduled, turning routine floor sessions into sustained public accountability moments.

• Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura publicly gave leadership a 24-hour deadline to bring the bill forward, then helped lead an overnight sit-in inside the House chamber after the procedural motion failed.

• Roughly 20 Democratic lawmakers stayed overnight in the House chamber after adjournment, physically occupying the space in protest and refusing to quietly let the issue disappear before session adjournment.

• Community organizers from groups including Protect Minnesota, Moms Demand Action, Students Demand Action, and GIFFORDS coordinated advocacy days, constituent outreach, Capitol gatherings, and sustained public pressure.

• Protesters gathered outside the House chamber chanting “Hold the vote,” turning the Capitol itself into a visible civic pressure point during the final days of session.

Look at this list. This all happened JUST YESTERDAY and is continuing today.

We just want the bill to have an opportunity to be discussed. It already passed in the Senate. We want the House to debate and vote on it.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

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Live Event Summary: The Portland-Minneapolis Connection — Fierce Love, OWLs, and the Power of Showing Up

This live conversation between Teri Leigh (Minneapolis) and Mel (Volcano, California — formerly Portland) explored the unexpected kinship between their two cities, the rise of older women in resistance movements, and what it looks like to lead with love instead of rage.

The Portland-Minneapolis Link Starts with George Floyd

The conversation opened with the question of how Portland and Minneapolis became so connected. Both agreed it began with the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement in Portland, including the formation of the Wall of Moms.

Mel shared her firsthand experience joining the Wall of Moms — a group of women, organized by Black activists, who stood arm-in-arm on the front lines outside the federal courthouse in Portland to create a human barrier against the National Guard. At 4’11” and in her late 50s, Mel showed up in a ski helmet, goggles, and a rain poncho. They were taught how to link arms, when to break and run from flash bangs, and to write an emergency phone number in Sharpie on their arms.

Mel described the experience as both empowering and traumatic — watching armed officers in riot gear just feet away while standing ground with strangers.

OWLs: Old White Ladies Stepping Into Their Power

Teri Leigh connected the Wall of Moms energy to what’s been happening in Minnesota, where older white women have been calling themselves OWLs — Old White Ladies — stepping into their privilege and using it for resistance. Key points included:

• Women over 50 who have reached the stage of “I have no more fucks to give” are showing up in ways that are uniquely powerful

• Their perceived invisibility as older women has become a kind of superpower — no one expects them, and that’s exactly why it works

• OWLs have been escorting school buses to protect families from ICE, protesting at the Whipple ICE headquarters, and writing their lawyers’ phone numbers on their arms

• Many have been detained and had wedding rings cut off, but none have been formally charged — which says everything about where the real power lies

The Frog, the Dildos, and the Absurdity of Resistance

One of the most vivid stories was about a 57-year-old Minnesota woman who, inspired by Portland’s protest frogs, showed up to the Whipple ICE headquarters in an inflatable frog costume. From inside the costume she witnessed a moment that captured the whole movement: an older woman standing toe-to-toe with a young ICE agent in bitter cold, their breath mingling, telling him gently that he didn’t have to do this — and watching a single tear fall from his eye.

Minneapolis then “upped the ante” with its own brand of creative resistance — throwing dildos at ICE vehicles, which became its own viral moment. Both women celebrated the role of humor and absurdity in resistance, noting that Portland brought the frogs, Minneapolis brought the dildos, and the silliness itself makes the point: this is how absurd things have gotten.

Resistance, Not Protest — Love Over Fear

A central theme was the intentional use of the word resist rather than protest:

• Resistance is a boundary, not an attack

• It’s holding love in place, not forcing opinions

• It’s “calling in” rather than “calling out”

• Both women emphasized that rage and “fuck you” energy, while understandable, doesn’t lead to peace or connection

Both women shared that they’ve moved through their own periods of anger and come out the other side — realizing that nobody is irredeemable and that the path forward has to include joy, humor, and love.

Fierce Love in Action

Mel shared how she’s now living fierce love daily in her tiny community of Fiddletown/Volcano, California — running a pop-up art gallery called Mel’s Messy Love Lab Live, doing community theater, and bringing strangers together over art-making. She also described her 52-week analog letter-writing practice: creating mixed media art while thinking about someone she loves, writing them a letter, and mailing it.

