Fierce Love

Fierce Love is a community space where we process the joys and the griefs, the beauties and the horrors, the passions and the rages of being human. . . all through the lens of love that is un-ending, ever-growing, and all-nourishing.

This community started as a safe space for sensitive souls, the over-feelers, and the meaning-seekers, to be weird and awkward and accepted and loved. We are the ones who need to leave parties early, but also hold vigil for strangers after everyone else has gone home.

During the winter of 2025/2026, when Operation Metro Surge arrived in Minnesota, something deep and permanent shifted for us at the bone-marrow level. We sensitive souls were called forward to serve. Our finely-tuned nervous systems are precisely the instrument the world needs right now.

And the WOMN of Minnesota are showing us the way.

I have interviewed eleven of the women of the resistance here in Minnesota and am working my way through writing their stories to publish here and in a fully compiled book.

This publication is the home for that unfolding. I’m posting excerpts from the WOMN interviews, pieces of the book as it takes shape, and the living conversation growing around it. This space is also for the deeper currents moving underneath these stories: grief, courage, service, tenderness, rage, community, and the ways we are being changed at the core.

I didn’t go looking for this project.

After Renee Good died, I lost myself. For weeks, everything felt frivolous and pointless in light of the horrors happening on the streets of my home state. Then, Alex Pretti died, and I picked up my pen to write about the helpers and the good things growing out of this tragedy.

Writing helped, but I needed more to feel whole again. Because writing is a lonely venture, and healing happens in community. I needed to be in a room where the grief had voices other than my own.

So I put out a quiet little call on Substack Notes, offering to create a space for sensitive soul Minnesota women to gather. And in true Minnesota fashion, they showed up. We sat in circle and poured our hearts on the ottoman between us in my living room.

And I kept thinking, I need to write these stories.

Over the past several weeks, I met with them one by one. I turned on a recorder and asked them four questions:

What encounters with ICE and the surge have you had?

How are you showing up to serve?

Who were you before all this happened?

How did this change you at your core?

What I found is that no WOMN is ordinary.
Every WOMN is extraordinary.

WOMN

These stories are written with anonymous first name pseudonyms because every women is phenomenal (thank you Maya Angelou). She is you. She is your mother. She is your neighbor and your third grade teacher and the stranger you locked eyes with at a protest.

These stories are the pure, unfiltered, human truth of what these women experienced, survived, and became.

• A woman who was physically assaulted by an ICE agent in a Target parking lot and found the only tool she had left was her voice — and it was enough.

• A green card holder from Europe who puts on a reflective to make sure immigrant children get to school safely, and organizes bridge brigades on the front lines.

• A woman whose fiancé was deported to Mexico, and now knows what tear-gas feels like.

• A protest frog — and the things she witnessed from inside her costume at protests at the Whipple Federal Building. The best of humanity and the worst of it.

• A woman whose MAGA family rejected her trans child, and who found her way to something bigger than herself through resistance action.

• A VA nurse who lives between Renee’s and Alex’s two memorial sites and sees herself in both of the people they honor.

• A Jewish mother who has no more fucks to give and calls her resistance her sacred obligation to repair the world.

• A woman who works with a team to bring home detainees released from detention centers in Texas back home to Minnesota.

• An ER social worker who watched the injuries come through her hospital doors and heard the explanations that didn’t match them.

• A mutual aid master who raised over $75,000 and paid more than fifty rents for families in need out of her tiny South Minneapolis home.

• An elder care nursing aide who started showing up at the Whipple Federal Building to yell at ICE because the grief had nowhere else to go, and it turned out that was exactly the group therapy she needed.

Every Tuesday, I’ll share a new piece of this work here on Fierce Love. Sometimes that will be an excerpt from one woman’s story. Sometimes it will be a reflection on what I am learning as I listen. Sometimes it will be an update on where the book is headed, what is growing around it, and how this community will help carry it into the world.

A grassroots mutual aid healing project

This is not just a book.
It is a healing movement.

My vision is for Fierce Love to grow into a community space where we share our truths about what we have lived. I hope our comments section becomes part witness-space, part story-circle, part gathering-ground. I want people to read these excerpts and feel their own memories rise up, and to spill those stories here too as a way of holding, bearing witness, honoring, and recognizing each other in love.

Fierce Love is more than a publication. It is more than words on a screen. We have community gatherings, on Zoom and in person. We hold grief rituals, and healing circles, and storytelling campfires. This is a place where story becomes medicine because it is spoken out loud and received by others with care.

And when WOMN, the book, is ready to come into the world, I want it to move the way this whole project has moved so far: through community, through grassroots mutual aid, through women and neighbors and readers carrying it forward because they believe in what it is making possible.

I want to take this work on the road to independent bookstores and community spaces for gatherings that feel human and alive. I envision something more communal than book signings. I imagine open mic storytelling that serves as healing grief circles. I can read an excerpt to open the room, and then we gather as shared witnesses, tending to our grief and growing our love through connection.

This isn’t my book or my project. It’s ours. This is a shared endeavor, a living act of community. Fierce Love is a movement of loving neighbors telling the truth, bearing witness, and creating spaces where healing and organizing can happen side by side.

The women of Minnesota showed us what that looks like during the surge.
I want this project to carry that same spirit.

I want us to make something together that helps people feel held, and helps them find each other, and helps them imagine what becomes possible when story is sacred and community is medicine.

Why

Because these women and their stories deserve to be witnessed.

Because grief and pain this huge need somewhere to go.

Because what happened in Minnesota changed us at the core, and I do not want that truth flattened into headlines, or lost to time, or swallowed by the churn of the next terrible thing.

Because Operation Metro Surge split us open, and what came out was rage, courage, tenderness, humor, devotion, resourcefulness, and the bright light of Fierce Love.

And that is worth keeping, and growing, and passing from hand to hand.

This is where I begin.

The first excerpt posts next Tuesday. It’s a hard one, and it is worth every word.

If you see yourself in these pages, pass it to the soul next to you.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Fierce Love is a community space, and your voice belongs here as much as any story I publish. Tell me in the comments — what does WOMN stir in you before you’ve even read a word of it? I’m listening. We all are.

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Minnesota’s Skyway System

Minnesota has miles of enclosed elevated walkways connecting buildings one floor above the street grid. You can meet your friend who works on the other side of downtown for lunch and a stroll through a bookstore three blocks away and get back to your office in time for a 2pm meeting without ever stepping outside.

During Operation Metro Storm, we expanded our skyway system into an invisible architecture of rapid response and mutual aid networks across the entire metro area.

Now the ice is melting, and we are walking outside again.

And we still use the skyways, both the physical 2nd floor walkways and the invisible community networks we’ve built.

They serve as bridges to heart-full connections we didn’t have before. Now that they are built, and we’ve experienced the magick of their warmth, we will use them and maintain them and support them and sustain them just like we do the physical ones in our downtowns.

Now that most of the ICE has melted, Minnesota leads the way to healing by bridging the division that disrupted our winter.

On March 28th, the day of the No Kings 3 flagship rally in St. Paul Minnesota, nearly every overpass bridge across the major highways of the Twin Cities had dozens of people gleefully dancing in the glitter-bombs of honking cars passing below.

This event was so massive that we cannot count the numbers in attendance any more than we can calculate the amount of love poured into the rapid response and mutual aid networks that is now a staple of Minnesota culture.

Let’s stop trying to count what cannot be counted.

Instead, let’s start asking what it means.

I think it means we are tipping an iceberg.

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The Collective Consciousness of Intention

A crowd of people holding love is neurologically contagious. Imagine what 3300 crowds of people at the No Kings rallies can do with that contagious energy.

Mirror Neurons are a specialized network of cells whose entire job is to feel what other people feel. When you watch someone in pain, your pain centers light up. When you watch someone laugh, your laugh centers fire. When you stand in a crowd of a hundred thousand people, or watch them on a livestream from your couch, your nervous system doesn’t know the difference. It just joins the frequency. Émile Durkheim called it Collective Effervescence, the documented psychological phenomenon of feeling larger than yourself inside a crowd of shared purpose. It reduces anxiety, increases meaning, and rewires the brain’s sense of isolation at the cellular level.

The HeartMath Institute calls it heart coherence. When people synchronize their emotional states through shared intention, music, prayer, and/or collective breath, their electromagnetic fields begin to overlap. Your heart generates an electromagnetic field that extends several feet outside your body. I know this because I literally see it…in human auric fields.

Now multiply that by millions of people standing in the same intention across 50 states and 16 countries on the same afternoon. Let me tell you, what I saw in St Paul that day was beyond any kind of synchronized energy I have ever witnessed in my life.

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The Tim Walz Word-Spell That Reversed the Curse

With the mirror neurons, overlapping heart fields, and the collective effervescence humming, Tim Walz walked onstage in flannel and opened his mouth to cast a word-spell on the world.

“Welcome to the freest state in the nation.

Tim opened the collective arms of Minnesota by claiming the energy of the word FREE, the root word of what the United States of America was founded to be, Free.

And then, he wrapped the arms of Minnesota around everyone in a giant bear hug.

“A state where you love who you choose to love. A state where you make your healthcare decisions. A state where you worship or not according to your own beliefs. And maybe most importantly — a state where everyone belongs.”

Everyone Belongs.

Research consistently shows that chronic loneliness activates the same pain centers in the brain as physical injury. The feeling of not belonging, of being invisible, of being told you don’t fit, genuinely hurts the human body. What we experienced here in Minnesota was a double-hit, because we were told that we don’t belong AND we were physically harmed with that message.

In three short sentences, Walz named every kind of person who has ever been made to feel like they didn’t fit, essentially every human soul.

The arms he opened wide with the word “free” wrapped gently around everyone who needed to hear him say “you belong here”.

Any good hug has a squeeze, a good long solid holding squeeze.

It was YOU Minnesota who stood up for your neighbors, who stood up for decency, who stood up for kindness. . . It was Minnesota who said not on our watch. . .

You are the heart and soul of what the nation saw. . .

Our weather may be a little cool, but our people are warm and we’re FIERCE.

“Don’t ever mistake our kindness for weakness.”

Walz offered that squeeze by affirming the strength we hold as a community in our fierce commitment to compassion and kindness.

And any healing embrace offers healing by holding the pain.

“We demand justice for Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We demand justice for every single person who was hurt or traumatized. We will never forget what they did here.”

In naming our pain, Walz invited us all to link arms together as a human shield made of memory and love and the absolute refusal to forget.

“I have a message to our immigrant community here in Minnesota. You are seen, heard, valued, and loved. You add value to our state. You are part of the fabric of what is good about Minnesota.”

Walz made sure everyone inside the human shield embrace knew they were included in it by returning to the universal theme of belonging. When he spoke of being seen, heard, valued, and loved, he spoke directly to our immigrants, and collectively to every human soul in the world, inviting all of humanity to embrace his message that kindness is strength.

“They call us radicals. You’re damn right we’ve been radicalized — radicalized by compassion, radicalized by decency, radicalized by due process, radicalized by democracy.”

And then, from that foundation of freedom, belonging, fierce kindness, and shared grief, he did the most powerful thing you can do with a curse. He caught the curse mid-air, turned it over in his hands, and he flipped it. Instead of arguing with the word radicalized, he owned it and claimed its power.

Five times he repeated it, like an incantation, the refrain of a resistance song. He took a word designed to frighten and filled it with five times the gentlest, most principled values in human civic life. By the fifth repetition the word didn’t mean what it meant before.

That is how you break a curse.
You don’t fight it.
You alchemize it.

Now We Cross

We have done something extraordinary. We have held each other through the coldest winter. We know what we are made of now. We have proven it to ourselves and to the world.

And we ask ourselves, what’s next?
Because we can’t stop now.

But right now, a lot of us are still walking backward — calling out kings, naming wars, chanting about ICE — with our eyes fixed on everything we are against and trying to walk away from.

Your nervous system does not process negation. It goes where the words point.

Every time we say no kings, our mirror neurons light up around kings. Every time we chant no wars, we are rehearsing war. Every time we name ICE as the thing we are fighting, we are feeding the field with ICE.

We needed that rage as a force to get us out of the freeze stress response. The anger is clean and clarifying, and it got us here. It got us to the middle of the bridge.

But now, we need to put down the hate.

I invite you to leave it here as an offering in the middle of the bridge.

The opposite of Love is not hate. Hate is still attention. Hate is still energy flowing toward the thing you are naming. And we have given these kings and their cruelty so much of our attention, our language, our signs, our chants, our collective field — and they have fed on every bit of it.

You do not tip the iceberg by adding more weight, attention, and energy to the side you are fighting and fleeing. You tip the iceberg by turning toward each other and moving forward to what you want to embrace. In spouting “No Kings, No Wars, No ICE” we have been adding weight to the wrong side by focusing on the hate.

We need to put it down. Leave it here.

The opposite of love is indifference.
We need to turn our backs on the kings and the wars and the ice and walk away, with indifference.

We need to turn our focus and our bodies to the other side of the bridge.
To the land we haven’t walked before.

And now we have enough volume to change the frequency.

So here is the invitation, offered with both arms open in a full-hearted embrace. Let’s put the full force of this collective effervescence towards Fierce Loving Kindness.

Let me be clear.
This is advanced activism.

We have enough people, enough bridges, enough honks, enough overlapping heart fields, and enough fierce love to tip this iceberg.

The sun is ahead of us.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

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Fierce Love Merchandise Now Available

on the Waking Dragons Etsy Shop

I have partnered with of Waking Dragons to offer Fierce Love t-shirts, yard flags, magnets, stickers, mugs, and more. 50% of all profits will be donated to Kelly Wilson’s mutual aid network, providing food, rent assistance, and baby needs to families in Minnesota directly affected by Operation Metro Surge.

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Back in January, I wrote about my own ICE encounter, before I started interviewing women for my book about the WOMN of the Resistance. It changed me at depth, turning me into an activist. I wanted to share it again here, with that deeper layer of awareness.

THE FROZEN PLACE

On January 7 2026, the earth cracked underneath me, as it did for everyone in Minnesota.

Bam. Bam.

Bam.

Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good three times, and I watched it on a FB video just minutes after it happened.

I lost my breath, and my words.

I know the date because I wrote it down at the top of my journal, and that page in the book stays blank.

My computer cursor blinked at me from my screen for days. Everything I wrote felt frivolous, pointless, pathetic in the face of what was happening in my hometown.

I usually write about learning to breathe, and working through life’s challenges by feeling the feels in the body. But I couldn’t move this giant knot that lodged in my gut, and my throat, and my knees. I could not move the heavy weights that had become my feet.

I felt small and stupid and afraid.

I am a highly sensitive person. I have spent decades tuning the synesthetic orchestra that is my nervous system. And that one moment short-circuited everything. As someone who usually feels and sees and smells the world in technicolor fragrances and symphonies, all I registered for days was a screeching tinnitus of white noise static.

But my dog still needed to be walked. My clients still needed to be heard. My programs still needed to be promoted. My sourdough still needed feeding. So, I went on auto-pilot.

But something was coming.
I didn’t know it yet.

It arrived, January 19th, in a parking lot at sunrise in -4F degrees.

THE ENCOUNTER

It was a Monday.

Tosha started barking as soon as we pulled up to our usual spot. There was a tightness in her voice I’d never heard before.

Eight ICE vehicles, a dark green Jeep, several black SUVs, and a grey pickup truck, had backed themselves into parking spaces at angles, taking up two or three spots per vehicle. Lights off, no license plates, engines idling in the early morning moonlight.

As soon as I parked, they pulled out, in formation, and drove behind me and exited the parking lot. Tosha stopped barking, and I exhaled a deep sigh.

I called my husband. If something happened, he needed to know.

