Exclusive Sneak Peek of Country Tides: Chapter Four

https://higginbothampublications.wordpress.com/2026/05/23/exclusive-sneak-peek-of-country-tides-chapter-four-2/

Haben mir Thai Airways in Kambodscha gemacht. Einfach keine Möglichkeit einen Flugbillet mit Bargeld zu kaufen. Kein Billetbüro am Flughafen Phnom Penh.

Also bin ich in Giant Ibis Busfirma reinmarschiert, cca. $110 Bargeld bezahlt, und mit einem komfortablem Bus mit 20 Mbps Internet, 3xphone charger und grossen gaming Sitzen gefahren. Zufrieden. Kein Konzentrationslager Flughafen, keine Schikane, keine Korruption.

Ade Thai Airways, ▇▇▇▇▇ dich.

In Bangkok hatten sie ein Office gehabt, Bargeld gekauft.

Wolte von Munich weiter fliegen aber sie kǒnnen anschliessenden Flug mit Bargeld nicht organisieren.

Also sie haben wieder Geld verloren. Eine Bahnfirma (andere als DB) bekam mein Geld.

Will kein Geld, bekommt kein Geld. Ist einfach so. Konsequenzen kommen.

#thaiairways #lost #loss #bargeld #cash #inkompetenz #incompetence #myopic #myopia #bureaucracy #rigid #inflexible #consequences #bangkok #phnompenh

Memorial Day
Ultimate sacrifices
Turned picnic weekend

#Haiku #OneHaikuADay #WritersCollective #writingcommunity #BackToHaiku #May #MemorialDay #Memorial #Sacrifice #UltimateSacrifice #Military #Loss #Death #Spring #Poetry #Ohio #USA #Photography #2026

May 23, 2026

#Lilac, #JapaneseAcorn, #Witchhazel
#sayinggoodbye #grieving #loss

So, so grateful for my little garden today. My bestie is being said farewell to in a Celebration of Life in the UK that I, much to my dismay, cannot afford to attend.
I planted a fern cos he loved them and it seems to like its place. 1/2

The five stages of grief were never the full story. Some losses have no funeral, no acknowledged mourning period — just a collapse that keeps pulling you back. This essay maps that experience onto astrophysics, not for poetry, but because the physics actually fits. Grief bends time. It needs space to move.

https://kalvin.obulou.org/when-grief-behaves-like-a-black-hole

#grief #mentalhealth #healing #psychology #trauma #loss #awareness #personalessay #neurodivergent #autism #recovery #emotions #truth #reflection #humanity #spark

Passive Smoking

The Yellow Menu

A grieving man returns to his hometown and finds shelter from a tornado—and his past—with the bus driver who once carried him home.

Micah Lyndon had imagined Lost Gap larger than this.

For twenty years it had remained within him as a country of pine shadow and red-clay driveways, of mailboxes leaning toward the roadside, of warm blacktop running away into trees, of small creeks swollen brown after rain. In his memory the woods were immense, the roads endless, the hills steep enough to rise beneath a boy like the back of some sleeping animal. Even after he had gone north, even after he had learned cities and interstate exits and apartment windows looking down over streets where no one knew his name, Lost Gap had retained the proportions of childhood.

It had stayed enormous because he had never returned long enough to measure it.

Now the roads curved too soon. The distances had collapsed. The hill that had once seemed dangerous when the school bus climbed it in winter was hardly more than a rise. A house he remembered as white stood abandoned behind brush and young pines, its porch listing toward the weeds. The convenience store where he used to buy candy and bottled drinks after school had been boarded shut, the paint on its sign faded until it resembled something remembered rather than something seen. Kudzu rolled over the back lot and sagged from telephone poles, covering the places time no longer intended to explain.

Micah drove slowly, although there was almost no traffic.

He had come expecting grief, though he had not known precisely what kind.

His marriage had ended the year before, not with betrayal or great anger, but with the long exhaustion of two people who had become considerate strangers. His work, once the ladder by which he expected to climb into meaning, had begun to feel like a room he had remained in after everyone else went home.

Then, three nights earlier, unable to sleep, he had typed Lost Gap, Mississippi into his phone.

The name itself had struck him with an almost scriptural force.

Lost Gap.

A place named for absence. A break in the ridge. An opening through something otherwise impassable. A home that sounded, even while he lived there, as though it had already vanished.

He had packed the next morning and driven south.

Read the rest of the story at Crawdad Epiphanies https://medium.com/@keith.lyndaker/the-yellow-menu-7056e723db66

https://medium.com/@keith.lyndaker/the-yellow-menu-7056e723db66

https://medium.com/@keith.lyndaker/the-yellow-menu-7056e723db66

Today is the International Day for #BiologicalDiversity!

The #RedListIndex of #ThreatenedSpecies shows a continuous #decline from 0.805 in 1995 to 0.745 in 2025📉 (UN).

This negative #trend is not in line with the aim of @UN #SDG15 to “halt the #loss of #biodiversity”⛔.

#GlobalGoals #SDGs #2030Agenda #SDG #RedList #KMGBF #wildlife #nature #ForNature #BiodiversityDay
Data source: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal/database - indicator 15.5.1