Teri Leigh announced that she’s expanding her WOMN (Women of the Resistance of Minnesota) project into a mixed digital media storytelling format — combining watercolor imagery with video narration of these women’s stories for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Substack.

The conversation closed with a shared conviction: the world needs these stories because the fierce love of old white ladies stepping into their power isn’t just a Minnesota thing — it’s a model for everywhere.

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Substack Live: Teri Leigh & Kristi Keller — Fierce Love, Rebranding, and the Women of Minnesota

Participants: Teri Leigh (Fierce Love, Minnesota) and Kristi Keller (Unstack Substack / Homebody-ish Magazine)

Teri’s Substack Publications

• Fierce Love, Minnesota — her main publication, focused on love, activism, and storytelling from the ground in Minnesota

• Creator Retreat — a cohort program helping people build their Substacks “the slow, gentle, sensitive soul way”

• Abundant Money Mindset — a cohort co-run with Axel Meyerhofer blending practical money management with mindset work

• The Hobbit and the Owl — a fun weekly publication she writes with her husband, Neal (”the Hobbit”), about being in a relationship

• Words or Spells — an alphabet-based publication exploring the energetic power of letters, winding down as she nears the end of the alphabet

Why Teri Rebranded (Mindful Sense Mentor → Fierce Love)

From December through mid-January, the ICE surge in Minnesota left Teri doom-scrolling, sheltering in place, and unable to write her usual mindfulness content — it all felt “frivolous” while people were being harmed on her streets. She couldn’t justify starting a sixth publication, and roughly 1,200 subscribers have followed her for 20+ years across every pivot — she couldn’t abandon them.

A Substack Note she posted about life on the ground in Minnesota went viral — 66,000+ likes, 6,000 new subscribers in three days — and the rebrand felt like something that “happened to her” rather than a deliberate decision. Having rebranded multiple times over 20 years of online business, the shift was natural and fast — done in just a few days, keeping her signature watercolor visual identity.

The WOMN Book Project

The title “WOMN” (Women of Minnesota) came to Teri in a middle-of-the-night download — “women” without the E, removing the “men,” with MN standing for Minnesota. The book collects stories of everyday Minnesota women — teachers, mothers, neighbors — who stepped up during the ICE crisis. One interviewee calls herself an “OWL” — an Old White Lady — a term Teri embraced since she’s always loved owls.

Stories from the Ground

• The first-grade teacher: Head of the teachers’ union, she watched her classroom get reorganized overnight after a school closure — no goodbyes for her six-year-olds. Teaching online from her classroom, she’d hear children crying on a bench outside her door and realized she could identify each child by the sound of their cry. After school, she delivered groceries to families and sat with isolated parents who told her, “You’re the only adult that comes to my door.” Her insight: “I show up because they need me, but I stay because I need them.”

• Dog walking and rescue: White women walking dogs for Black and Brown neighbors who couldn’t safely go outside, plus a whole dog rescue movement created for pets left behind by detained families

• The Quarter Fairy: A woman with no connection to a local school called asking how to help. The school said they needed quarters for coin-operated laundry in apartment buildings, since sheltering-in-place families couldn’t go out to get them. She went bank to bank collecting quarters.

• Confronting ICE: Women using their voices to confront ICE — and ICE literally walking away

• Teri’s own encounter: She froze when she encountered ICE while walking her dog, but says next time she’d film, call rapid response, and take down license plates

Kristi’s Role and the Value of “Custodial” Work

Teri credited Kristi extensively as the behind-the-scenes force who made her Substack work — organizing the Good News Lists into posts, implementing back-end changes, spotting patterns in metrics and comments. She compared Kristi’s work to her husband’s job as “custodian of websites” for the State of Minnesota and to the teacher tucking diapers into a kid’s backpack — quiet, essential, unsung labor that makes everything else function. Kristi expressed feeling disconnected from her own Substack work, wanting something “more human than shouting into the void.”