A little older man in a reflective vest and neon yellow hat climbed out of a bright blue VW parked near the entrance of the lot and started walking the perimeter. A legal observer, trained to bear witness, to hold space, and to not put himself in the way. He walked slowly, steadily, a full loop of the lot before Jo arrived.

As Jo pulled into the parking lot with her husky/shepherd, Frank, the ICE vehicles followed behind her, all of eight of them. They circled the lot, and parked just as they had been before.

Frank bounded out of Jo’s car, and I was more grateful for his husky-shepherd energy than I had ever been before.

“ICE,” I said, nodding to the vehicles.

“Let’s do the short loop today,” Jo said. We barely spoke the rest of the walk. But we silently agreed, ICE wasn’t going to stop us from living our lives, and we weren’t gonna give them any reason to come after us.

Fifteen minutes later, the six vehicles parked in our aisle pulled out one behind the other. We stepped off onto the snowbank to let them pass.

The rumble of their engines activated my tinnitus into a penetrating squeal. As they approached, driving slower than a walking pace, the vibration peeled off my defense layers, like pulling scar tissue skin from a burn. This is what it’s like to be a highly sensitive person in the middle of a threat. Every sense glitches out at once.

I couldn’t see their eyes or bodies through the darkened windows. On a normal day, I would read body language, facial expressions, auras so I could de-escalate. But I wasn’t dealing with human bodies. . . these were machines, staring me down with headlights in the early morning moonlight.

So I took a cue from Mr. Reflective Vest. I stood tall. I breathed. Mountain pose at minus four degrees on a snowbank with my friend and our dogs. One by one, as they passed, they sped up and looped the lot and re-parked, spreading themselves across three spaces each.

Their message was clear. You’d better behave. And we don’t give a fuck about your dogs.

As we drove out of the parking lot, the little man in the reflective vest got back into his bright blue VW. I sent him a silent thank you as I drove by.

I drove home in silence, thinking to myself, “I am a white woman. I am fully aware of my privilege. This encounter is minor.”

On the drive home, I noticed more reflective vests: a woman wearing a teddy-bear ear ski-cap at the bus stop. A man in a unicorn onesie and a reflective vest at the school crossing zone. A woman with a red-resistance cap at a busy intersection.

In time, I came to realize that the reflective vests far-outnumber the ICE agents.

THE WITNESS ACCUMULATES

I went home and I watched video after video. New ones each day. Old ones recycling with new angles and viewpoints.

I watched them drag a pregnant woman through icy pavement. I watched them hold a man down and spray tear gas directly into his face. I watched them use chemical weapons on an entire North Minneapolis neighborhood sending a family of six children, including a six-month-old went to the hospital. I watched them march a Hmong elder out of his home in his underwear and a blanket.

Every time I thought, it cannot get worse than this.

It kept getting worse.

And the worse it got, the more reflective vests appeared, and more protesters took to the streets, the more helpers offered mutual aid.

And then, on January 21st, the crack under my feet opened up, and I willingly stepped into the hole. I became an activist myself.

As part of a General Strike, no school, no work, no shopping, seventy-five thousand people showed up to the ICEOUT protest marching the streets of downtown Minneapolis in minus twenty degree windchill. I agreed to host a Buddhist Chaplain from Virginia, a man I’d never met in person, so he could participate.

Making up the guest bed for one of the protestors felt like the most important thing I had done in weeks. It was my version of Mr. Reflective Vest’s slow steady loop. With my sensitivities, I couldn’t march with a loud crowd. But I could offer a safe home to someone who could.

Clergy and faith-leaders led resistance actions at the airport, at Renee Good’s memorial, at Target Corporate headquarters, and in smaller venues around the entire metro area. I drove my house-guest to his events, prayed for his safe return, and picked him up at the end of the day.

He told me about 109 clergy and faith leaders at the airport. I pulled up the videos of pastors, rabbis, imams, monks kneeling on concrete in the cold, singing Amazing Grace, as they got arrested one by one. They had a permit for 55 people. They brought 5,000. They knew what they were doing.

In order for protest and civil disobedience to work, it has to be uncomfortable. These people had chosen to be uncomfortable on purpose, in public, on behalf of humanity.

I sobbed a big ugly wet and slobbery wailing cry, emoting sounds I didn’t recognize coming out of myself.

The next day, January 24th, Alex Pretti died.
And I watched it on a FB feed just minutes after it happened.

A guttural explosion of sobs that mixed laughter-like squeals with ear-drum piercing screeches with deep gut-rumbling groans gurgled out of me for more than twenty minutes. It wasn’t just grief for Alex. It was everything — Renee, the pregnant woman, the Hmong elder, the parking lot, the ten days of frozen silence, everything, all at once.

THE AWAKENING

On January 26, I remembered the words of Mr. Rogers. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

My cursor stopped blinking that day. I started writing about the good things happening in Minnesota as a result of all this violence and pain and cruelty. I wrote about the reflective vests, the donut shop turned warming house, the tattoo studio raising $22K in a single day flash sale, the sex-toy store repurposing as a mutual aid donation center. Because the helpers need to be witnessed more than the violence.

I had to find my lane, my way of supporting the resistance, my way of helping.

My lane is lined with words.

Cuz words are spells. . . that’s why we call it spelling.

Every word I choose is charming an energy for the world, my effort to shift a frequency, to soothe a nervous system, to adjust the narrative.

The power I found in my pen is something I didn’t know I had in me, activism. Or perhaps a better word is alive-ism.

Now, I am writing a book.

It grew the way the mutual aid networks grew out of the crisis — organically, necessarily, because the moment demanded it. I am conducting anonymous interviews with the everyday women of Minnesota who are living inside this resistance.

I expected a rabbit-hole venture through grief. But what I am finding in the layers of these interviews is far louder and more hopeful than grief. It is a fierce love for humanity.

I have watched Minnesota become a living, breathing, mycelial network of people choosing each other, again and again, in the cold.

THE REFLECTION

There is a man I think about often. I don’t know his name.

He was wearing a neon yellow hat and a reflective vest on a Monday morning in January, walking steady circles around a parking lot at sunrise, in the cold, making sure I didn’t feel alone.

I didn’t know it then, but in a few short days, I would become him, putting on my own reflective vest for others.

My words– every essay, every note, every good-news dispatch, are the luminaries shining along the path from a state that is bruised and burning yet still bringing hotdish to the neighbors.

When ICE stared me down with their headlights and told me I was small, I got BRIGHT.

summary written by claude.ai

How We Both Unfroze

Sean is a salesman from Delano, a self-described non-writer who started posting daily news roundups on Facebook after the death of Alex Pretti shook him to his core. Sean and his kids climb at Vertical Endeavors — kitty corner from Glamdoll — and if his son hadn’t had a one-act competition that morning, they would have been right there at the time Alex died.

Same thing happened to me. I talk about it in this video — the freeze. The doomscrolling. The way Renee Good’s death hit me and I just... stopped. I live two miles from the State Capitol and I couldn’t function. Then on January 20th, ICE pestered me with their vehicles in the parking lot of my dog park — eight SUVs lighting me up with their brights while I stood in a snowbank with my dog.

For both of us, the turning point wasn’t rage alone — it was finding the helpers.

• Sean started compiling real news for out-of-state friends who thought Minneapolis was still on fire from 2020

• I wrote my first viral post by looking for every story of goodness that emerged from the chaos — Glamdoll turning their donut shop into a medic center, the 70yo bookstore owner emerging from the tear gas cloud

• Fred Rogers was right: Look for the helpers. It saved us both

What It Has Given Us

• Community. Sean’s Facebook followers feel like family to him. He reads every comment. The encouragement is literally what keeps him going.

• A book. I’ve been gathering the stories of Minnesota women who unfroze themselves into action. Working title: WOMN — Women without the e, cuz this isn’t about men. It’s about Minnesota women.

• A purpose. Neither of us went looking for this. It found us because something had to give.

Why Rage Becomes Love

The only thing that sells better than sex is rage. But what’s different about rage is that love is always born out of it. That’s why we both went viral at the same moment, posting the same kind of thing:

Here’s the terrible thing that happened — and here’s how the good loving people of Minnesota are showing up for it.

The world didn’t just need the news. It needed proof that people still give a shit.

The Reality on the Ground

We also got real about what’s actually happening in Minnesota right now:

• Economic damage: Mayor Frey has cited $203 million in losses for Minneapolis alone

• Schools: Districts like Fridley have lost millions in funding because frightened families are keeping kids home — if a student misses more than 15 days, the school loses that financial support

• Rural communities aren’t exempt: A Mexican restaurant in Watertown had to lock its doors so customers ring a doorbell to enter. ICE showed up in Delano, Buffalo, and Rockford. This isn’t just a metro issue.

• ICE is not gone. The fallout is not over. And the people standing at the mobile home park every morning in their reflective vests, making sure kids get on the school bus safely — they are the story.

What Minnesota Keeps Teaching the World

Minnesota is not uniformly blue, not uniformly anything — and that nuance matters. What we are is a state that balances its budget, invests in its children, and stops on the side of the road when someone breaks down. Every single one of those things is showing up in this moment.

The rage is real. The exhaustion is real. And the fierce love coming out of both of them is the most Minnesota thing I’ve ever seen.

Watch the full replay above. We think you’ll feel less alone after you do.

💜 TeriLeigh & Sean Snow

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One month ago, I sat in my living room with three GenX moms who have found themselves deep in the Resistance.

A MamaBear to All Cubs

“If this was our kids we would need people for us.”
“We have to be the people for others.”

Fierce Love begins with the mothers, forced with the potential reality of seeing their own babies in danger. When a mother sees somebody’s else’s child endangered, she feels the threat inside herself. That’s when a MamaBear culture emerges.

“My son has a panic attack going to school every single day because he saw someone beat up and thrown into a car like a dog in the car-line in front of us.”

These three moms sit on the couch in front of me and openly admit they are privileged. Their children will never have to face the horrors that their black and brown classmates experience.

And, these moms are very much dealing with the kinds of questions no parent should ever have to answer to their kids.

“I’m just really afraid that you and dad are going to die. And I don’t know what I would do without you guys.”

How is a mom of a 10yo supposed to respond to that? Children of that age don’t understand the legal frameworks or the political policies. All they understand is that their friends’ parents are “being taken”, and in some cases, they are witnessing these violent abductions first hand.

“I’m not going to lie to my kids and say it’s all fine.”

That very real fear is coming out of the children in typically safe suburban neighborhoods in Minnesota. These mothers can no longer shield their children from the damage. They have to deal with it.

When stress happens, the body naturally responds into four different ways: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

These mothers know they can’t flee because to do so would be to surrender their livelihoods, their hard earned lifestyles, their carefully cultivated family and community structures.

These mothers also don’t have the freedom to freeze. They have babies to protect, even if those babies are teenagers. They are still children, with years left before their pre-frontal cortexes fully develop the capacity to understand and comprehend and critically analyze the circumstances for themselves.

These mothers have well-developed skills in fawning, and they know when a threat is so violent that it is well beyond the functions of fawning.

So they fight.

“How do you let this go?”

“But I’m also not going to stop.”

“There’s no stopping at this point.”

“I want my kids to grow up and say ‘My mom loved me so fiercely, regardless of everything.’”

They fight like MamaBears protecting their cubs.

Except these MamaBears expression of Fierce Love has teeth, eyes, instincts, and a PTA bake-sale organizing clipboard.

Pick a Lane

These three moms, all nurses who work in the same medical facility, drive in three different lanes of the same resistance highway.

“You almost have to pick a lane”

Switching lanes in this environment is like driving on black ice during white-out blizzard conditions. Each of them has chosen their specific action within the resistance.

One is deeply embedded in Rapid Response Networks. She monitors a Signal Chat so she can patrol, track, and film ICE in her community. She wears a whistle around her neck and isn’t afraid to get in the face of an agent who might be threatening a child on school grounds or at a bus stop. But rapid responders cannot and will not deliver mutual aid supplies because they might lead ICE right to their targets. So she passes any referrals of families in need to her friend, a pastor’s wife.

The second, the pastor’s wife, shares that her husband’s church has seen a drastic increase in attendance since the surge started. Families are leaving the mega-churches for her smaller outreach based church.

“So many people have left church because they’re all talk and they say, we’re going to pray for you. And that’s it. . . Like prayers are great, but what’s the next step? We need action. . . We have atheists that come to our church every week just because of the community.”

The third has dedicated herself to befriending those in the community in need. She goes to the immigrant businesses, becomes a regular at their bars and restaurants, gets to know them until they trust her, and then, after weeks of building relationship, they let her refer her friend’s church community to support them. When ICE is impersonating a church pastor offering support in order to gain access to the immigrant community, making friends with the new lady who tips big isn’t something that happens in one or two visits.

Together, these three form a trinity of support to their community, stepping up in ways others can’t.

“Do you feel like all this responsibility lands on your shoulders?” I ask.

“I kind of do because when you look out at the pictures and the things, it’s moms. It’s us or gray hairs.”

Because the privilege gives them the power.

GenX Flips the Script

There’s another reason these moms feel particularly responsible to holding this line. They grew up with emotionally distant parents, neglect, and conditional affection. Those parents, now grandparents, proudly wear MAGA hats.

“That’s how GenXers were raised.”

“You have to deserve the love.”

At six years old with the stomach flu we were told, “here’s the bucket, here’s the remote, here’s canned soup, I’m going to work.” And then, when we vomited near, but not in, the garbage can by our bed, we were told to clean it up ourselves. Our parents were too wrapped up in their careers to bother with parenting. What we lived through as children became the moral compass of how we raise our own children. We can’t raise our children the way we were raised. We have to give them the exact opposite.

“My mom laughed when I said my son has a panic attack going to school every single day.”

While they used to live by the "we agree to disagree” rules with their families of origin, the Surge has changed that. They have stepped away from parents and relatives who defend the actions of ICE and condemn these women for their resistance actions.

These three women speak of their relationship to each other as a sisterhood. They barely knew one another a year ago. Their relationships emerged from smile-cordially-at-work-colleagues to flat-tire-4am-friends in a matter of months.

The resistance has turned acquaintance into kinship.

The women form a mycelial network

What these women are building feels less like an organization chart and more like a mycelial network. The neighborhood protests, bridge brigades, fundraising events, and mutual aid distribution packing parties are where the real connections happen now.

“Who are you?”

“Tell me your story.”

“What’s your Signal Chat handle?”

What I heard in this conversation was a definition of Fierce Love that starts with children and keeps widening until it includes the whole future. It reaches from her own child to the child in the next classroom, to the family across the street, the church meal line, the bridge brigade, the Signal chat, and the future that is being shaped right now by who chooses to show up.

These women are mothering far beyond the walls of their own homes. They are feeding people, filming danger, building trust, opening churches, and carrying referrals.

Together they form a living underground network of care, passing support hand to hand, house to house, family to family, until the whole community feels less alone and eventually everyone, every child, every elder, every human-being is connected. When mycelia grow roots underground, they form intelligent connections with each other, not just as roots supporting each other, but as knotted structures growing new connections everywhere.

These women are holding the line with the instinctive intelligence of women who remember exactly what neglect felt like and who chose to grow mycelial connections instead.

That is Fierce Love in Minnesota.

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A few weeks ago, I posted this little story on Substack Notes about bringing my neighbor a loaf of sourdough bread. Then this week my friend elaborated on the magick of sourdough.
Today’s post was inspired by both.

TeriLeigh💜

On a 15 degree day in mid February, my neighbor Steve snow-blowed the sidewalks again.

He does the entire block, both sides, every time it snows more than two inches.

I bring him a loaf of homemade sourdough.

Steve displayed Trump signs during the election. Amy, the neighbor between us, has a pride flag and one of those little wiggle-walk signs on her front lawn. I bring Amy sourdough when she feeds my dog if I can’t get home in time.

