How MN Fierce Love Tips an Iceberg

On the neuroscience of showing up, the magick of a Governor in flannel, and the most advanced activism available to us right now.

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.

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.

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.

I make my living writing on Substack.
Writing is my bridge brigade. If you felt something reading this, come stand on the overpass with me. Buy me a coffee and I'll keep showing up. ☕💜

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💜

Fierce Love Merchandise Now Available

on the Waking Dragons Etsy Shop

I have partnered with Connie Baglia, RN 💚✨ 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.

I've been interviewing the everyday women of Minnesota who showed up this winter, the ones whose names never made the headlines. What I've found is that no woman is average and no effort is small. Excerpts from these interviews are coming to this page in the weeks ahead. I cannot wait to introduce you to each other. 💜

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