Bless this season of Beltane turning towards Midsummer, when the May air feels like water and the trees are in full leaf: soft and green and perfect. The feeling of the air and these last few weeks of writing have put me deeper in mind of my summers in the deserts of New Mexico and the woods of Vermont and I want to be there. I want freckles and braids and cutoff overalls; I want my body to smell like celery and garlic and river water and honeycomb.
Those times were fraught; tender and anxious, but they were also teeming with beauty and bright transcendence. On one backcountry hiking trip in the Bandelier National Monument, after the kids were in their tents for the night, the world opened wide as I scrambled up the side of Alamo Canyon, fit my human self into a cup in the ledge like an insect, and watched the full moon rise over the ridge of the gorge, dripping light like gold and honey. I finally, blessedly, understood myself to be so minuscule, so tiny, so infinitesimally small. For lack of any other way to celebrate this newfound perspective of my place in the scheme of things, I kissed my own sunburnt arms in thanksgiving.
Once, while canoeing across a lake for a whole day in Vermont, panic carving a rut in my gut with every stroke of the paddle, feeling raw and exposed under a punishing sky, I looked up and watched as a huge murmuration of many thousands of birds spontaneously formed the shape of one giant bird over the lake and stayed there, a gift of protection the whole sky wide, and instantly I broke open and shed everything in a burst of salt tears, giving it all to the water, changed forever.
After my summer at Ghost Ranch, I had secured a job with room and board on an organic farm in San Luis Obispo, California, and my ride west was with the only two friends I had under the whole desert sky: Angela and Brigette. Brigette was a dyed-in-the-wool deadhead, a Berkeley girl with the best West Coast weed I had ever tasted, and Angela was a Greek Cypriot beauty who attended college in Lawrence, Kansas during the year. Early one August morning, we gathered our last checks from the ranch and set out to make the drive to Brigette’s friend’s house in Las Vegas in one day, her Ford Explorer packed with all our bags; the drums that Angela had made over the summer in her medicine drum class, still-wet deerskins stretched across the drumheads; and the giant ceremonial cross with inlaid rosettes I had made in my Spanish colonial wood carving class, still sticky with linseed oil, curing. The smells were unbearable so we drove with all the windows down.
Shortly after we set out, Angela decided she wanted to smoke weed for the first time. Brigette, who had been sharing her face-melting kindbud with me all summer, was happy to oblige. It felt like an honor to hold space for a friend to get truly, deeply stoned for the first time: we drove for hours, all of us laughing so hard we thought we would die, as Angela pierced the mysteries of space and time while simultaneously losing her already-tenuous grasp on the English language.
We stopped at a tourist-trap ghost town for gas, and, after Angela painstakingly made her way out of the back seat, she stood staring at a fudge-shop window display for a full ten minutes, unable to discern whether the animatronic mannequins stirring fudge in the window were humans or machines. We laughed so hard we couldn’t walk.
We drove through Galina, Regina, and La Jara, and then we didn’t see any road signs for a good while. The mood turned slightly somber, as we withdrew into our own minds to contemplate the day, the sky, the hot, dry wind, leaving the patch of earth we had called home for the last three months. We came across a sign for Route 666, and then an arrow pointing west to First Mesa. We pulled over and consulted the map to discover that we had gotten hours off course and were now entering the Hopi Reservation. We charted a new course to Vegas, and set out across Arizona, bewildered and slightly sobered.
The sun was in full blaze above us, when suddenly, to our confusion, traffic stopped ahead for a line of pickup trucks heading up a switchback dirt road. When we inched towards the turn to the mesa, a cheerful woman greeted us on the side of the road.
“Are you here for the dance?” she asked.
“Uh, actually, we’re lost,” replied Brigette, hesitantly.
“Well, you made it, you’re just in time for the Snake Dance. Let me get you some cokes and drive you up to the Mesa.”