Amy has long chats with Steve about his grandkids while she’s weeding her garden.

I keep encouraging Steve to wiggle when he snow-blows her sidewalk. I’m convinced someday he will.

Steve told me about his cancer with this matter-of-fact calm, and I offer him a hug —one hand holding his loaf of sourdough, and the other hand wrapped around his shoulder.

I don’t care who he voted for. He’s a good guy facing something terrible, and he does it with grace. . . He is sourdough-worthy.

Sean Snow

One of the stranger things about COVID was how many of us became sourdough people overnight. People were trading tips, sharing jars, and finding comfort in keeping this one small living thing alive during an uncertain time.

On its own, sourdough starter does not look like much, just a cloudy little jar on a counter… but if you feed it, protect it, and pass it along, it grows into something that can nourish a lot of people.

That feels like Minnesota right now.

It rarely starts with something dramatic. It starts small, gets tended, and grows because people keep showing up for it. The jar may be small, but what grows inside it can feed a lot of people.

The starter needs the right environment to grow.

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TeriLeigh💜

The oldest sourdough artifacts are about 4,500 years old, recovered from ancient Egyptian clay pots. Medieval monasteries maintained their starters for centuries, treating them as living members of the community. Families carried their starters across oceans in the holds of ships, because to lose the starter was to lose their history. During the California Gold Rush, San Francisco sourdough bakers were so protective of their starters that they slept with them on cold nights, holding the jar close to their bodies to keep the culture warm.

The culture in a Minnesota sourdough starter reflects the bacteria and yeast specific to this region — our cold winters, our humid mosquito-ed air, the flour milled from grain grown in our soil.

Baking sourdough is a community project. You receive a starter from a neighbor, and feed it with flour and water. Then, you share the discard with someone else, who feeds it and shares the discard with someone else. One jar, tended faithfully, can eventually feed an entire city.

The starter doesn’t care about politics.
It feeds everyone.

Sean Snow

A sourdough starter takes patience at first.

In the beginning, you have to keep tending it before you get anything back, trusting that something good is growing even when it just looks like a quiet jar on the counter. But once it is alive, keeping it going is much simpler.

That is what this moment feels like to me.

A city council vote, one court deadline, one bill, one hat, one neighbor showing up… each small on its own, but together becoming something strong enough to feed people through a hard season.

Federal overreach depends on fear spreading faster than care. Our job is to keep feeding that care until it grows stronger than the fear.

TeriLeigh💜

This is where we are right now. The days when it would be easy to look at the jar and conclude that nothing is working. But the wild yeast is already here, in the hands of every Minnesotan who keeps showing up.

And there are a lot of them.

There is ChongLy “Saly” Scott Thao, who lives just half a block from my favorite East-Side neighborhood pub, a naturalized U.S. citizen, a Hmong elder. His mother had been a nurse who treated American soldiers during the Secret War in Laos. He became a citizen the right way. While his toddler grandson was napping on the couch, federal agents broke through the door with guns drawn. Saly was led outside bare-chested in Crocs and boxer shorts and a children’s blanket in single-digit temperatures. His neighbors showed up, blowing whistles in the street and yelling. ICE drove him around for an hour, confirmed he had no criminal record, and dropped him back at his apartment like nothing happened.

A sourdough starter needs witnesses. It needs someone paying attention. That’s what those neighbors were. That’s all they were, watching, documenting, bearing witness.

There is Stella Carlson, who was on her way to a church to paint children’s faces when she saw federal agents in her neighborhood. She could have kept driving, but she pulled over instead. She saw a man directing traffic and recording — that man was Alex Pretti. “I was his backup, is how I felt about it,” she said later, through tears.

That is a loaf of bread left on a doorstep, or a back-up jar of starter, passed along, in case the first one didn’t take.

There is Jennifer Briggs, who wrote about what she called Minnesota’s underground human hive — thousands of women organizing through encrypted chats, deploying observers within minutes, making legal calls, running secret grocery runs, doing school drop-offs for families too afraid to leave. “Will history write about these heroines?” she asked.

A living culture doesn’t forget what kept it alive.

There is R.T. Rybak, former mayor of Minneapolis, now leading the Minneapolis Foundation. He launched a $4 million Economic Response Fund. Grants of $2,500 to $10,000 going to the restaurants and shops and service providers who couldn’t open their doors, who were feeding their staff out of their own pockets. He said publicly: “We recognize the needs are much greater.”

He fed the starter with money, quietly, from within the system.
This is also neighboring. This is also bread. (why do you think we call money “dough”?)

There is Annie Ganger, sister of Renee Good, who flew in from out of state to speak at her sister’s memorial in Powderhorn Park. She looked out at the crowd of thousands who had been caring for Renee’s memory for a month, in the cold, without being asked, and she said: “We who do not live in this area see this powerful work that you’re doing, and it encouraged us to dive into our own communities.”

Then she told us what she thought her sister’s advice would be, right now, in all of this:

“Take care of yourselves. Care for your neighbors. Receive care from your neighbors. Rest and eat, and play, and show up.”

That is a sourdough recipe if I have ever heard one.

When someone asks me what Minnesota tastes like right now, I think: a little sour, and very much alive.

Sourdough tastes different from every other bread. The sourness is lactic acid, produced by bacteria as they ferment. But lactic acid is also what lives in your muscles after a hard run, in your gut when your microbiome is healthy, in fermented foods that have sustained human life for ten thousand years. The sourness is evidence of life, proof that something is working.

What we keep feeding will be what survives.

The starter or the fear.

The culture or the rot.

The bread or the silence.

Steve is still out there in the cold. Amy will wave from her garden the first warm day we get. . . I’m going to go bake more bread.

Good News from Minnesota

Sunday, March 1, 2026

• Minnesota’s February budget forecast released Friday showed a $3.7B surplus. Minnesota is known for always balancing our budget. We are also a “donor state”, meaning that we pay more into the federal government in taxes than we get back. This year is no different, even with the alleged fraud, we not only balanced our budget, but we have money leftover, at least enough to cover the loss JD Vance announced from Medicaid last week.

• For the first time, iceout.org and local news reported a relatively CALM Saturday morning, with only a handful of ICE sightings (there was still increased action at Whipple reported). We got a period of quiet to rest and regroup!

• $5.39M has been redirected to the state’s food shelf program as a way to counter the federal cuts. Minnesota is proving that we can act as our own safety net without federal support.

• An article in Politico gives an inside look to how Minnesota officials worked strategically, reinforcing that Minnesota did not make any deals or trade away any rights to get agents out of the state.

• The Minnesota Loons soccer game at Allianz Field displayed a giant Rebel Loon banner that reads “We Have Friends Everywhere!”

• Radiohead demanded that ICE take down a choral rendition of their song “Let Down” from a recent IG video.

• The Singing Resistance is gathering at Roseville City Park to sing-ice-out of their park and city. This is the park where I walk my dog every morning, and where ICE stared me down on January 17th. I will be personally attending and performing some shaman ritual work to spread the vibration of the voices in a way to protect the park from future ice occupation.

While I keep focused on the goodness, things are not better. The protestors at the Whipple Federal Building right now (10am Sunday) are being kettled, arrested, and tear-gassed.

I visited the memorials for George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti yesterday, and the pain our community is feeling is very palpable. I will share those experiences in other notes today.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

Monday, March 2, 2026

• Right now, the Wilson Foundation, a 501(c)(3) foundation is matching up to $1.5M for rental assistance in Minnesota.

• For the 50th anniversary of the Hmong Community in St. Paul, the St. Paul Saints minor league baseball team hosted Hmong Day. Mayor Kaohly Her threw out the first pitch. The day featured traditional dances, a Hmong artist singing the national anthem, and more.

• Yesterday, as part of the Bring the Heat - Melt the Ice actions happening all week, a group of protestors tried to form a human shield blocking traffic out of the north parking lot at Whipple. This was an act of civil disobedience not unlike the lunch counter sit-in of the 1960s. Simultaneously, on the south side of Whipple, Indigenous Roots performed native dancing and drumming. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department declared an unlawful assembly and arrested protestors on both sides. This was an example where protestors pushed beyond the boundaries of peaceful protest by blocking roadways, dumping glass into the street, and throwing rocks and ice chunks. Minneapolis City Council Member Jason Chavez was amongst those present and told the crowd: “As long as ICE remains in Minnesota…our community will occupy this space.”

• The Singing Resistance had events happening across the nation yesterday. I personally attended a “take back our park” event at Roseville City Park where I walk my dog and ICE commonly stages in the parking lot. About 100 people attended, and cars passing by participated by honking in solidarity.

• A “Dine & Demonstrate” event along Central Avenue brought customers into immigrant owned restaurants in NE Mpls before going to nearby intersections with their signs and chants. Spend money, then protest.

• Alex Pretti’s Memorial outside the Minneapolis VA was taken down yesterday at the request of his family.

• Golden Valley, a western inner ring suburb of Minneapolis, held a DEI sponsored event called “Stronger Together” for community mutual aide and support offering direct resources, connections to legal aid, and community solidarity to connect city resources with immigrant families in the western suburbs.

• Minnesota colleges and universities have seen a marked drop in attendance and enrollment, and higher education leaders are speaking out about the impact on all levels of education in our state.

My favorite source for MN Good News is now on Substack! Go follow Sean Snow and give him your support. I just purchased a year subscription. His introductions and conclusions to the daily news reports he offers are always metaphoric and symbolic wisdom that weave spirituality with politics in a beautiful and necessary way.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

Tuesday, March 3, 2026

• Governor Walz has sent another letter to Secretary Kristi Noem, demanding answers on the surge, specifically in relation to the number of children detained. He accuses DHS of acting “lawlessly and without transparency”. His letter states that he expects weekly updates on the number of federal law enforcement agents in Minnesota until the number returns to the pre-Metro Surge numbers, and until all children are fully accounted for and returned to Minnesota.

• Walz’s office has also filed a Freedom of Information Act request from DHS.

• A Minnesota prosecutor announced on Monday that an investigation may lead to charges against federal officers, including Greg Bovino, for misconduct during Operation Metro Surge.

• An 8th grader from a Rochester MN middle school, Riddhi Patel, is headed to Washington DC for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

• Fraud convictions continue as another suspect pleaded guilty, this one running a fake autism clinic that resulted in $6M in fraud.

• Nicolette’s Macaroons, a St. Paul small business is now selling macaroons with the rebel loon. *this bakery is walking distance from my home.

• US District Judge Jia M. Cobb has blocked DHS from enforcing its Jan 8th policy requiring members of Congress to give advance notice before visiting ICE facilities.

• A federal judge ordered the U.S. Attorney to appear at a contempt hearing to explain repeated court orders ignored by DHS.

• An internet portal has been opened by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty to build an evidence archive of digital documentation of use of force during Operation Metro Surge.

My long-form article this week details the story of a simple act of civil disobedience at the Whipple Federal Building last Sunday that serves as a beautiful metaphor for the whole resistance by Minnesota. This one has personal tugs on my heart as I love and care for the protester as family.

thehush.net/p/rainy-lik…

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

• UNITE to Heal Minneapolis: Bringing Heaven to Earth, a living prayer for Minneapolis and blessing for the state of Minnesota is happening on Friday March 6, led by Lorraine Flaherty and Alexandra Wenman.

• Minnesota has filed suit against the Trump administration for withholding Medicaid funds, alleging that this is “political punishment” that will harm more than 1 million people enrolled in the program.

• MN Legislative Auditor Judy Randall says a $100M grant program intended to bolster small businesses is now on her radar.

• Minnesota Congresswoman Angie Craig published a commentary yesterday admitting that she regrets voting for the Laken Riley Act, a bill requiring the detention of any undocumented immigrant charged with theft. She stated that any bill giving ICE new authority under this administration was the wrong call. Here in Minnesota, we have no problem admitting when we are wrong and working to repair our mistakes.

• Representative Athena Hollins authored a bill to ban all 287 (g) agreements in the state, those that allow county jails and sheriffs to function as quiet extensions of ICE. Hollins stated that agreements like this erode public trust in law enforcement and divert resources from public safety. This is an example of Minnesota doing the work to take care of our own and separate more and more from the feds.

• Oasis Lactation Services in Minnetonka MN collecting postpartum and prenatal supplies, including C-section wound care items, belly bands, prenatal vitamins, and hygiene products for new and expecting parents who are still afraid to leave home for appointments.

• In Willmar MN, Rise Up Singing gathered people downtown with cupcakes, songs, and a march, and that the freewill donations are going straight to immigrant families for rent, food, and utilities.

• The Dakota County Community Volunteer Fair brought residents to Wescott Library in Eagan to connect with local organizations that need help.

• Registration opened for the 2026 Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon. Organizers expect more than 30,000 runners across the weekend, and kids 18 and under can run free through the TC Kids Run Free program. The charity half marathon is also expanding, with runners raising money for nonprofits while participating.

• The Skyway 5K took place on Saturday, February 28, 2026, in downtown St. Paul, starting and ending at Union Depot. It was billed as a first-of-its-kind race through the St. Paul skyway system, giving runners a chance to do a full 5K inside the climate-controlled maze of connected downtown walkways

Some sad news

• 1st Class Nicole M. Amor of White Bear Lake MN was killed in yesterday’s drone attack in Kuwait. She was a 39yo Army Reserve soldier, wife, and mother who has served since 2005.

On a personal note, my spidey-senses are registering that this shift in Minnesota culture to be even more community-based has reached a tipping point where this is now our new normal.

A friend asked me yesterday about how Minnesota is going to handle the clean up of this mess and the trauma that lingers. I found myself telling her that I really feel like we are completely up for the task. People in Minnesota know now, in ways we never have before, that we have each other’s backs, 100%. This culture and commitment to community is not going away once this all “settles”...this is our new normal. I believe it was always in our DNA to be this kind and community based, but it had never been tested like this before. Now that we have a taste of it, we can’t go back. Those who have suffered the worst trauma have also been recipients of the greatest kindnesses here. With that kind of energy, healing is deep.

I have always lived by the adage “the gift lives inside the wound”, and Minnesota is recognizing our capacity to rinse, bandage, and heal those wounds into stronger and more durable tissue.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

Thursday, March 5, 2026

• Transform MN is holding a free session to help immigrants heal from the trauma called Walking with the Wounded: a basic introduction to trauma for the friend or minister. transformmn.org/event/h…

• Yesterday Social Worker Day was recognized at the Minnesota State Capitol. Through Operation Metro Surge, social workers, especially those working in our schools and clinics and hospitals, have spear-headed mutual aid efforts.

• Attendance at Valley View Elementary School in Columbia Heights MN is coming back. This is the school where Liam and several other children were taken and detained.

• Minneapolis City Council heard testimonies yesterday for an initiative called Pause Evictions, Save Lives. This ordinance would temporarily extend the eviction notice period from 30 to 60 days. It has moved forward with a 7-5-1 vote at the city council.

• Rage Against the Regime (Rage Against the Machine tribute) at the Turf Club is explicitly listed as a fundraiser for the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund (doors 7:00 PM).

• Mancini’s Restaurant teamed up with others for a “Gathering for Good” and raised $35,000 to aid neighbors impacted by the surge.

• U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen was held in contempt in court for failing to return belongings to 28 federal detainees. Judges are taking larger action to hold feds accountable for violating the Constitution.

• Registration is open for The 2026 Hot Dash 5K, 10K and Kids Tater Trot is set to happen Saturday March 21st. It’s events like these that are bringing the healing to our state.

• When challenged by Chairman James Comer about fraud in Minnesota at the Oversight Congressional Hearing yesterday, Walz informed Comer that Minnesota’s level of fraud is roughly 2% where the national average is closer to 6%, and Minnesota’s fraud is significantly lower than Comer’s home state. Comer was left speechless.

