11. The messy gorgeous maelstrom of life.
I’ve come to think of Philly as the South of the North.
Closer to Maryland than New York, in a certain light this city glows with slow, quiet magic: languid, Gothic, almost rural. In the deep pandemic winter days of walking, me and two dogs in the end-of-the-world streets, I passed church after church blazing with salvation, cows escaping the butcher and running helter skelter, old men in fedoras, produce stands with hand-painted signs, Magnolia trees thick with evergreen leaves. I saw street preachers on street corners reading scripture with a driving cadence into their megaphones, chickens and rats and cats, cowboys on horseback, grand Victorian mansions of mauve and brick with their insides burnt out and tattered sheets wafting through windows thick with wasps.
Just like home.
And so, too, the weather: yesterday the sun came out and I embarked on a plan to repot my houseplants, dividing and separating all the crowded succulents so they can stretch their roots for spring. After grocery shopping and picking up a few pots, I set to work below the back porch. It took me hours to just get through the aloes, and when I looked up to half the sky endarkened- I checked my phone. “All hands on deck! Tornado watch! Help me get these plants back in the house!” I texted my family, followed by screenshots of the weather report and “NOT APRIL FOOLS". What followed the bucket brigade was an extremely chaotic attempt to continue my task inside the house, smearing potting soil on every window sill and door frame and drawer handle, pots dripping mud off the counter and onto the floor.
I’m a person who loves to finish a task, but the more I tried at this one, the more un-done it became. I gave up as the storm came in and Jasper and I moved to the front porch, to see the lightening, to hear the thunder, to watch the rain shear down in silver sheets past the streetlamps, to feel the awe.
I avowed myself off of social media in 2020, exhausted and demoralized by fighting with friends and family over every new social and political indignity, and needing privacy, and space to heal from the feeling that every where and every way I had once belonged no longer existed, and that I, myself, no longer existed in any form that I had once known.
I needed freedom from the feeling of being constantly surveilled, including my own self-surveillance, and from the feeling, however self-imposed, that I was obligated to generate a meaningful daily narrative of Who I Am and What I Stand For, as though being myself was an unpaid contract gig for exposure, agreed to in hopes that I could one day make it big and be a real person.
Years ago my therapist told me that I have an anxious-ambivalent attachment style1, and nowhere has this been more evident to me than in my relationship to social media. Since the beginning, I have been fascinated and enthralled by social media’s infinite stream of thoughts, ideas, and images, its color and light; and in my need to be loved by it I cycle through phases of expansion and contraction: spending hours scrolling every day then walking away for months, deleting, unfriending, and unfollowing people who I don’t like, or who I worry don’t like me, or who are simply adjacent to someone I don’t like or I worry doesn’t like me. I think I’m going to consolidate my footprint down to my closest friends, but then I lose the thread, and my feed becomes more illogical than ever. I start a new instagram, this time it will be different, and the previous ones shrink down into bizarre nesting dolls of stilted connection.
Of course, our anxiety, our ambivalence is cultivated by design: as we know from behavioral psychology, intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful way to manipulate and encode a behavior, and lord knows I love an intermittent emotional reward (Alexa, play “I’m Going to Make You Love Me” by Diana Ross/Supremes/Temptations). We’re all out here doing our best to manage our triggers while trying to stay oriented to the world, to get a little dopamine, to get a little break. Bless our hearts.
I guess I’m in an expansion phase: increasingly this year and especially this week I’ve been wading back into the maelstrom of social media news, posting in stories, feeling connected to my comrades in the face of the current social and political indignities. But in a constantly expanding universe we are never in the same place twice: I feel differently about it right now because I feel less afraid, I feel I have less to prove. I dare say I’ve healed a little bit.
But/and/also, fuck it. Because the world is on fire always and again. Because I do what I want. Because even though my last two professional nonprofit jobs have featured particularly messy petty betrayals and gossip and I’ve had some gruesome friend breakups over the last couple of years, I’m making new friends and loving my old friends and loving my new job and letting myself trust people and trusting myself and fully knowing that my heart could break but I will survive and I don’t want to sacrifice what I would have to sacrifice to be safe from that heartbreak and I just can’t worry about it anymore.
Because our best laid plans will be leveled to the ground. Because every way and place we thought we belonged will be washed out in the flood. Because there is just so much LIFE happening at every moment, a stream of life, a maelstrom of tornadoes and houseplants and children, a thrumming current of energy that cannot wait to get its hands on us, to fill us up, to rip us apart and shape us into new and glorious forms that we couldn’t have imagined, to dissolve all the old forms and shapes and ways and places we thought we knew and were.
Last week I was writing some things about power and powerlessness but I couldn’t finish because of the water crisis and now it’s not feeling as relevant and I think I’ll leave it be. I’ll try not to worry. I’ll try to finish the houseplants. I’ll try to hold it lightly. I’ll try to feel the awe.
Home + The World is an occasional newsletter from 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. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you. ⚔️❤️
Home
The Plantmageddon:
And again being a toxic cat mom by showing blatant favoritism towards the kitten, but just LOOK at her:
The World
I don’t know if this is happening in your world (is it?) but the teenagers in my life are quitting TikTok and getting into this cool new trend called reading. And like most of the best things about parenting, this is renewing my relationship to books and reading and I now have a goodreads which is proving very satisfying as a place to catalogue all the books I’m reading, want to read or have read, and sharing that with friends and family. If you’re there, holler. I’m currently reading Crying in H Mart. Honestly, I felt the first few chapters were meh, but I’m making myself finish it because I quit the last two books I started and I need to break the spell, and now I’m getting into it. Did you read it? What do you think?
Did I share this playlist already? I literally cannot stop listening to it. There is simply no better song for walking out of your office and onto the springtime daylight savings city streets at the end of the day than that first Janelle Monáe/The Coup song and thank you to Jess for sharing it with me. If you want to know what the inside of my head sounds like every day for the last 5 or so weeks (and why wouldn’t you?) here it is:
Six of Pentacles
The name of this card is Generosity.
Of course, the six follows the five, and so in Tarot. When the seeker overcomes and integrates the lesson of the five, they get to move on to the six. In the suit of wands, victory follows strife, in swords, success follows defeat. In cups, we see pleasure following disappointment, and so here in pentacles, the suit of earth, money, the body, the physical, real world: generosity follows worry.
The five of pentacles is one of the iconic cards: two huddled forms, on crutches and in rags in the snow, locked outside a church that glows warmly from within. It represents, not necessarily that specific scenario but rather the fear of that scenario; it represents worry about money, the fear of being left out in the cold. We have to go through it, but after facing and integrating our fears, we move along to the six of pentacles: a card that speaks not from fear of loss, but from the kind of giving that flows from being in right relationship to abundance, to graciousness, to reciprocity. In this way it also speaks to the justice (or lack thereof) implicit in charity, and a balancing of the scales.
My wish for you this week is that you possess all that you need, an embarrassment of riches: enough time, enough space, enough nourishment, enough quenching of your thirst; enough love, enough safety, enough rest, enough beauty, enough joy. Plus more, to share lavishly.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
PS: No newsletter next week as we will be with family for Easter. See you in a couple of weeks!
Anxious-ambivalant attachment style is marked by a strong need for attention and affection from the other (partner, friend, the Internet, the homies, etc), followed by rejecting, punishing, or acting indifferently towards the other once the attention and affection is secured.
Thank you Jodi. You words and love are precious.