60. You are tired and you want to be free.
and vegan Mexican chocolate cake
I’m making a home inside my body, a place where my body can come home to rest.
And I’m working to remember this, and be diligent about it. Inside me is not a place where I will be at war with me, not anymore.
On my best days lately, I’m able to be intentional about leaning in to discomfort, and widening my window of tolerance for being disliked, or feeling misunderstood (which, for my specific flavor of attachment trauma/neurobiology/Leo placements, is a feeling akin to death), while standing firmly in reality, in the truth of things.
Feeling the threat of annihilation that abandonment brings on within me—without acting on the various fight/flight/freeze/fawn impulses that arise as a result—is freeing up a tremendous amount of energy, when I can manage it.
And I can manage it more and more: I’m starting to actually believe, on my best days, that someone’s feelings about me is actually at least halfway about their feelings about themselves, and I’ve noticed that when I remember that, I can choose not to take someone else’s feelings personally, and I actually don’t have to be as hurt or angry.
Paradoxically, by releasing my grip on the wounding I feel from others, I can also realize simultaneously that sometimes, I actually am the problem, and that’s OK too. It doesn’t make me any less deserving of love. It doesn’t make me a bad person (whatever that is).
I can set things down for a time without having to resolve them.
I can be intentional about boundaries in relationships without being transactional or punishing.
I think part of what has caught me so off guard is how much harder things got when I got serious about healing; when I quit drinking, when I separated from my family of origin. Instead of making things easier, it has made my own patterns so much more painfully visible to me, made all my little schemes of likability fall flat.
But the fact that my life has not gotten easier is not to say that it hasn’t gotten better, because it has. My life continues to expand in immeasurable ways—in new and deeper ways to love and be loved—not despite but because of the repair, the care, the attention that discord and rupture requires.
Tuesday is the full moon in Pisces, the the reaping of that which was sown six months ago at the Pisces new moon on March 10th, which for me was the day before I lost my job—the most stable, professional, highest-paying job I have had to date—for refusing to be silent about Palestine.
It’s been an even half a year, a wider lunar cycle, and (with help and support) I have come to feel that I’ve very much landed on my feet—that the struggle and humiliation I experienced has given way to a more spacious, creative, and balanced life-way than I had even imagined for myself a year ago. That I’m exactly where I’m meant to be, doing exactly what I could only ever be doing.
Is there is a part of me that feels the need to prove that I’m doing not just OK but crushing it? Yes, but it’s not just for the flex, it’s for survival: a part of me knows fundamentally that I must succeed—irrefutably, undeniably, and of my own volition—or else I’ll die; that I’ve been cast out and struck out on my own so many times that going back is not an option. It’s sink or swim, baby. There’s no safety net, no dress rehearsal, and the fact is I’m too fucking stubborn to go out like my sister, my aunt, my great-aunt, or any other of the litany of exiled women in my lineage, I won’t.
And yet there but for the grace of God go I.
So I’ll take the grace and I’ll run with it.
Meanwhile, everything is enchanted:
Otis Redding keens you are tired and you want to be free into the four feet of sky between my neighbor’s brick wall and mine, and my heart floats out the window to meet him.
During the protest outside the presidential debate, I squat on a stoop with my comrades in the street, breathing deep and centering myself so I don’t bum a cigarette from the young beautiful punks smoking all around me because what fucking future? while thinking how good it would feel to just taste the smoke, just a little, to exhale a pillar of cloud and fire; and then I let the thought of it be enough.
I bless the grain, down on all fours in the good black earth, pulling out the stalks of corn by the root after the harvest to make way for the fall lettuces.
A Great Blue Heron takes wing, impossibly, from the center median of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, gliding their full wingspan across the windshield, taking my breath away.
Biking fast along the Schuylkill River trail, a group of yogis practicing in the grass lift their arms and faces to the sky in unison, just as a flock of geese rises from the river behind them as if conjured, and a sculling boat cuts a clean wedge through the water, and I laugh giddily and say to the river and the yogis and the birds and the boat thank you thank you thank you for this symmetry of beauty because it reminds me of who I am and that I belong here, in this day, in this family of life.
I’m making a home inside my body, a place where my heart can come home to rest, a place that is safe, a place where I can have peace, a place where I am free.
Home.
Last night our friend Victor hosted us for a beautiful fish taco dinner, and I brought a vegan Mexican chocolate cake with farm flowers, and some fresh farm watermelon and mint to make watermelon agua fresca (watermelon, mint simple syrup, lime zest and juice, and ice in the blender, poured over muddled mint with mint garnish. Hot damn it was so insanely good). I’m so grateful to be a working member of an amazing CSA!
Here’s the recipe for vegan Mexican chocolate cake I’ve been making for a million years, adapted from the “Chocolate Vegan Death Cake” recipe from The Grit in Athens, GA (RIP).
Vegan Mexican Chocolate Cake
Makes three 9” layers or four 8” layers
Sift Together into the bowl of a stand mixer:
21.6 oz flour (4.5 cups)
3 c. sugar
1 cup cocoa (I used the Ecuadoran cocoa powder from Condor Chocolates, a gift from my friend Anna)
1 T. baking soda
2 t. salt
2 t. cinnamon
1 t. cayenne
Add:
1 ½ c. vegetable oil
1 T. vanilla
Mix into paste with the paddle attachment.
Slowly add while mixing (slowly!):
3 c. hot or warm coffee
Scrape down bowl thoroughly and mix again.
Add and mix:
¼ c. apple cider vinegar
Quickly pan into prepared pans and bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes, or until the sides of the cake pull away from the pan and a knife inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
ICING:
In double boiler, melt:
4 c. dark semisweet chocolate
In food processor, blend:
2 packages (24.6 oz) silken firm tofu
Add melted chocolate to food processor and blend until smooth.
Add:
2 t. cinnamon
1 t. cayenne
The world.
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
Are you an artist, writer, culture worker or academic? Then it’s time for you to sign on to PACBI, the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and advocate for your organization/institution/department to do the same. PACBI is one aspect of the larger BDS (Boycott/Divest/Sanction) movement. BDS is a coalition of over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations—trade unions, student groups, women’s organizations and refugee networks—formed in 2004 and inspired by the BDS campaigns that were successful in helping end apartheid in South Africa.
There are clear guidelines, so nobody has to reinvent the wheel. Here is a great PACBI explainer on the Writers Against the War on Gaza website.
Home + the World on Bookshop.org.
Home + the World now has a shop on Bookshop.org, where I’m cataloging my recommended reading in the genres of memoir, fiction, and—of course—healing, self-help, and social justice. If you purchase a book through my shop, I will receive a commission and so will an independent bookstore of your choice. Check it out!
Home + The World is a newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake.
Dear Temperance is a Tarot advice column for paid subscribers of Home + the World. Send your burning life questions with the subject line “Dear Temperance” to homeandtheworld@substack.com or through the contact form at my website www.jodirhoden.com. If your query is chosen for publication, you will receive a year’s paid subscription for free. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
“you thank you for this symmetry of beauty”….love that! It has taken me decades to set real boundaries with my family of origin. I have new family now, found all over the world, in the rooms. And here with you. Thank. You.