Some numbers to contemplate:

Minneapolis has an estimated 76,000 residents (about 1 in 5 people in the city) facing urgent needs as a result of Operation Metro Surge. While the ICE incidents have dropped from 300 incidents per day to about 30 incidents per day, the average number of incidents in other cities is 3.

ICE is still here. Just yesterday in downtown Minneapolis, three agents came out of a white van labeled “Midwest Plumbing” with guns drawn and pointed at a woman’s head. They then shot pepper balls at her before getting back in the van and driving into her.

There was an ICE vehicle parked again this morning at the city park where I walk my dog at sunrise every day.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

P.S. Fierce Love t-shirts, magnets, stickers, and other merchandise will be ready to purchase from our online store sometime next week.

P.P.S I met yesterday with new Substacker Sean Snow (whom I reference daily for my good news listing), whose publication offers daily 6am reports out of Minnesota. We will be collaborating on some Substack ventures here very soon.

Friday, March 6, 2026

• MPR reports a court win with real teeth (yesterday/this week): A federal judge ordered DHS to pay $9,334 in attorney’s fees in the Garrison Gibson case (ICE agents broke down his door without a proper judicial warrant, per the court findings reported by MPR).

• AP reports Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz warned ICE and Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor that continued noncompliance with court orders could bring criminal contempt, after documenting repeated violations.

• “Abolish ICE: A Fundraiser for the People” at the Alex Pretti memorial (1–8 p.m.). This is a free, in-person fundraiser at 26th & Nicollet (by the memorial), with community programming and performances. Dropkick Murphys is one of the bands performing.

• Vegan Food for Good serving/connecting with neighbors today (March 6, 10:30 AM–1:00 PM) at a Simpson Housing location

• In federal court Thursday, Minnesota’s U.S. attorney said detainees are no longer being transferred to El Paso because there are enough detention beds in Minnesota.

• Medical professionals across Minnesota quietly built an informal network to bring care directly into people’s homes when they were too scared to go to appointments in office. KFF Health News reported Thursday that Minnesota’s model is now being watched as a lesson for cities across the country.

• On Tuesday, March 3 MyNortheaster covered a “Bakers Supporting Neighbors” bake sale at a gardening store, explicitly raising money for mutual aid funds in the wake of Operation Metro Surge.

During the Congressional Oversight Hearing about Fraud and Misuse of Federal Funds in Minnesota, Governor Tim Walz showed up as the adult in the room. When Nancy Mace challenged him about caring about children, Walz informed her that children in Minnesota rank near the top in every category, affirming that Minnesota children are fed every day, and have better housing, healthcare, and schools than most of the rest of the country. When James Comer challenged Walz about fraud rates, Walz informed Comer that Minnesota’s error rate is lower than Comer’s home state of Kentucky, and is one third the rate of the national average.

What the feds underestimated about Minnesota is our grit and endurance. Minnesota is playing the long-legal game, and we have the evidence and records and documentation to back-up our cases. It’s working. Kristi Noem was removed from her position as Secretary of Homeland Security.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

Saturday, March 7, 2026

• Bring Me The News has published a list of businesses that have pivoted their efforts from profits to mutual aid in Minnesota. This list is a teeny tiny sampling of what is happening here in Minnesota. bringmethenews.com/minn…

• 300+ people gathered for a Polar Plunge to raise money for the Special Olympics.

• Second Sight Visuals and @n8me created a visual art projected installation of protest art on the Witch’s Tower in Minneapolis.

• A neighborhood outdoor music block party occurred yesterday at the site of Alex Pretti’s death. DropKick Murphys had hundreds of neighbors dancing in the streets while Kathy Griffin stopped by for a surprise visit.

• La Vina Burnsville, a Spanish language food delivery organization offered gratitude for two families that have been driving long distances, during the worst travel weather season of the year, from Wisconsin (3.5+ hours) to bring donations every week to support the food scarcity issues here in Minnesota. This is a great example of how efforts but just a few people make a huge impact.

• The Minnesota Reformer featured Minneapolis City Council Member Jason Chavez-Cruz, as a political leader who is truly “boots on the ground” through this resistance. He has had direct family members deported out of the country. He says, “I think it’s a responsibility of people in power to show up for their constituents.”

• Social workers have been at the front end of this community support venture since long before any of this started. They are already over-worked and under-paid, and through this their jobs have become the front of it all. They were honored as part of Social Worker Day at the Minnesota State Capitol on Thursday.

ICE is still here, and still very much active. Reports from protesters who track the activity in and out of Whipple every day are reporting new shipments of brand new vehicles coming in daily. They also track close to 1000 agents coming and going on a daily basis.

There is word of “bounty hunters” working for the feds. We aren’t sure if these are ICE agents working in plain clothes or if these are independent contractors hired by the feds. While yes, this is a sign that the tactics are shifting to be more targeted actions and less racial profiling on the streets, it brings a whole different kind of fear. These bounty hunters are using surveillance, pretending to be utility workers, or worse, preying on Minnesota’s helpful nature.

Thank you to those of you who asked for Kelly Wilson’s venmo to offer donations. She has now been diagnosed with pneumonia. It got to be too much to personally DM each of you asking for her donation link, so I posted a QR code of her venmo on another note. She’s doing great work, and receiving a lot of hate mail for it. Let’s shower her with our fierce love.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

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A Profound Act of Civil Disobedience

A young man just sat, comfortably on the pavement, neither resisting nor complying.

Law enforcement officers had pulled him to the ground as he was walking away from them. Five of them wrestled his arms behind his back and took several minutes to figure out how to zip-tie his wrists that couldn’t reach more than a few inches behind his back.

Then they rolled him over from his belly and ordered him to stand.

He refused.

They tried to lift him. They couldn’t.

So there he sat, calm as a stone in a river, while the current of the day rushed around him. Native drummers and dancers performed in the background, ceremonially keeping the heartbeat of Minnesota’s resistance alive.

He smiled toward the camera of independent journalist @bgonthescene and said, “They can’t lift me up.”

I thought I recognized his voice, and definitely his smile. But I couldn’t be sure.

Here were all these officers with their gear and commands and zip ties, completely befuddled by one peaceful young man refusing to make their job easier.

How, exactly, did they expect a man of his size to rise from the pavement with his hands bound behind his back? Did they imagine he would simply tuck his feet beneath him and spring upward like some limber gymnast? Their order made no sense in the physical reality of the body they were commanding.

Civil disobedience has always lived in that space where the body tells the truth that power wants to ignore. A body seated at a lunch counter. A body remaining in a bus seat. A body walking calmly across a bridge.

Or in this case, a body going limp during an arrest.

Two Separate Protests Converge

Bring the Heat, Melt the ICE was a Week of Action running from February 25 through March 1st, culminating in a march and gathering at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, housed at the convergence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, now known as the ICE detention center in Minneapolis, MN.

54 protesters were arrested, cited, and released.

On the south side of Whipple, Native dancers danced, drummers drummed, and people came together for what was meant to be a peaceful, prayerful, public gathering.

On the north side of Whipple, protesters planned an act of civil disobedience. They arrived with helmets, goggles, gas masks, umbrellas, and makeshift shields fashioned from blue-and-white plastic trash bins. They intended to form a human shield at the parking lot entrance so ICE vehicles could not exit the headquarters and spill out into Minneapolis streets where they had been causing violence and trauma to the people for months.

However, before the human shield could form, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department met them with tear gas and flash bangs. The first arrests came fast, with no dispersal announcements before that initial rush.

That split-screen image tells the capital T-Truth about Minnesota in this season. Native dancers moving with rhythm in ceremony on one side, and on the other, officers surging, tackling people, and chasing those attempting to retreat. Two rivers converge.

After months of violence in our communities, after thousands of neighbors have been abducted off streets from ordinary moments of daily life, through sheltering-in-place and rapid-response-networking and coordinated-mutual-aid, Minnesotans are still showing up in ceremony, documenting, legal observance, and community solidarity.

We are still trying to place our bodies between vulnerable people and the machinery that keeps swallowing them.

The Fierce Love and Desire for a Peaceful Home

I watched the video over and over again. I suspected it was him. It looked like it was him, but I hadn’t seen him in eight years. I couldn’t be completely sure.

But then I found a second video, a different angle of the same scene, and my suspicions were confirmed.

“What’s your name?” a protestor yelled across the crowd to the young man.

“Rainy Cunningham. Rainy like a rainy day.” Just as his dad had taught him to say when he was a little kid.

My throat closed, and I choked on my breath.

It is him. My husband’s son.

I am a childless mother. Once upon a time, I hoped this young man might someday embrace me as his stepmother. But he estranged himself from us on his eighteenth birthday. We’ve had no contact, and gone through all the processes of grieving someone who is still alive. We went on with our lives, loving from afar with a quiet hope that one day we’d see him again.

We never thought we’d see him again on a social media feed getting arrested for civil disobedience.

The first clip I saw that morning was dated and timestamped, 3/1/26, 11:11am

11/11 ~ Rainy’s birthday.

Later that night I found an hour-long livestream video, beginning with the violent arrests on the north side of Whipple and ending with a dozen officers trying unsuccessfully to lift Rainy into the back of a nearby Sprinter van.

We watched the whole thing in awe.

I saw the strong-willed, good-hearted kid who once devoured my home-cooked meals and shook Yahtzee dice with exuberance while laughing in loud machine-gun bursts of joy. He had grown up into a young man with a passion strong enough to place his own body in the path of harm on behalf of other people.

This story is larger than one arrest.

I don’t know what comes next, but I do know what I saw.

I saw Native drummers and dancers holding ceremony while officers tackled and zip-tied protestors nearby. I saw a community still showing up for each other after months of fear and violence.

And I saw a peaceful act of civil disobedience so simple and so complete that a whole cluster of befuddled officers could do nothing with it.

I also saw a defiant teenager I once knew, now grown up into an exquisitely stubborn young man, representing the whole of Minnesota.

And I felt myself loving him fiercely for standing up for his people by sitting in his power, handcuffed, calm, and absolutely unwilling to help the machinery that was trying to carry him away.

Rainy, like a rainy day.

Good News in Minnesota

Sunday, February 22, 2026

• Minnesota Angryman calls protests and peaceful demonstrations “group therapy”. seems fitting.

• A march to honor Alex Pretti, marking one-month since his death started at Whittier Park yesterday.

• Diane Moua, a Hmong Minneapolis chef received special recognition on Good Morning America for blending “her award-winning pastry skill with the flavors of her Hmong heritage.”

• The Minnesota Rebel Loon resistance logo has inspired a nationwide movement of attaching state birds to the rebel insignia. They can be seen at creaturesofresistance.c…

• Thank you Chris Damian for this HUGE list of donation drives, fundraisers, and other MN events happening through the end of February. This list only grows every single day…and doesn’t account for the small 3-10 person actions happening everywhere. substack.com/profile/11…

• More than 80 Minnesotans have offered sworn declarations in the amended complaint filed by the ACLU in Tincher v. Noem. Presiding judge Eric Tostrud (a Trump appointee) indicated he will rule in an expedited basis.

• Here are some numbers for you:

  • lawyers have filed 1000+ individual charges to detentions.

  • MN fed judges have ordered releases hundreds of times for unlawful arrests and detentions.

  • 400+ federal judges nationwide have issued 4000+ rulings finding ICE held people illegally

Ten women who have never met each other gathered on a quiet St. Paul home yesterday, sharing their stories and their passion for protecting Minnesota. It was instant kinship. This is called hyper-local organizing, and is how it is done here in the north star state.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

P.S. question for you all, if I had “thanks for giving a shit” and “love fiercely” MN t-shirts and stickers and magnets made up, would any of you buy them? with profits going to MN mutual aid.

Monday, February 23, 2026

• When Brandi Carlile performed a special concert here in Minneapolis last Saturday, she invited the MN Singing Resistance to perform on stage with her! (this one gave me chills).

• A school board member from Fridley schools (a north suburb of the twin cities) has been reporting that ICE is blending in and waiting at the schools for drop off and pick up. The community has responded by forming a human shield to stop kids from seeing what is happening on the street.

• Former Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak is referring to Minneapolis as “The City That Won’t Break” and Minnesota as “The State Teaching the World How to Love Your Neighbor”

• Pods of Resistance Singers are popping up all over the city, in groups as small as 5-6 people, as well as in crowds of thousands. These events are meeting weekly, or even daily!

• St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her attended an online town hall last night and informed citizens to call 911 if we witness anyone getting abducted by ICE as police will respond, and that the city is not allowing ICE to stage on city property and that they are to wear ID tags and no face coverings. This might explain why I saw such a heavy police presence on the streets on Friday when ICE was so prevalent. For every ice vehicle I saw, I saw 3-4 police vehicles.

• Minnesota definitions of the word “protest”

  • One way people gather peacefully to show care and solidarity.

  • Collective action reflecting shared responsibility within a community.

• The BYHAC - Black Youth Healing Arts Center in Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul is using art to help the young people navigate the trauma we are experiencing as a collective.

Thank you for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

I have a storefront working on designs for merch…coming soon

TeriLeigh💜

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Much of the good news today lives in the legal world. Minnesota has always been a state and community that does things by the book, and we are throwing the book at the feds in big ways.

• Minnesota won the most Olympic medals than any other state. Minnesota had 26 athletes competing in the Olympics, bringing home 13 of medals: 10 gold, 1 silver, and 2 bronze. (btw - the Women’s Olympic Hockey Team turned down an invitation to tonight’s State of the Union Address).

• Minnesota was just ranked the second-best state to raise a family (behind Massachusetts), based on family fun, health & safety, education & child care, affordability, and socio-economics.

• Rapper Yung Gravy has been working with local activists donating money and supplies directly to families impacted by immigration raids.

• When a shooting occurred at a local mall, William Swift, owner of Enchanted Fantasy Film Museum inside the mall did what Minnesotans do. He opened his doors making his shop a safety zone.

• Judge Eric Tostrud, for the second time, has found the federal government in civil contempt for violating a direct court order. The gov’t must pay for a detainee’s return flight to Minnesota after he was released in Texas without ID or belongings.

• A coalition of of religious organization and faith leaders filed a lawsuit against DHS yesterday, alleging that federal agents have repeatedly blocked clergy from providing essential pastoral care to detainees held at the Whipple Federal Building, in violation of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

• Minnesota leadership confirmed yesterday that they did NOT agree to any policy concessions to end the surge, countering the narrative provided by the federal government. Minnesota has not changed any policies, practices, or procedures in how they handle immigration, and our local sanctuary laws and community protections remain fully in force.

• Volunteer attorneys from all specialties (divorce, estate, corporate, etc) have mobilized to file over 1000 habeas corpus petitions since January.

• Weekly filings of habeas corpus petitions have declined from 130 to 46, indicating fewer arrests.

• Fridley and Duluth school districts have filed a federal emergency motion to halt immigration enforcement near classrooms and bus stops.

• Minnesota educators were celebrated this week as heroes for providing critical support to families during the surge.

• Dropkick Murphys, an iconic band, announced a free acoustic memorial show in a Minneapolis parking lot near Eat Street where Alex Pretti’s Memorial is. The event will be livestreamed globally and is raising funds for local rent relief and small businesses.

• Whistleblower, Ryan Schwank, a former trainer and lawyer for ICE testified yesterday revealing unconstitutional practices and directives and training procedures within ICE.

**I need to acknowledge and give proper credit… I get a lot of my good news reports from Sean Snow, an independent journalist in Minnesota.