Vulnerability, Fear, and Defiance

Kristi asked if Teri felt vulnerable being so publicly vocal — Teri said every woman she’s interviewed has said the same thing: “I don’t care. If they’re going to come for me, come for me.” White women who’ve been detained and arrested have had their charges dropped and say it was worth it to amplify what’s happening. Both women identify as introverts and “keyboard activists” — not the type to physically protest, but committed to telling stories and raising awareness through writing.

Broader Themes

• The disorienting compression and expansion of time (”time is accordion”) — four months feeling like four years

• The contrast between Substack’s supportive, love-centered community and the toxicity of Facebook (Teri cross-posted her viral note to Facebook and was immediately overwhelmed by trolls)

• Declining international travel, airline safety concerns, and the ripple effects of the political climate on everyday life

• The tension between technology/AI and humanity — Teri noted that dramatic inhumanity draws out even fiercer human love and connection

• Loyal Substack supporters who restack everything were celebrated — the “quiet amplifiers” who spread the word

Closing

77 viewers at peak — Teri’s highest in a long time. Both expressed love for their friendship forged over two and a half years on Substack, with Teri saying, “Someday I will hug you in person when all this is over and we can actually cross the Canada border again.”

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What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,

Pass it to the woman next to you.

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Go Home ICE

Grand Casino Arena called for a moment of silence to honor the life of Alex Pretti.

Minnesota couldn’t just be “Nice” anymore. We chanted instead.

GO HOME, ICE!
GO HOME, ICE!
GO HOME, ICE!
GO HOME, ICE!

It was January 25, 2026, one day after Alex Pretti was shot ten times in the streets of Minneapolis, the second brutal murder by ICE.

MN Frost professional women’s hockey games are usually family-friendly events, a popular father-daughter outing for pre-teen girls to feel empowered. We should have been celebrating our team, two-time league champions, gearing up to send six players to the Winter Olympics in Italy.

We were too angry to sit in silence. Moments later, during the national anthem, we decided we could, in fact, be silent, and we sat down in protest.

“I love watching how Minnesota expresses their anger,” Emma says to the woman next to her as they watched a woman on the JumboTron wearing a Rebel Loon Frost jersey dance while lifting her middle finger and clearly saying “Fuck Ice.”

The camera quickly turned off, and the JumboTron replaced her image with their official Code of Conduct.

Alex Pretti’s death pulled the f-word of the tongue of Minnesota-Nice.

“We are so fucking reserved,” Emma’s eyes twinkled as she said the word fucking, as if she had only recently given herself permission to say it out loud.

“Not anymore!” the woman next to her says motioning to the fans clapping and chanting FUCK ICE as if the Code of Conduct was a challenge.

Dildos & Baloney

“Did you see that reel of the woman taunting the Fox News reporter at Whipple?” Emma asked, “She danced around him singing ‘I’m a big tough guy…I’m such a big tall strong tough guy.’”

“Yup. And the dildos?” the woman laughs.

“Oh my God. The dildos! We’re funny. We’re funny and creative. Let’s throw dildos and let’s throw baloney. That’s funny. And we’re not shooting guns—we’re throwing dildos and baloney.”

This is not how Minnesotans are supposed to behave. We are not a dildos-at-federal-agents people. At least we didn’t use to be. We were a hotdish-at-church-basement people. But the old rules weren’t working anymore, and the absurdity of the moment demanded an absurd response.

Once absurdity was allowed, creativity poured through the crack.

When ICE started patrolling our streets, the Smitten Kitten got mad, and their form of mad showed up as mutual-aid-married-expressionism and had a nonbinary baby. The Smitten Kitten, a progressive, sex-positive adult toy store that has been quietly serving the community for years with the warmth of a neighborhood bookshop and the inventory of, well, not a bookshop, gave us permission to be weird in public. They organized. They donated. They went viral on Instagram, and yes, they taught us how to attach freak flags to our protest signs.

And yes, they supplied the dildos.

“I’m proud of us,” the woman agrees.

“I have so much Minnesota pride. Don’t attack winter people in the winter. That huge protest when it was negative bajillion degrees out. Thinking of creative ways—the Singing Resistance, all the things—to continue the fight and hopefully inspire the country. We’re so fucking creative!” Emma’s eyes twinkle again, only brighter this time, as if using the word fucking is a super power she’s recently discovered.

