Thistle & Moss: Wendy the Druid
Climate-Conscious Druid · Healer · LGBTQ+ Advocate
On Leaving
There is a kind of clarity that comes the morning after you have finally named the thing that has been poisoning the well. Not relief, exactly. More like the clean ache of a wound that has finally been opened to air.
We are no longer publishing on Substack.
This is not a complicated story, though the people who profit from complexity would like it to be. The platform made its choices — choices about whose harm was worth tolerating, whose safety was negotiable, whose voices were simply the cost of doing business in the attention economy. We made ours. You cannot build a sanctuary on rented land owned by a landlord who will sell the building out from under you the moment a better offer comes along. We were done renting.
“Platform neutrality is a polite fiction. Every algorithm carries politics in its bones — and silence in the face of harm is just harm wearing a quieter coat.”
So we packed what was ours — every story, every meditation, every sharp-edged piece of geopolitical analysis, every Sanctuary Bar tale that smelled of woodsmoke and whiskey and improbable hope — and we walked out the door.
On the Fediverse
The fediverse is not a product. Let that settle for a moment, because we have been trained since birth to understand the internet as a series of products — platforms with terms of service, shareholders to answer to, quarterly metrics hungry as furnaces. The fediverse is something older in spirit than any of that. It is a commons.
Land held in common. Worked in common. Belonging, finally and fully, to the people who build and till and tend it.
It runs on open protocols — which is to say, it runs on trust codified into mathematics, on agreements that no single corporation can revoke at will. When you follow us in the fediverse, you are not following us inside some company’s walled garden. You are talking to us across open ground, the way people used to pass word mouth to mouth along a road that belonged to everyone who walked it.
We chose the fediverse because we believe — with the bone-deep stubbornness of people who have watched too many platforms monetize our marginalization — that the infrastructure of our community should not be a product someone else can discontinue. Our words, our relationships, our digital commons: these things deserve architecture that does not have a board of directors. The fediverse is that architecture. It is imperfect, still growing, sometimes stubborn as a root-bound oak. We love it for all of that.
What We Make Together
At 53, five years deep into transition’s tender and relentless alchemy, I walk between worlds — mother, partner, healer, certified Druid priestess, and whatever word you want to use for someone who has decided that fury and love are the same river running toward the same sea. My family of five moves through our days like a gentle, ongoing revolution. Proof that love reshapes everything it touches, slowly, the way water reshapes stone.
Our work lives across this ecosystem now — longform essays and dispatches at Thistle & Moss on Beehiiv, where the words have room to breathe; images and short video across our Pixelfed instance, where we are building a visual record of this particular life in this particular moment; live gatherings broadcast through our own Owncast endpoint, where community gathers in real time around fire and questions that have no easy answers; and our Matrix server, where the conversation continues in encrypted, unharvested quiet.
Druid meditations that taste of copper earth. Queer-focused geopolitical analysis with teeth. Religious and queer trauma work in sacred space. Fiction set in the Sanctuary Bar, where every queer soul and progressive heart has a seat and someone who will listen. This is what we make. This is what your presence sustains.
Come Find Us
Here is where we live. Every door is open. Walk through whichever one calls to you.
thistleandmoss.com — Our home for essays, dispatches, meditations, and analysis. All the longform work, delivered to your inbox or readable on the web. Hosted on Beehiiv, free from algorithmic burial.
thistleandmoss.org — Our federated image and video platform. Think Instagram or TikTok, except no one is harvesting your attention to sell to someone you have never met. Built on Pixelfed, visible across the fediverse.
thistleandmoss.online — Every live gathering — ritual, conversation, broadcast — streams from here. Powered by Owncast and distributed through Jitsi and Restreamer. No platform decides whether our fire gets to burn tonight.
matrix.thistleandfern.online — Our Matrix server: free to register, free to speak, end-to-end encrypted by default. Matrix is an open protocol — your messages live on our server, not in a corporate data center. No ads, no surveillance, no one reading over your shoulder. Your conversation here belongs to you the way a letter belongs to the person who wrote it — sealed, private, delivered only to those you choose.
The Work Continues
We are still here. Still making things. Still carrying the stubborn, inconvenient belief that love and justice are not opposites of grief and anger but their most honest expressions. The tools have changed. The land beneath our feet is finally our own. The work — the real work, the dangerous work, the work that tastes of wild thyme and determination — that has not changed at all.
Thank you for finding us. Thank you for staying. 🌿