While ICE is not as active within the city of Minneapolis, they are much more active in St. Paul (my home) and outer suburbs and more rural communities. St. Paul is handling it well, and SPPD is supporting the community well. However, for the outer suburbs and rural communities, the ICE raids are more devastating as they don’t have the capacity for rapid response as the cities do.

We have two seasons here in Minnesota, winter and road construction. While we are recognizing that nothing lasts forever and the intensity of the raids may pass, we have a long road in front of us in terms of cleaning up the pothole mess that was left. Our economy has been decimated, and the trauma we are enduring will require deep healing.

We also know that this resistance is not for Minnesota alone. This is a national situation that is impacting global relationships. We Minnesotans know that the world is watching us, and we carry the responsibility of not only showing the way, but teaching, leading, facilitating, and healing all at the same time. Fierce Love always prevails. We’re on it.

Thanks for giving a shit,

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

Good News in Minnesota

♀Special Women’s Edition♀

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

• volunteer doulas are making house-calls to provide prenatal care and provide in-home births to moms who are sheltering-in-place.

• nursing mothers continue to donate milk to babies when their mothers were taken by ICE.

• Brandi Carlile raised over $600K for human rights at her Be Human MN concert.

• The USA Women’s Hockey Team won the gold medal, six of its members come from Minnesota, and they turned down an invitation to the State of the Union Address tonight.

Women, particularly retired women, here in MN are taking on the biggest of the burdens in coordinating donations, deliveries, rapid response, and protest actions. There is a fearless quality to these “moms and grey-haireds” as they know they have the time, the resources, and the privilege to make the biggest difference.

I’ve come to learn that the combination of rage and guilt of a woman over 50 is a powerful force of Fierce Love that will prevail no matter what.

I’m collecting the stories of these women, and calling for interviews for a project …working title WOMN… if you are a Minnesota mom or grey-haired willing to share your story with me, please comment here or DM me.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

Wednesday February 25, 2026

• This week Minnesota is coordinating a week of action today through March 1st. Bring the Heat, Melt the ICE features protests, walkouts, teach-ins, noise demos, marches, phone banking, and singing resistance and other events throughout the state every day.

• March 1st a historic tenant union rent strike is planned to put public pressure on leadership to enact an eviction moratorium and rent relief for families impacted by ICE.

• Melt the Ice organizers offer these Lessons

  • Find & Follow ICE with whistles, cameras. Stay safe in numbers, and keep your distance. Large numbers have proven to make ICE leave, and documentation is proving to support legal actions down the road.

  • Mutual Aid for Impacted Communities networks for food, grocery distribution, ride sharing, rent relief and more comes most readily from hyper-local community action.

  • Neighborhood Organizing start small, host potlucks, drive through your neighborhood streets, invite your direct neighbors over. Get to know who belongs in your neighborhood so when ICE appears they stand out to everyone.

  • Labor Organizing the power of the people to shutdown the economy is one of the most effective weapons. Coordinated action through unions and labor forces is vital to protest success.

  • Intervention Points & Secondary Targets protesting against corporate leadership that is not taking a stand such as Target, local hotels, car rentals companies can.

• A coalition of 50 Organizations issued a joint condemnation demanding that federal authorities stop blocking Minnesota’s independent investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti.

• Minnesota’s grassroots response was featured on CNN piece titled “Minnesota Becomes a National Model.” (you do give a shit!)

• Unanimous city council votes for Minneapolis and St. Paul in January for an eviction moratorium, and now Berkeley CA pressing Gov Tim Walz to enact the eviction moratorium.

• A growing list of cities across the country are passing solidarity measures in response to the situation in Minneapolis.

Thanks again to Sean Snow, independent journalist for his amazing reports. If you haven’t found him yet, his writing and reporting is top-notch. He produces a list of Minnesota news, Good News, and National News every morning, and always adds a bit of symbolism and nature metaphor at the beginning.

I’m holding a Fierce Love for Minnesota Group Healing today at 11am CST on Zoom featuring Theta Healer Kyle Fisk. The healing portion of this session will be recorded and posted on my Fierce Love publication for anyone who cannot attend.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

Thursday February 26, 2026

• The Singing Resistance is hosting sing-in protests nationwide on Saturday February 28 and Sunday March 1. Singing Resistance now has 95 city chapters and one in Canada.

• A summit organized by Duluth Indivisible, Itasca Indivisible, and Brainerd Lake Indivisible met at a YMCA camp in Sturgeon Lake for an overnight grassroots organizing retreat. 65 people from 25 different groups came together to plan, organize, and coordinate resistance movements to bring back to their individual communities.

• Local communities and city councils have stopped ICE from purchasing twelve warehouse sites that would have become concentration camps. Two of those blocked sites are in Minnesota.

• Sixty empty school desks sit outside the Minnesota State Capitol representing the student lives taken by gun violence as MN legislators renewed their push for new gun restrictions to protect children.

• Aliya Rahman, the MN woman with autism and disabilities who testified at Congressional DHS Oversight hearings about being unlawfully detained and injured by ICE attended the State of the Union as a guest of Ilhan Omar. She was forcefully removed from the SOTU, arrested and detained a second time. After being released at 4am, she showed up for her early morning media interviews and spoke out once again. This woman is a powerhouse!

• While JD Vance and Dr. Oz announced that the federal government is now withholding some Medicaid payments to the State of Minnesota, the people of Minnesota are more resolved to support each other with hyper-local efforts. The government is not our friend, so we are finding strength in our neighbors and friends.

• Mayor Jacob Frey’s office reports that the city has reported fewer 911 calls for ICE-related incidents. ICE has stopped targeting Minneapolis and moved to suburbs and rural areas.

• MN State Senator Alice Mann attended a hearing in the Education Policy Committee where legislation was introduced to protect schools and children from ICE. She reported that her Republican colleagues did not understand why this legislation was necessary as they were not aware of the reports from schools, principals, teachers, and superintendents (who spoke at the hearing). She encouraged her constituents to get out and talk to their Republican neighbors, to share with them the testimonies that were given at the hearing. Our leadership continues to encourage neighbors to talk to neighbors and bridge the division and divide.

What I’m reflecting on this week is that what we are learning from all this is that we need to take care of ourselves, in small local communities. We cannot depend on the government to bail us out anymore. We are building our own strength in new and profound ways.

I had 25 loving souls participate in my Fierce Love for Minnesota Group Healing yesterday and we raised over $500 for rental assistance. I’ll report later today about the families we helped.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

Friday February 27, 2026

• The Immigrant Rapid Response Fund surpassed $10M in global donations.

• standwithminnesota.com is nearing $10M in donations.

• The overwhelming response from donations across all 50 states proves that compassion is very much alive.

• Minneapolis ICE related 911 calls have started to drop, indicating that there is less disruptive activity. (this does not mean they are gone or this is over…people are still being abducted…it’s just not as rampant or violent within the city of Minneapolis)

• A 2500 member Dungeons & Dragons Twin Cities Gaming group pivoted from games to mutual aid by coordinating food deliveries, “Know Your Rights” workshops, and legal support. This is a great example of how every community group has repurposed their missions to establish their own grassroots community support measures.

• New York Times documented the gap between federal rhetoric and the local reality by reporting that only 30% of MN ICE detentions came from local jails, proving that Hennepin County has not changed their policies and did not make any deals with the federal government.

• Hell’s Kitchen, a famous Mpls downtown restaurant raised $15,443 at their first Hotcakes for a Helluva Cause pancake breakfast. Selling 850 tickets the funds will help save Mercado Central which houses 35 small businesses.

• Yesterday, JD Vance and Dr. Oz announced that $259M in federal Medicaid payments to MN will freeze, a report of federal data released by the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proved that the overall rate of improper payment in MN’s Medicaid program is 2.3%, and falls far below the national average of 6.1%. At the same time Governor Walz unveiled an 18-point anti-fraud package designed to increase oversight and establish a new Office of Inspector General. This package will extend fraud statutes of limitations, strengthen investigative powers, and institute a lifetime ban on state contracts for providers convicted of fraud. (in other words, MN is one of the better states at catching and handling the fraud…and now we are even better at it!)

• An open mic at the Whipple Federal Building brought out some of the best artists, poets, musicians, and speakers. (see video attached)

“Most Republicans are GOOD PEOPLE. Most Democrats are GOOD PEOPLE. The White House says outrageous things to make you hate your neighbor. Your neighbor isn’t the problem. The White House is.” ~Minnesota Governor Tim Walz

Yesterday, I shared that I had a case of the sads, and you all stepped up with your own good news to flood my comment field. I spent two hours last night giggling, smiling, and responding to as many as I could. If you get a case of the sads, I highly recommend scrolling through the comments on that note. I still feel the sads, AND feeling them with the happies and joys and giggles makes me feel fully ALIVE. Thank you all!

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

GOOD NEWS from Minnesota

Substack Edition - February 28th, 2026

I asked for happy news and you all showed up to shovel me out of the sads with a tater-tot hotdish in one hand and a dad joke in the other.

Here are just a few:

• A little boy named Victor gifted his bus attendant a “heart robot thing,”

• A whole crew of neighbors has been meeting weekly for two years to clean up a local creek: invasive plants removed, natives planted, watershed friendship formed… and trout are starting to show up again.

• A brand new Singing Resistance group formed with neighbors and they’re having their first rehearsal/gathering this Sunday.

• One street with 35 homes turned into an actual village: Memorial Day picnic, Halloween party, food drive, email group, lost pets tracked, cookies shared, snow shoveling help.

• Someone’s retired Craigslist furniture seller delivered a chest of drawers and then proceeded to restore faith in humanity with unexpected kindness.

• A neighbor showed up after a huge snow dump with a snowblower that broke… and then he shoveled anyway, smiling, because “neighbors and friends do that.

• A 13-year-old played Falstaff in Shakespeare (fat suit, beard, wig, 500 lines memorized) in a FOUR-HOUR uncut production performed by kids ages 10–14. No phones. Just brains, bodies, swords, and theater magic.

• After attending our Fierce Love for MN Group Healing, a participant slept almost 11 hours after being sick for weeks… and didn’t cough all night. The body remembered how to rest.

• A sixth grade teacher is “pushing hard on empathy” in the classroom and learning new lingo from the kids. (Great aura, everyone.)

And a few dad jokes, just cuz. . .

• “Have you heard about the new corduroy pillows? They’re making headlines.”

• “How do you make a Kleenex dance? Blow a little boogie in it.”

• “Why did the honest rainbow stop talking to the dirty window? Because it lacked transparency.” 🌈🪟

If you need me this weekend, I’ll be over here working my way through commenting back on each one. If you’re feeling a case of the sads, I invite you to happy-scroll the comments here. It’s great medicine.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

Saturday February 28, 2026

• Authors for Minnesota day - TODAY from 12pm-4pm - 26 independent bookstores across the state in MN are hosting over 50 authors to raise money for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota Immigration Rapid Response Fund.

• People from across the country are traveling to the Twin Cities, both as tourists to spend money at our local small businesses or to come here and learn in person the Minnesota ways to bring home to their states. (I’ll be hosting one today, can’t wait to see you Tom Schell !)

• A Haven Watch volunteer, Morgan Woodruff, received a man who had been released from Whipple after being detained for 3 months. He has been here legally for 37 years, and while he was detained, he lost his job and his disabled mother had to care for herself. The volunteer said she asked him if he wanted to call his family and he said “no, I want to surprise my mom.” She said he was the happiest and toughest person she had ever met. He said his faith got him through. There is no further court date, he was released without charges.

• Judge John Tunheim converted a temporary order into a permanent preliminary injunction protecting 5600 Minnesota refugees from arrest or detention under Operation PARRIS. His 66pg opinion called the fed gov’t actions a dystopian nightmare.

• COPAL and The Immigrant Defense Network have raised over $1.5M to support families impacted by ICE raids with more than $700K already distributed to help with housing, groceries, and medical care.

• UNIDOS Minnesota has called out Target Corp and will gather outside Orchestra Hall today to confront Target board members attending a shareholders event, demanding that they publicly oppose Operation Metro Surge.

It is important to note, ICE is not gone, and they are still up to their shenanigans. Yesterday, raids and violent abductions were documented in NE Mpls, and in suburban parking lots. Our immigrants still don’t feel safe to leave their homes, and we continue to show up every day for mutual aid deliveries, fund-raising drives, and protests. We are tired, and we have accepted this as our current “normal”.

Sean Snow - the independent reporter where I get much of my good news each day says this about Minnesota:

“We’re known as the ‘North Star State,’ but it’s not just a tagline. To us, Polaris is not just a symbol, it is a fixed point. While every other light in the sky shifts and wanders, the North Star remains still…a constant guide for those navigating the deep woods or the open water. It creates the comfort that when the world feels like its spinning out of control, true leadership is about being the one thing that doesn’t move. Yesterday, as federal indictments and executive pressure intensified, Minnesota’s fixed points held steady, with unyielding judges and vigilant neighbors proving that even in the darkest night, we know exactly where we stand.”

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

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We Showed Up for Minnesota.

What’s happening in Minnesota right now is too heavy to carry alone, and I wasn’t about to pretend otherwise. So we built a virtual circle, invited in some magick, and let people show up however they needed to.

And show up they did.

People came from all over: Kansas City, California, British Columbia, Seattle, and yes, right here in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Real humans who give a shit.

Our certified Theta Healer, Kyle Fisk, led us through a grounding meditation that moved through the seventh plane of consciousness — which, if you’re not familiar with Theta healing, is basically the energetic zip code of unconditional love and the Creator’s frequency. Kyle has this incredibly gentle, steady way of guiding you there, and I watched the whole room (virtually) exhale together. We visualized light filling the dark corners. We sent love to Minnesota’s people. We held space for the grief that’s sitting in people’s bodies right now.

If you missed our live zoom session, you can get all the benefits of the group healing by watching the replay!

The caregivers, both here in Minnesota and across the globe, are struggling. The therapists, the CNAs, the healthcare workers. The people who are literally holding everyone else together are quietly falling apart in the margins. The helpers need help too. ALWAYS.

The vicarious trauma that healers carry when the world keeps throwing tragedy at their doorstep. It’s real, it’s heavy, and we don’t talk about it enough. Today, we talked about it.

The conversation kept circling back to community. “We The People” isn’t a slogan, it’s a living, breathing, active choice we make when we decide to show up for each other.

Today, we did something. We sent real love into a real crisis. And through Venmo donations (thank you, thank you, THANK YOU), 100% of the funds raised are going directly to GoFundMe accounts for Minnesota families who need rental assistance by March 1. Right now.

Kyle is available for personal Theta healing sessions if today stirred something in you that wants more one-on-one attention. His info will be in the recording post. The recording itself will be up on Fierce Love Substack soon so that anyone who registered can revisit it whenever they need a drop of unconditional love.

Book with Kyle

We built a container of fierce, glittery, defiant love for a state that is carrying so much right now.

Minnesota, we see you. We feel you. And we are not going anywhere.

If you want to donate, every single dollar goes to families in need.

Venmo @Teri-Leigh-1

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

Subscribe now

Imagine the Anthem
Oh what I want to see
By the dawn’s early light
Is a safe peaceful world
With no reason to fight
Let those stripes and bright stars Stand for peace not more war
For the beauty we watch
wherever children are beaming
No more rockets’ red glare
No bombs bursting in air
Sweet dreams through the night when we’re no longer scared
Oh say can that star spangled banner yet wave
Within a world of peace
Where we all can be safe.

UPDATE

We raised over $500 to donate to rental assistance in the Twin Cities.

Here’s the gofundme campaign we supported. It is hosted by Shobi’s Table, a local pay-as-you-can food truck that serves immigrant clientele as its customer base.

They are less than $1000 from their goal, as of 2:03pm on 2/26/26.

Addiction Has an Aura

I know what addiction looks like in a person’s energy field.