The Rebel Loon

“Yeah! We are fucking creative!” The woman says, “Speaking of creative, I like your earrings,” she points the rebel loons dangling from Emma’s ears.

The Rebel Loon seemed to appear overnight, building momentum for Minnesota in ways we couldn’t have planned, but sorely needed. We were in the midst of a rebellion, and we are not a rebellious people. The simple design of Minnesota’s state bird rising into the shape of the Star Wars Rebel Alliance took on a life of its own when “feral_user,” a Moorhead web developer named Bernardo Anderson, shared it openly for anyone to use.

“Wearing these is a form of micro-activism.” Emma said, “I get excited when I see someone wearing a loon. It builds momentum.”

The Rebel Loon moved rapidly through social media feeds, the same way mutual aid and rapid response moved, passed along, neighbor to neighbor. Within weeks, it was everywhere, including a limited edition run of the MN Frost jersey.

“Those new rebel loon jerseys are only $60, and the proceeds go to mutual aid,” the woman tells Emma, and shows her where to get one for herself.

During nesting season, loons have the water, and eagles have the sky. The loon doesn’t meet her prey head-on. She disappears, underwater. And when she comes back up, she knows exactly where she is, driving off her opponent, the bald eagle, our federal government, again and again.

“I have a loon tattoo,” Emma tells the woman. “I’ve had it for two years, but now I feel prouder to have it. I feel prouder to have it tattooed on me.”

When Emma puts on her resistance loon earrings and her new loon Frost jersey, she doesn’t have to explain who she is. She doesn’t have to say anything out loud. . . She can just wear it.

To Emma, microactivism is wearing things to quietly make a loud statement.

She used to coach a hockey team, and had the opportunity to go to Washington DC to meet Senator Amy Klobuchar. Everyone was supposed to wear matching team sweatshirts for the event. But Emma wore a shirt that read “Racism and misogyny are injustices to all.”

“I don’t want to be the one following ICE. I don’t want to get blown in the head with a gas canister. What I can do is wear my activism.” Emma says. As a social worker who works in the ER where ICE brings protesters they’ve arrested and assaulted, she knows too well the personal consequences of that kind of resistance.

“I don’t want to be a soldier, and I felt kind of bad about that for a while because I’m an able-bodied white person that’s young and healthy that could have been out there.”

Emma has friends who are on the front lines, in the rapid response networks, chasing the ICE caravans and putting their privileged whiteness between ICE and our immigrant neighbors.

“There are people that can be on the front lines, that want to be out there, and that’s great. And sure, I’ll wear a whistle around my neck.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to see anyone,” she says. “But if I do, I’m ready, and it shows community support. And whenever I see someone walking with a whistle around their neck, it’s like — okay, yes. We have community here. Everyone’s looking out. We’re on the same page.”

The woman pulls a whistle out from under her turtleneck and winks at Emma.

Red Resistance Hats

“I can’t imagine myself on the front lines either, but I can crochet” the woman adds, motioning to the crowd, “Look at all those red resistance caps!”

In just a matter of weeks, women across the globe gathered in knitting circles to click-click-clack their needles. The red hat resistance started when Paul Neary and Gilah Mashaal, owners of Needle & Skein, a knitting store in St. Louis Park MN, reached back into WWII Norway and revived the nisselue, a simple red hat once worn under Nazi occupation. They sold their simple pattern for $5, went viral, and raised over $700,000 for mutual aid in under two months. The hats aren’t mass produced. Each one is handmade by mothers, grandmothers, aunts, friends, fathers, neighbors. The pattern reached more than 43 countries.

“I’ve made a crochet pattern with the Rebel Loon with laser eyes.”

“That’s super cool. Can I get a copy?”

“Of course.”

“My name’s Emma, by the way.”

“I’m Kim. It’s nice to know you, Emma.”

“I like that. It’s nice to know you too, Kim.”

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This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

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Good News - Sports Edition

Sunday, May 3, 2026

After a really tough winter, we are now looking into spring and craving some JOY! Minnesota knows how to lose. Our beloved Vikings has never won a SuperBowl, but we keep getting close. And still, we show up. We are l…

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