Wordless and breathless, we moved, together, in silent acknowledgement that, yes, this is exactly what was happening, no question about it. We pulled over at the woman’s trailer and got in her van, and she drove us up the road to the 600 year old pueblo at the top of the mesa. I’m not trying to be romantic here, I’m just telling you what she said: she told us that we were welcome, that the Hopi have a mandate to teach the world how to live in peace, that it was perfect that we came on this very day, that she had extra mattresses we could sleep on tonight. She dropped us off at a crossroads at the top of the hill, where hundreds of people milled around in preparation for a ceremony and we were urged to eat from the folding tables covered in food. She disappeared for a few minutes and returned with the promised cokes.
I don’t remember her name. I don’t remember what the food tasted like and I only remember the dance in the faintest of impressions. I sat down in the dirt next to my two friends, my precious friends, on an ancient village street at the top of a mesa, backs against an adobe wall, sipping coca-cola in wonder and silence, again feeling so very small, and therefore so very free and so very thankful for that fact. I looked over at Angela, and tears were streaming down her face. Later that night I fell asleep in the backseat of Brigette’s car, and woke up in the blaring lights of the Hoover Dam. We made Vegas by morning.
Home
Is it raining? Are you menstruating? Is mercury stationing direct? Are you binge-watching Succession? Do you like things that taste good? If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, then do yourself a favor and whip up a batch of these chocolate chip cookies:
The special ingredient in these cookies (recipe from Cook’s Illustrated) is brown butter. If you’ve never made brown butter, it’s easy: just simmer the butter in a saucepan, whisking occasionally, until it begins to foam and caramelize to a nice brown, nutty color, and becomes very fragrant (see picture below for how my butter looked after browning). It seems like a frivolous extra step, but I promise, it’s so worth it.
Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
3/4 cup all purpose flour (as usual, I’m substituting with Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free all-purpose flour)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
14 tablespoons butter, divided
3/4 cup dark brown sugar (I also did not have brown sugar on hand, so I added 1 tablespoon molasses to white sugar to substitute)
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 1/4 cup chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Whisk together flour and soda. Heat 10 tablespoons of butter to brown, then transfer brown butter to bowl and stir in remaining butter. Whisk until melted, then let cool. Add sugars, salt, and vanilla to butter and whisk. Whisk in eggs. Stir in flour mixture then chocolate chips. Scoop onto parchment (give plenty of space to spread) and bake 1 tray at a time, 10-14 minutes. Makes 16-20 cookies.
Happy baking!
The World
Mother’s Day was founded by grieving mothers.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. -Julia Ward Howe
Today is Mother’s Day, which has been an anti-war, anti-oppression holiday since its founding by grieving mothers after the Civil War. According to the Zinn Education Project, Ann Jarvis of Appalachia founded Mother’s Day in 1858 to promote sanitation in response to high infant mortality after the death of her two young children to disease. Inspired by Jarvis, abolitionist Julia Ward Howe made a Mother’s Day call to women to protest the carnage of war:
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace, Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask That a general congress of women without limit of nationality May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient And at the earliest period consistent with its objects, To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
Mother’s day remains a call to action: action on gun violence, action on queer and trans rights, action on abortion and reproductive freedom, action on mass incarceration. In addition to giving mothers our flowers, consider supporting and getting involved with Moms Demand Action, Black Mamas Bailout, your local abortion funds, trans rights funds, and candidates for public office who will preserve democracy and fight fascism.
This Mother’s Day, I’m going to renew my dedication against “caressing and applauding” the patriarchy; and towards the “great and general interests of peace.” All my love to the mothers and children who are grieving today.
Some essays I enjoyed this week:
Women’s Work by Laurie Stone in her Substack, Everything is Personal:
And this Mother’s Day Modern Love about (what else?) death and estrangement.
Be easy and gentle with yourselves today, ok? It’s rough out there. Love you. xo
Home + The World from Jodi Rhoden features 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.
⚔️❤️ Jodi