And now, I am seeing it on a global scale, as Power is an Addiction. It’s showing up en masse through the immigration raids, the Epstein files, the arrest of British Monarchy, the fall of spiritual leaders like Deepak Chopra, and more.

The aura of addiction, especially addiction to power, is the scariest and ugliest vision I’ve ever experienced in my tender synesthetic world.

I’ve seen addiction up close, in people I love dearly. Addiction is a hungry parasite that is as sneaky and charismatic as a vampire. It feels like a black hole, sucking life-force into a vacuum and leaving behind a cold, chilling emptiness that remains perpetually hungry. It has a dark center with pointy syringe-like edges that are always reaching, always poking, always looking for the next thing to consume.

Every horror-movie monster, from Alien to Predator to Pennywise to Freddy Krueger, is a representation of what I see in the aura of those consumed by addiction.

What I’ve discovered recently, since ICE invaded Minnesota, is that same aura exists on those in positions of power.

Power is an addiction.
And right now, I feel it everywhere, as evidenced by the increasing violent actions of ICE in Minnesota.

I’ve watched this power-addiction aura intensify in real time, and the footage has marked the stages.

I saw it in the video of an ICE detained Mubashir Khalif Hussen at Cedar-Riverside in early December 2025, even though he offered to show proof of citizenship. He was later released miles away from where he was taken. Mubashir provided written testimony for a congressional field hearing.

I saw it again, only stronger, once Bovino came to MN, on the video of the agents pulling Aliya Rahman from her vehicle and detaining her as she was going to a doctor’s appointment for a traumatic brain injury.

I saw it again, much stronger, in the face and eyes of Jonathan Ross after he shot Renee Good, and in the frantic energy of the agents guarding her body, refusing to offer or allow medical aid before EMTs arrived.

I saw it grow as I watched videos of ICE agents attacking a neighborhood in North Minneapolis with tear gas and pepper balls after two agents shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.

I saw it even hungrier, and much more manic, in the men who attacked and shot, and celebrated the death of Alex Pretti.

Just like a drug addict builds a tolerance to the substance, needing more of the drug in higher doses, the ICE agents here in Minneapolis have developed a hunger for power that has grown like an uncontrollable addiction over the three months since they first arrived here. As a collective, these agents’ auras have grown darker and hungrier and more black-hole-like over time.

Power Behaves Like a Drug

Power is a drug.
And now it appears in the auras of those with authoritarian power.
I can’t unsee it.

The neural reward loop of power works like any highly addictive substance. The first hit feels like everything, then the body adapts and tolerance builds. What used to satisfy stops working, so you need more: more control, more dominance, more compliance, more spectacle. As the tolerance climbs, empathy burns out, because empathy slows down the next hit. Eventually the behavior escalates into cruelty that looks like frantic, glitchy grasping—overdose energy.

That’s where we are right now. The people at the very top of our federal power structure are glitching. They can’t get enough, snd when an addict can’t get enough, they self-destruct, taking the people enabling them down with them.

The Epstein files are the clearest example of this self-destruction in slow motion.

As more documents surface, we’re watching an entire ecosystem of power addiction unravel, and the names keep coming. Monarchs. CEOs. Politicians. Spiritual Gurus. And yes, Deepak Chopra, whose name reportedly appears thousands of times in those files, a man who built an empire on spiritual wisdom and the language of consciousness.

Power Addiction doesn’t care what costume you put on: linen pants, a crown, a suit, a mala bead necklace. The hunger is the same, and the aura is the same. When admiration becomes supply and followers become currency and accountability becomes optional, the drug takes over every single time.

The self-destruction is always public.

The cover-ups require more cover-ups. Prince Andrew gives an interview thinking he can charm his way through it and ends up the first monarch to be arrested in over 400 years. The Epstein network thought its walls would hold forever, but the higher the tolerance climbs, the less careful the addict becomes, and eventually the whole thing collapses under its own weight.

You Cannot Reason With an Addict Who Doesn’t Want Help

So what do we do?

You cannot reason with an addict who doesn’t want help. You cannot logic your way into getting them to see clearly. You cannot bargain, plead, explain, or shame them into sobriety. Anyone who has loved someone deep in their addiction knows this truth in their bones. The attempts to reason with them don’t just fail, they fuel the cycle, cuz attention, even the outraged kind, is still energy flowing toward the addiction.

And this is exactly what Minnesota is modeling right now, and why the world is suddenly taking notice of this quiet and humble “flyover” state that houses the headwaters of the Mississippi River and is nestled between the Great Lakes.

Minnesota Is Showing Us the Way

In a recent conversation with Stephen Colbert, Texas State Rep. James Talarico said that this is not a left vs. right issue, but rather, it is a top vs. bottom issue. Minnesota understands this and is working from the bottom, under the surface, to activate and expand a mycelial network of support.

Think about what happens in a forest fire. It appears like this force from above renders total destruction on the land. But underneath the scorched earth, the mycelial network (fierce love), that vast underground web of fungal threads that connects root to root and tree to tree, is not only surviving, it’s activating. It’s been there the whole time, quiet and invisible, and the fire is exactly the catalyst it needed to accelerate its work. New growth doesn’t come from fighting the fire. It comes from what’s already alive underneath it.

Minnesota’s response to the federal power surge wasn’t to debate or negotiate with the machine. Minnesota knows we need to activate the fierce love of our mycelial network, turning toward each other in the form of hyper-local, immediate, neighbor-to-neighbor love, rapid response networks, mutual aid.

Minnesota is a mycelial network of Fierce Love at work.

I hope you enjoy this guest post by my dear friend Amanda Saint. She is a sensitive soul who has dedicated her life to the art of writing. Her work in Mindful Writing is ground-breaking. I highly recommend her Writing Sangha.

I was a quiet child. Not shy, exactly. Just quiet. Watchful. Feeling everything deeply and saying very little of it out loud. Because I’d learned that silence was safer.

I grew up in a family where anger was the only permitted emotion. My mother’s rage. My stepfather’s violence. My step-siblings bullying. The chaos and unpredictability that meant I was always scanning, always bracing, always trying to read the room before the room could hurt me.

In that environment, my feelings — all of them — were a problem. Not because I was loud or demanding, but because I felt too much, too intensely, about too many things. I cried easily. I cared deeply. I was moved by beauty and devastated by cruelty and frightened by their anger and unable to hide any of it as well as they seemed to want me to. My emotional range, in a family that only knew how to express rage, made everyone around me very uncomfortable.

So I learned to swallow it. To turn my feelings inward. To become very still on the outside while everything churned beneath the surface.

For a long time, that stillness looked like coping. It wasn’t. It was disappearing.

The Mindful Writer

The Mindful Writer is where we live and write more mindfully and use our words to bring more peace, love and unity to the world.

By Amanda Saint

I found a love of writing when I was very young. Because the page was the one place where I didn’t have to pretend. I could bring whatever was actually happening inside me, all the feelings I had to hide, as there was no one there to be disturbed by them. No anger in response to my sadness. No discomfort at my tenderness. No impatience with my need to try and make sense of things.

The page simply received whatever I brought. And received it again the next day. And the next.

That’s not a small thing, for someone whose inner life had always been treated as too much. It was, in many ways, everything.

That early love of writing never left me. It became the thread I followed through my whole life. Into journalism, where I learned to find the human story inside every subject I wrote about. Into communications work, where I discovered how much words matter — how the right ones can open people up and the wrong ones can shut them down. And eventually into fiction, where I could finally tell the kinds of stories I’d always needed to tell — about complicated families, about the long shadows childhood casts, about what it takes to find your way back to yourself.

Writing two novels and a novella taught me things about my own interior world that years of trying to make sense of it in my head never could. There is something about the sustained act of putting feelings into words, of writing toward truth rather than away from it, that does something to the writer. Moves things. Clears things. Makes space.

And then, about three years ago, something shifted again. I began to understand that the writing I most wanted to share wasn’t about fiction at all. It was about what I’d discovered writing could do — not for the manuscript, but for the person holding the pen. I began teaching people to write not as aspiring authors but as human beings with feelings they need to process, stories they need to tell themselves, lives they need to make sense of.

What I’ve found, again and again, is that the people who benefit most from this kind of writing are the ones who feel things deeply. The ones who have always been told, in one way or another, that their emotional world is inconvenient. Too intense. Too much. The ones who learned early to manage their feelings quietly and by themselves, if at all.

These are the people who, when they finally give themselves permission to write honestly — not beautifully, not skillfully, just honestly — discover that there was never anything wrong with their depth of feeling. That it was always a gift, not a flaw. A way of being present to life that most people never fully access.

Writing doesn’t teach them this. It makes them remember it.

Mindful writing — writing as a practice of presence rather than a pursuit of perfection — is not about craft. It’s about sitting down with what’s actually alive in you today. The grief you haven’t had space to feel. The joy that felt too fragile to claim. The confusion about something that happened, the thing you’ve been carrying without knowing quite where to put it.

It’s about writing your life. Your feelings. Your experience of being human in the world right now, in this body, at this age, with everything you’re navigating.

And it’s about doing that in community. Because there’s something that happens when we write in the presence of others who are doing the same — something that doesn’t happen when we write alone. A sense of being witnessed without being judged. Of not being the only one struggling or searching or trying to make sense of things.

I want to say to anyone who has spent their life feeling things too deeply, caring too much, being moved too easily by the state of the world and the people in it that it is not a malfunction. That it’s a gift. And writing — not to be good at it, not to produce anything, just to show up and let the feelings out onto the page — is one of the most powerful ways I know to honour it.

The page doesn’t judge you. It never has. Whatever you bring — however large, however raw, however unresolved — it can hold it. All it asks is that you show up.

I’ve recently opened The Writing Sangha — a women-only mindful writing practice community for exactly this. We gather not to produce but to practice. Using our words as a path to healing, presence, and connection with ourselves, each other, and our world. Weekly writing sessions, monthly deeper circles, an online space where I’m actively present throughout the week sharing prompts, insights, and snippets of what I’ve been moved to write, as well as four complete courses to work through at your own pace.

You don’t need to be a writer. You only need a willingness to show up and write honestly, in the company of women who understand what it means to feel deeply.

If it’s calling to you, I’d love to have you there. You can find out more here.

Amanda Saint is the founder of The Mindful Writer, an award-winning author and publisher, and a mindfulness mentor. She lives nomadically with her husband, John, has been teaching writing for fifteen years, and believes that writing our lives with honesty and compassion is one of the most healing things we can do for ourselves and our world.

Good News in Minnesota

Sunday February 15, 2026

• small community churches that are increasing their community outreach are experiencing drastic increases in congregation size, with atheists even attending, just so that they can connect with a community in outreach.

• Wednesday, February 18 is Dine Out or Donate day at local community restaurants. Here are just a few you could support and donate to.

  • Pedro Walcott of North Star Deli says the only reason he is open is because community rallied behind him. “I feel cared for, watched, and protected.”

  • Patti Soskin of “Yum! Kitchen and Bakery” has increased their costs by driving people to and from work.

  • Tammy Wong of Rainbow Chinese Restaurant & Bar says they don’t have enough customers and are dependent on community support.

• Tow Truck driver Juan Leon has recovered over 250 vehicles abandoned by ICE after taking people. He returned them to their rightful families and refused to take a dime.

• Luminaries lined 50th Street from 28th to 34th on Friday - organized by the Nokomis East Neighborhood Association and Branches Church.

• Haven Watch’s fundraiser has reached over $1M. HavenWatch is the organization that greets detainees at the Whipple Building. They are released without their personal effects, no phone, and often without proper winter gear. An estimated 60-70% of those released are US citizens.

• A GoFundMe campaign for Haven Watch launched on Jan 17th raised more that $666,000 from 9,300 donors. Their website has expanded into a broader community resource with legal and immigration questions, healthcare referrals, lost wages, rental assistance, and more. This is an organization and website with the motto “No One Walks Alone” that started just two months ago!

• Stand With Minnesota connected 120 families with donations in the month of January.

Keep giving a shit.

Because we do.

Loving you fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

p.s. if you are a MN Twin Cities woman - I’m hosting a meet-up on Saturday Feb 21st at 2pm. DM me to RSVP and get the address.

Monday February 16, 2026

Do you remember that mother of a 3mo old who was taken, leaving her 16yo to care for her 3mo old?

The baby had been purely on breast milk and wouldn’t take formula, so a local resident donated her breast milk, and started a mutual aid and gofundme campaign for moms and babies in need.

GOOD NEWS! That gofundme campaign raised $200K in just a few weeks —she used some of that money to pay bond and fly the mother home to reunite with her baby to continue the legal process of her asylum request!

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

• a community in Alaska sent a box of Mental Health Kits to a community in St. Paul. These kits are lunchbox size packs of things like bubbles, coloring books, stress balls, colored pencils, key chains, gum, worry stones, and more.

• Indigenous tribal leaders launched an emergency ID drive at the American Indian Center ensuring that every community member has the documentation to prove their citizenship and assert their rights.

• “Ink for Justice” - Tattoo artists and studios across the Twin Cities have raised thousands in “flash tattoo” fundraisers. A popular tattoo is the rebel loon.

• First Avenue ICEOUT Benefit, organized by Twin Cities United Performers sold out.

• High school teachers, nurses, and therapists are serving extra duty as “ice patrol” - following school buses through their routes so that ICE can’t get too close.

It’s important to note, we aren’t sharing specific names and individual stories because all the mutual aid efforts are kept very secret for protection.

It’s also important to note that protests happen every single day. Many of them. In the suburbs, at the Whipple Building, at Bďote, on rural street corners, on highway overpasses, at Target stores, and so many more places.

Keep giving a shit.

I fiercely love you all,

TeriLeigh💜

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

• Comedian Dave Chappelle recently offered two short-notice pop-up shows in the Twin Cities, donating the proceeds to MN Mutual Aid, and visited the Alex Pretti Memorial.

• The Big Turn Music Festival in Red Wing MN is this weekend. This is a rare indoors winter music festival with the mission and belief that the Big Turn is to turn toward the idea that culture doesn’t stop cuz conditions are harsh. This festival turns churches, bars, basements, and many other unique venues into music stages for the winter crowd.

• First Lady Gwen Walz attended the Women’s March weekly protest that happens every Monday at 1pm on the corner of Snelling and Selby.

• Our beloved Senator Hoffman received a standing ovation as he returned to the Senate floor for the first time after an assassination attempt on his life last year.

• Our beloved Senator Melissa Hortmann, who was assassinated last year was honored on our Senate floor.

• West St Paul Northern Service Center offers a popup fresh produce giveaway monthly. County Commissioner Joe Atkins volunteered to helpd distribute 25,000 pounds of fresh produce to local families in need. This year, families who are not in need are showing up to collect the food and bring it to those in need.

• Insight Brewing is painting a giant mural of the Rebel Loon logo on their taproom wall.

• Cities for Safe & Stable Communities is an coalition of 17 mayors of cities on both sides of the aisle. This coalition formed just 10 weeks ago and is actively speaking out.

While the weather has warmed up considerably at the same time as the feds have promised a draw-down, we Minnesotans know that winter isn’t over. We are expecting our usual dumping of Feb/Mar blizzards (the snowiest weeks of the year). We also know this probably means a different kind of ICE energy to resist.

The ICE presence here has shifted. They are acting more sinisterly, trickery is their heaviest hand now. They are pretending to break down in their cars to ask for help. They are showing up as Uber and Lyft drivers. And they are staking out for surveillance. I heard from my brother this morning that they are staking themselves outside a predominantly Hmong church to watch and stop the mutual aid deliveries coming and going from that church.

Please know, I don’t like calling this a “fight” because we are not fighting. We are not attacking. We are not violent. We are defending. We are resisting. And we are doing our best to do so as peacefully and according to our fierce love values.

I’ve had a number of Substack friends talk to me about wanting to visit Minnesota. Earlier I said no, because we would feel like we have to host you, and that was too much on our plates. But, these friends are now saying they want to come in the spring and summer to spend money here and help with the rebuild. We would love that! please come spend your money here and get to know our amazing diverse culture and beautiful land.

Keep giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

Thursday, February 19, 2026

• Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty reports that without cooperation from federal government to provide evidence in the shootings of Renee Good & Alex Pretti, over 1000 submissions of independent evidence (citizen testimonies and videos) have been made.

• Marking the first time consequences have been issued for violation of a court order, Judge Laura Provinzino found Special Agent US Attorney Matthew Isihara in civil contempt for violation of a court order to release Rigoberto Soto-Jimenez from detention without his personal effects. Soto-Jimenez was released, in Texas without his identification documentation. Isihara will be fined $500/day until Soto-Jimenez’s personal effects are returned. (there are over 100 incidents of court orders for release that have been ignored. many detainees are shipped to Texas within 12-24 hours of detention, and if they are released, they are released in Texas without their personal effects and are left to find their own way back to MN).

• Saturday Feb 28th is the annual Bed Race for Bridges where Minnesotans dress up in wild costumes and sled down the hills at Buck Hill on beds. This is a fundraiser for the non-profit organization Bridging, which provides furniture and household goods to people transitioning out of homelessness. We expect a really unique display of costumes this year.

• MN Love Fundraiser delivered $123,000 in checks to Rapid Response Fund and the Immigrant Defense Network after an 18 day drive that shipped 800 prints, 6500 stickers, 1800 t-shirts, and 800 hoodies.

• The MN DNR eagle cam is reporting evidence that the eagle couple has laid their first eggs!

• The Singing Resistance has gone internationally viral and is now calling for a nationwide day of song. No official date has been set yet.

• U2 released a surprise anti-ICE song honoring Renee Good.

Here in the Twin Cities we had an average snowfall during rush hour last night. It didn’t stop us from getting out to protest. There were numerous reports of “brand new larger vehicles with blackened windows and no front license plates” ended up in the ditch when they tried to speed up to pass people on the roads. Seems ICE doesn’t know how to drive in the snow, especially when a good freezing rain hit the ground before the snow came.

This time of year, the massive snowfalls of late February and into March always bring out the best of the best of Minnesotans as we dig each other out of the “white stuff”…particularly around the time of the MN State High School Basketball and Hockey Tournaments. I personally predict that the best of Minnesota is yet to come!

keep giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely,

TeriLeigh💜

Friday, February 20, 2026

Lots of really good news today.

I woke up a bit on the bouncey-side of the bed today!

• The Bemidji MN Resistance Choir has been practicing and will debut soon.

• Brandi Carlile is offering her Be Human: a Concert for Minneapolis at the Target Center tomorrow as a live-stream with concert proceeds going to Advocates for Human Rights.

• Minnesota Legislature has introduced 11 bills to curb the use of force by federal agents.

• The Bond Between, a local nonprofit supporting the pets and animals impacted by ICE hosted a “puppy party” to reduce stress and anxiety and increase oxytocin for students at Roosevelt High School - the school where ICE pepper sprayed and attacked students during dismissal just hours after Renee Good was killed.

• The Ramsey County (the county for St. Paul MN) has pledged to investigate and prosecute all past and future incidents of use of force by federal officers.

• Thousands of peaceful protestors filled the State Capitol on Wednesday 2/18 at a rally demanding accountability.

• Nick Benson, as part of MN50501 has been tracking, monitoring and publicizing the deportation flights out of MSP airport. He has logged over 3000 people being sent out of Minnesota since the beginning of January alone, AND he reports that the flights have fewer people on them now!

• Minneapolis has been named the happiest city in the United States, according to a new ranking that considers metro areas worldwide. It’s the only city ranked “gold” among a list of 250 cities in this London based research from Institute for Quality of Life.

• The US Women’s Hockey team has won the gold medal at the Olympics, and many of the team members come from the Minnesota Frost Women’s Hockey team.

• The city of Minneapolis has confirmed that it is working to preserve the Renee Good and Alex Pretti Memorials permanently.

Did you know that in 2024 a mechanical engineering team from the University of Minnesota successfully sent the new MN State Flag on its first-ever flight to space?

Thank you to everyone submitting good news to me via DM and comment.

I’m officially putting out a call for crowd-sourcing good news! This practice of looking for the good in my feeds every day took me out of the doom and gloom I was feeling after Alex died. I invite you to join me. Submit your MINNESOTA good news to me via DM and I’ll add them to my published lists.

Also, thank you to the kind souls who sent me “ope…you made a mistake…” messages. I appreciate your kindness in your corrections. All oopsies have been edited to correct.

thanks for giving a shit

I love you all fiercely!

TeriLeigh💜

Saturday, February 21, 2026

• A kidney transplant recipient who was arrested Feb 5th in Rochester MN was denied the medical attention he needed and was flown by DHS to a detention facility in El Paso Texas. By court order, he is now home reunited with his family and working with his medical team to recover from the last weeks’ disruption from his treatment plan.

• Edwin Dastro, after winning the $2B Powerball jackpot is dedicating his fortune to rebuilding homes lost in the devastating Eaton Fire. Although this is not MN good news, I feel it is important to show that some billionaires are directing their wealth to good causes.

• St. Paul City Council voted on Wednesday to require all law enforcement officers operating in the city to show their faces and to display badges.

• During a heavy snowfall, Micah Stewart, a volunteer caretaker for the Alex Pretti Memorial cleared the snow around the memorial to read “HERO”

• Mercado Central, an immigrant owned business, is now receiving a boost in business as local retired community members and church groups have started filling the business at lunchtimes.

If you haven’t seen my video-post from last night, check it out here.

This is my first-hand account of the creepy and weird behaviors of ICE. They were heavily present in downtown St. Paul last night. It felt like ICE was patrolling the streets saying “we’re in charge here” and the SPPD and State Patrol were patrolling ICE saying “not on our watch”. It was very weird. At least that is how I choose to view it. I felt supported by SPPD and State Patrol as I drove home from downtown last night.

Please keep sending me your examples of Fierce Love and Good News in Minnesota.

thank you for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

Leave a comment

As sensitive souls, we exhale way more than we inhale.

We give, give, give, and give some more. . . and then wonder why we end up feeling depleted, exhausted, fatigued, and extra short on cash.

This is a lesson the entire state of Minnesota is learning the hard way right now.
As a culture, we are over-givers, and now with the ICE invasion, we are learning how to RECEIVE in the form of support and mutual aid from across the globe.

We gotta inhale!

As sensitive soul “exhalers” we pour ourselves out — care, time, energy, devotion — and somehow we keep pouring even when we have very little trickles filling ourselves back up. The abundance we create for others somehow doesn’t flow back to us in the same way. Magickally, emotionally, spiritually, financially... we’re all-giving, all-generous, and very little receiving.

We are so flippin’ bad at receiving that even when people offer generosity back to us in kind, we turn it down!

“Let me buy your dinner.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t accept that.”

🤦🏻‍♀️

What if I told you this is giving generosity is one of the biggest roots of your money struggles?

And, it can be rewired through your breathing habits.

Exhalers vs Inhalers: A Metaphor That Explains Everything

Scientists have discovered that your breath has a signature, like a respiratory fingerprint. They can identify you with 97% accuracy just by watching how you breathe over time. The ratio of your inhales to exhales, the tiny pauses between breaths, the rhythm your nervous system creates — it’s uniquely yours.

It’s also incredibly revealing.

Here’s where the woo-woo comes in. Your breathing habits reveal how you move through the world.

The Exhalers — that’s us, the sensitive souls. Deep, generous out-breath patterns. Nervous system tuned to parasympathetic states, to connection and care. We’re the nurturers, healers, teachers, therapists, the people who show up with hot-dish when someone’s world falls apart. Our default setting is outward. We dispense love like it’s our job (because often, it literally is).

The Inhalers — the deal-makers, the executives, the people who seem to magnetize money and opportunity without guilt. Their breath patterns lean toward inhalation. Nervous system alert and acquisitive. They’re wired for intake, for gathering resources, for claiming space.

Neither is better.

But, the painful truth is that in an economic system designed by and for inhalers, we exhalers are playing a game with different rules and wondering why we keep losing.

Right now, stop and take a deep breath.

Was it easy to inhale, or was it easier to exhale?

If your nervous system tilts toward exhaling — toward giving — you’re probably carrying an invisible set of beliefs that sound something like:

• I give first.

• I nurture first.

• I support others before myself.

• Connection matters more than money.

• My worth comes from how much I can offer.

In real life, this shows up as beautiful generosity and devastating self-abandonment:

We can end up chronically undercharging for our work. (I’m totally guilty of that.) We say yes before we can even contemplate the possibility of saying no. We give and give until we’re running on fumes, wondering why the universe doesn’t reciprocate. We feel guilty — actually guilty — when someone pays us well for what we do.

It’s not that we’re bad with money. We’re not irresponsible or naive. Rather, we’re wired for outflow, and our bodies haven’t been taught how to receive.

The parasympathetic nervous system — that rest-digest-receive part of your physiology — is intimately tangled up with unconscious beliefs about worthiness and safety. When our breath patterns prioritize exhaling, when our nervous systems default to giving, our internal systems aren’t calibrated for claiming abundance.

The Body Holds the Key (And the Lock)

Most money mindset work focuses on thoughts, affirmations, shifting beliefs from the neck up. But your relationship with abundance lives in your body. In your breath. In your nervous system’s automatic response to receiving.

And, your breath can be retrained.

Studies show that intentionally changing your breathing patterns — especially the relationship between inhalation and exhalation — can rewire autonomic states, enhance emotional regulation, and literally change how safe your body feels in the world. Breathing practices are already used clinically for trauma, anxiety, and stress resilience.

Why not apply them to your relationship with money?

Sensitive souls carry a sacred gift: we bring compassion into the world, we heal, we hold space, we give with open hearts and steady hands. The world desperately needs what we offer.

But the cycle can’t complete if we don’t inhale enough, if we don’t learn how to receive.

Money, in both psychological and spiritual terms, is simply the form energy takes in our economy. To block receiving is to block the flow that sustains your gifts. When you refuse the inhale, you’re not being noble — you’re choking off the very thing that lets you keep giving.

Your generosity is sacred. Your receiving is equally sacred. One cannot exist without the other.

If you’re reading this and you felt your body quietly nodding… I want you to know: you’re exactly who we built Abundant Money Mindset for.

AMM is a 9-week container where sensitive souls learn how to inhale again—without shutting down, overthinking, people-pleasing, or spiritually bypassing their way around money. We work with the nervous system and with real-world tools, so receiving starts to feel safe, clean, and honest in your body… and your bank account gets to come along for the ride.

Come as you are. Bring your generous heart. We’ll help you build a relationship with money that can love you back.

Apply Here

Bibliography

Van Diest I., et al. Inhalation/Exhalation Ratio Modulates the Effect of Slow Breathing on Heart Rate Variability and Relaxation, Applied Psychophysiology & Biofeedback, 2014.

Bae D., et al. Increased Exhalation to Inhalation Ratio Enhances High-Frequency Heart Rate Variability, Psychophysiology, 2021.

Russo M.A., et al. Physiological Effects of Slow Breathing in Healthy Humans, PMC, 2017.

Giorgi F., et al. The Science of Slow Breathing and Heart Rate Variability, PubMed, ongoing research.

Breathing Patterns Show Differences Between Individuals, Psychology Today, 2025.

Balban M.Y., et al. Breathwork and Mood Improvements, PMC, 2023.

Bentley T.G.K., et al. Breathing Practices for Stress and Anxiety Reduction, PMC, 2023.

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This is my way of spiritually understanding the pain of this moment in history,
and keeping hope alive in my soul. As a chakra-expert, this is my reality.
I see it. I feel it. I’m experiencing it myself.

Chakras are real.

And every human being in Minnesota right now is getting a massive chakra upgrade.

A chakra is the place where nerve lines intersect —72 million chakra intersections in your body.

The chakras are the places where information converges and gets routed. The seven major chakras are simply the biggest “junctions” along your spine—major traffic circles for your nervous system.

And. . . your system has a dimmer switch.

Sometimes you need bright, fierce, full-beam energy. Sometimes you need soft, low lamp light. Your body adjusts the dimmer constantly, and those adjustments show up as hormones, moods, sensations, impulses, sleep patterns, digestion, tears, courage, and the feeling in your belly when you know something is off.

When your world gets turned upside-down and inside-out and normal doesn’t exist anymore, your chakras get overloaded with new information and have to re-calibrate their dimmer switch functionality.

Which is why, Minnesota’s chakra system is getting a massive upgrade as a result of Operation Metro Surge occupation by ICE and DHS.

Root Chakra: Minnesota in High Gear

Minnesota’s dominant chakra is the Root.

The root chakra is the base layer of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Am I safe? Do I have food and nourishment? Do I have shelter and support? Is my body okay and are my people okay?

When basic safety and survival are challenged and these needs are compromised, the root chakra kicks into high gear, which is what we Minnesotan’s live every winter when facing sub-zero temps and blizzard conditions for months on end.

Operation Metro Surge has activated our root chakra circuitry, only this time it is a different kind of ICE. We are defending each other from violent forces as we also raise funds, collect donations, and deliver basic needs to those more at risk. Our people are standing closer together, because nobody should have to be alone when the world is unsafe and the ground is unstable.

I’ve said it before, Minnesota has a deep and complex mycelial network of support. And this occupation has activated the network into high gear, growing that reticulated root system deeper and wider and stronger in every way.

This occupation is demanding that Minnesota’s Root chakra matures. We are no longer dependent on outside systems or forces to support us, we are supporting ourselves, 100 percent. We used to trust and depend on our federal government, and now we are supporting ourselves against it.

And we’ve got this!

Heart Chakra: Minnesota Learning to Receive

Minnesota’s secondary dominant chakra is the Heart, the married partner to the Root. Put simply, we know how to love, and love deeply. While the Root builds the house, the Heart opens the door and puts the kettle on.

While Minnesota’s Heart chakra is strong, it is also more than a little… leaky.

The heart and lungs are designed to give and receive all day long, inhaling and exhaling, pumping in and pumping out. However, Minnesota’s cultural rhythm has leaned too heavily on the pumping out and the exhale.

We give more than we receive. Our default response to a compliment is to decline it and offer three more in return. For example, Minnesota pays about $6.88 in federal taxes for every $1.00 it receives back in direct federal support.

We are good at pouring love. We invite in asylum seekers and make them family, welcoming refugees for decades: the Hmong, the Somalis, the Karens, and so many more. We integrate people into our neighborhoods, our schools, our churches, our workforces, our potlucks, and our lived sense of “us.” That is a community that knows how to make belonging.

And, we give too much. Before all this happened, we had a massive leak in the Heart chakra, and it showed up in the most Minnesota way possible: we trusted, we assumed good faith, we kept giving, and massive fraud found room to grow. Our goodwill went way way too far. The leak was the lack of protection around love.

Operation Metro Surge is forcing a different kind of Heart work now. As we build boundaries against ICE, we are learning boundaries in all ways. We love our immigrants. We want them here. But we have to be better about protecting our boundaries.

And, we have to be better at receiving. Through the ICE occupation we are actually asking for help from other states and communities, and we are receiving it, teaching us that love gets to have a spine.

Minnesota is learning how to stop over-giving and to let support come toward us without flinching, without minimizing, without waving it off, without insisting we are “fine.”

Minnesota is learning how to inhale.

Core Chakra: Minnesota Finding Its Spine

Minnesota’s Core chakra has always been on the softer side.

We are overly humble, putting others first, staying quiet, polite, “reasonable” and under-the-radar. We don’t like attention. We let our root and heart take the lead so that the core doesn’t have to flex.

Operation Metro Surge is changing that.

Core chakra energy is personal power. It is the inner fire that says, “This is who we are, and this is what we stand for.” Integrity with a backbone, and boundaries that do not wobble when pressure shows up.

Well, pressure has shown up in the form of a big-bad-bully challenging every core value we hold dear.

ICE is forcing Minnesota to put ourselves—our people, our values, our sense of right—above the intimidation of “highest authority.” The bully keeps pushing new rules, new demands, new distortions, and Minnesota keeps responding with the same unwavering Core message.

No.

We keep documenting. We keep filing legal cases. We keep doing things according to our true values, even when it would be easier to fold.

As a result, the world is taking notice, and we can’t downplay our power to deflect attention anymore. Minnesota is standing center stage now, visible to the whole world, and we are learning how to be seen without shrinking.

We are learning how to own who we are, and how to say it out loud.

Throat Chakra: Minnesota Finding Its Voice

Minnesota has always been a little hush-hush in the throat.

If we don’t have anything nice to say, we don’t say anything at all. If we do have something real to say, we often wrap it in neutral language that sounds polite and leaves room for interpretation. “That’s different.” “Interesting.” “Huh.” It has always been hard to read what a Minnesotan really thinks, because we have been trained to sand down the sharp edges of truth until nobody bleeds and everybody can still eat hotdish together.

Operation Metro Surge has changed that.

This occupation has pushed Minnesota’s throat chakra into a new octave. We have learned to swear, yell and chant. We have also learned a more Minnesota way of using our voice, and it is not just volume. It is repetition and consistency through our steady insistence of common sense. We keep naming our laws and our policies, issuing judge’s orders, documenting the injustices, and repeating the same truth again and again.

And mostly, Minnesota is singing.

We are singing our truth in gentle, beautiful, vibratory, resonant song. This is what a throat chakra upgrade looks like. The voice comes online, and the truth comes out.

The vibration of our song is changing the collective energy of the world.

I swear I can feel Prince guiding us from the ancestor realm, proud of our every move, reminding us that Minnesota has always known how to turn love into sound.

Crown Chakra: Minnesota’s Wise Ones Holding the Line

In Minnesota, the Crown chakra is showing up through our wise ones.

Our spiritual leaders, clergy, and Native Elders, our teachers, professors, and educators. These are the sages spearheading most of this resistance. They are coordinating and organizing, building the grassroots containers, showing up in public with prayer, with moral clarity, with steady presence, and with the kind of courage that does not need to shout to be powerful.

And they are reaching out to other states, guiding teaching, connecting, and networking.

Simply put, here in Minnesota we are led by Faith.

When the Root goes into high gear, when the Heart learns to receive, when the Core finds its spine, and when the Throat starts singing, the Crown is the part that keeps it all pointed toward what is right.

It keeps Minnesota remembering who we are, even while we evolve into who we are becoming.

Fierce Love.

Cuz LOVE is all there is.

God says so.

February 7th, 2026

Today’s Good News from Minneapolis list

I’m losing count of how many parts I’m on

• Needle and Skein a yarn and knitting store in a small Minneapolis suburb, St. Louis Park (where the Cohen brothers were raised) sold a $5 pattern for a red resistance cap with a braided tassle to raise funds. It went global and has raised over $650,000!

• Not On Native Land Event gathered this morning at the Whipple Federal Building, led by indigenous leadership and clergy from around the country to pray for peace and get centered through the chaos.

• When a mom of a newborn and 16yo was detained, the 16yo did what she could to feed her infant sibling. Then a mom in Minneapolis named Bre gave her 300 ounces of her own breast milk. Bre has now started organizing to support all mothers and babies impacted by ICE.

• Fuzzy Loon Designs, a small 7-person mom-and-pop 10yo business has had such response to their stickers and designs they are now donating a large percentage of their profits to mutual aid.

• Comma, a Bookshop in Minneapolis has had hundreds of online orders from out of state that they are announcing that they don’t need donations. They want all donations to go to mutual aid and community organizations.

• University of Minnesota students chained themselves to Morrill Hall, the administrative building demanding that the university be declared a sanctuary campus.

We Minnesotans use the term uffda as both a curse and a prayer. If you’ve never heard the term, it might be time you learn it.

Also, we aren’t giving up. We are MN Vikings football fans. We suffer in pain together even if we never win. This is the true definition of stubborn.

If you want to know where to put your monetary donations, support our BIPOC small businesses buy purchasing gift cards you never intend to use. Find a local school and give to their gofundme campaigns and your money will go directly to the families in need.

People are asking me about coming here to help, to march, to support. I’ve been saying, please don’t come to MN. If you came, we would feel like we would have to host you, and that’s more than our arms can hold right now. Please, organize in your own communities. Coordinate a general strike in your town. Attend a demonstration in your state and make it as big as the tens-of-thousands marching every single Friday here.

Thanks for giving a shit.

And as always, I love you all.

TeriLeigh💜

February 8th, 2026

Good News from Minnesota

Sunday, February 8, 2026

The list is almost getting too long…I can’t keep up with all the smaller scale good things happening that I find in a 20-minute scroll on Facebook. Here’s what I got last night.

• Minnesota music bands are putting together a “Mixtape for Good” with proceeds going to MN Mutual Aid.

• A short drive through Mpls neighborhoods showed that almost every single home displays some sort of ICEOUT signage.

• Operation Dildo Ice was carried out yesterday at the Whipple Federal Building…this one got a bit violent and several people were arrested.

• Wookiefoot has made a song for Minneapolis and is donating proceeds to MN Mutual Aid.

• Hell’s Kitchen (a beloved Mpls restaurant - I used to go there on Easter Sunday every year) is hosting a Lemon Ricotta Hotcakes Breakfast to benefit the Mercado Central Cooperative. One business raising money to keep another business in business. That’s community!

• ArtYouHeart is hosting an ICEOUT Protest Poster Exhibit on Saturday 2/14.

Also, did you know that Minnesota is the state that is the LEAST dependent on federal taxes? For every $6.88 cents paid into federal income taxes from Minnesota, we get back $1.00 in funding.

I’m headed to a Mindful Walk led by the Buddhist Community today.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all.

TeriLeigh💜

February 9th, 2026

Good News from Minnesota

Monday February 9, 2026

• nearly 1000 people gathered for a silent mindful walk led by the Minneapolis Zen Center yesterday (I was there). We walked 2×2 on city streets, visiting George Floyd Square, the Say Their Names Exhibit, and Renee Good’s Memorial. For 90 minutes, we did not speak, we walked to the sounds of occasional bells.

• Minnesota Children’s Museum put together 600 play kits for children sheltering in place.

• Thousands sang put down your weapons, we walk the same ground, it’s okay to change your mind, our love will carry us through at the hotels where ICE sleeps.

• Heart of the Beast brought their giant puppets to PowderHorn Park on Saturday and gathered with puffy frogs, indigenous dancers from Native Nations and thousands of neighbors to honor Nicole Good with sparkles and glitter, one month after her death.

• Twin Cities United Performers, the Singing Resistance of Twin Cities, and Brass Solidarity are organizing musical resistance events across the metro area daily.

• Relish and American Pie spearheaded a coat drive to gather winter gear for people being released from detention at the Whipple Federal Building without coats or their personal effects being returned. The drive gathered so many coats in less than 48 hours that they had to stop the drive and suggest donations go elsewhere.

• Mor Salon and Spa donated 100% of their sales for a week to Minnesota Mutual Aid.

• Pow Wow Grounds Native Coffee Cafe has become a hub for legal observers.

I’ll write a separate note about my experience on the Mindful Walk.

I’ll also write a separate note with suggestions about what you can do from outside Minnesota.

Thanks for giving a shit.

As always, I love you all.

Please keep loving fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

February 10th, 2026

Good News from Minnesota

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

• 125 portraits of Minnesotans from all backgrounds with the words “I Am Human” was projected onto the side of the YWCA on Lake Street.

• FAIR School Crystal - a student-led resistance - created a massive Chain of Love Against ICE by draping a paper chain from the school stairwell while students sang Lift Every Voice And Sing.

• Organizers at Pow Wow Grounds Cafe on Franklin have launched indigenous-led safety patrols.

• Advocacy groups representing 15,000 Minnesota doctors are demanding that health care protections for detainees be a non-negotiable condition for further DHS funding.

• The Dakota and Lakota Oayote have set up lodges outside the Whipple Federal Building that is the center of DHS operations in the Twin Cities.

Governor Walz announced that Tom Homan is likely to have ICEOUT by end the of the week. We aren’t believing this until it happens.

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

February 12th, 2026

Good News from Minnesota

Thursday, February 12, 2026

• Every Thursday from 11:30am-12:30pm at 7400 Metro Blvd in Edina, a group has gathered to protest at the MN MAGA HQ.

• The Parkway Theater is offering Songs for Our Neighbors: Raising Funds for Food & Rent on February 22nd at 7pm.

• The Dakota/Lakota peoples have set up four teepees and a sacred fire as a multi-day prayer vigil outside the Whipple Federal Building to hold sacred ceremony. This land around Fort Snelling carries deep historical weight for Dakota people who are now there reclaiming a sacred Dakota place through presence and ceremony as a way to say “we are on our land, in our way, with our prayers, and we’re staying visible.” The First Nations United at Mni Owe Sni are requesting a meeting with Tim Walz and/or Peggy Flanagan.

• MIRAC - Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee is celebrating Valentine’s Day by hosting a protest on Sunday Feb 15 from 12pm-1pm on the corner of Central & Lowry in NE Mpls, encouraging people to grab lunch at an immigrant owned small business.

• When a Circle Pines restaurant worker was attacked and taken by ICE agents in plain clothes (caught on restaurant security camera), the community raised nearly $25,000 to help bring him home. He is legally in the US on a work visa.

• The Do-Gooders, a mom-led small charity started in January 2025 and led by local Mpls mom Kelly Wilson is now spearheading campaigns to teach other states how to organize and is being featured as a guest on podcasts across the country.

• On Saturday, Feb 14, there will be a “Love Shows Up” rally in St. Louis Park.

• Multiple protests occurred at area Target stores to pressure Target to take a stance against ICE. Yesterday, the Richfield store drew a crowd of over 75 protestors who stood at the entrance (but didn’t stop shoppers from entering or exiting). This is the location where a 17yo US citizen was arrested while working there. Target has not issued a public statement addressing the staging concerns or ICE activity at its stores. Richfield PD made some arrests and released the protestors right away in front of the Target location as the crowd left while singing “we will be back.”

Thanks for giving a shit.

I love you all, fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

February 13th, 2026

Good News from Minnesota

Friday, February 13, 2026

• US District Judge Nancy Brasel issued a Temporary Restraining Order calling for an immediate overhaul of detainee treatment at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building requiring ICE to provide detainees with free, unmonitored legal calls within one hour of arrival and explicitly banning transferring detainees out of state for 72 hours.

• Governor Walz sounded like the good guy dad that he is when he said yesterday, “you don’t get to come in here and break things and just leave,” as he called for the federal government to pay for the damage caused here.

• Tim also announced a $10M Relief Fund offering forgivable loans of up to $25K to businesses. This was launched alongside a new “Shop Local, Stand Together” campaign.

• A volunteer-created tracker website, a crowd-funded endeavor, played a pivotal role in ending the surge. This website tracks federal convoys in near real-time as a “civil radar” that served as community defense that can easily be replicated in other sanctuary cities.

• The principal of Liam Ramos’s school has gone way above and beyond his contracted duties as an educator. He organized his teachers and staff to pack 120 boxes of food every week and deliver them directly to families. He coordinated staff volunteers to walk kids to school so that no child walked alone, ever.

• Voices of Neighbors is a community sourced poetry anthology responding to ICE in Minnesota. Submissions are being collected through march 21 with proceeds going to Immigrant Support Organizations.

• Mancini’s Restaurant, a St. Paul business for over 70 years is hosting a pay-what-you-can Italian dinner fundraiser on February 18 at 6pm.

Keep giving a shit.

I love you all fiercely.

TeriLeigh💜

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After my note went viral a couple weeks ago, I was approached by a publication here on Substack to write about my experience as a Minnesotan during Operation Metro Surge. That publication then rejected my submission…but I think it is some of the best writing I’ve ever done. I hope you agree.

Pink Duck, Purple Duck, Minnesota Duck. . .

As Minnesota childre…

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Summary written by claude.ai

The Medicine We Need Right Now

I had the absolute joy of being a guest on The Daily Whatever Show this week with Dana Dubois and Lawrence Winterman, and the conversation went to places that made my whole nervous system light up.

We talked about Minnesota. We talked about what it actually means to welcome refugees and immigrants—not as some abstract political concept, but as living, breathing humans who bring their whole hearts with them.

The Somali people staff our hospitals. It’s impossible to show up in a Minnesota hospital without being cared for by someone Somali who walks in saying “Hi mama, how you doing?” and means it with everything they have. They pull their whole hearts out and gush that love over every single patient.

Here’s what people don’t understand: trauma survivors know how to show up for others because they’ve survived needing that showing up themselves. The Somali people have been through so much trauma that they’re more sensitive, more alert, more deeply connected to what it means to care for another human being.

My best friend died in January 2020. She fell and broke her neck, and I spent six months feeding her breakfast every morning in hospitals and rehab centers. Every single day, Somali people served her, washed her, cleansing her, loving her. Every one of them brought that mama energy—that deep, unconditional care that only comes from having lived through suffering.

That’s why Minnesota welcomes refugees. Because they bring medicine our world desperately needs.

My St. Paul mayor, Kaohly Her, is a Hmong immigrant. She posted videos of herself making egg rolls in her kitchen, saying “I’m going to take these out to the demonstrators.” Then another video: “Well, I was trying to take them, but my car won’t start because it’s cold.” Even our political leaders are humble and human.

That human impulse to feed and nurture—that’s the medicine. Trauma survivors show up with care, with food, with love, even when their car won’t start in the Minnesota cold.

Lawrence and Dana asked me the Gen X question: What’s the most Gen X song of all time?

I didn’t even hesitate. “The Greatest Love of All” by Whitney Houston.

Because after everything we’d just talked about—the trauma survivors caring for our sick, the immigrants feeding demonstrators—isn’t that what we all need? To believe we’re loved enough that we can love everyone else?

The greatest love truly is learning to love ourselves. And when people who’ve survived trauma love themselves enough to keep showing up with care for others, they teach the rest of us what’s possible.

This conversation reminded me why I do what I do. Why I show up for other sensitive people. Why I believe our sensitivity—that heightened awareness, that capacity to feel everything—is mystical intelligence, not something to fix.

The people who feel too much are often the ones who’ve been through too much. And they’re the ones staffing our hospitals, making egg rolls for demonstrators, caring for our dying with their whole hearts.

That’s the medicine we need right now. More feeling. More sensitivity. More heart. More of the greatest love of all. . . the courage to let our sensitivity guide us toward care, connection, and love.

Wow. This publication has more than tripled in subscribership in the last ten days.

As a highly sensitive soul, my way of showing up in this moment has lived on the page. I write what I notice. I name what my body feels. I tell the truth with a steady voice. I invite you to activate your sensitive-soul superpowers and spread love everywhere you stand.

Tha…

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This first note is the one that started it all.
It went viral and has reached over 60K likes.

January 26, 2026

I’m writing this from Minnesota.

These are just a few things that may not be making the national or international news.

• a beloved local donut shop Glam Doll Donuts across the street from where Alex Pretti died turned into a warming house and medic …

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