24. The second arrow.
Beloved readers: I will be taking the next two weeks off from writing in honor of Leo szn 💅🏻 and will be publishing re-runs from the early days of Home + the World for the new subscribers (thank you, and welcome, new subscribers! Thank you, and I love you, OG subscribers!). As always, please share the newsletter with others who you think might enjoy it, I would consider it a birthday gift if you did 🙂. Connecting with each of you here is an honor and it is changing my life in beautiful ways. My gratitude is endless.❤️🔥
This may be more of an update than an essay, because I only started writing at 5pm when I usually start at 7am, because I slept in, because I made a pilgrimage to the beach yesterday, because I had to walk the dog and fold the laundry, because I had to ride the bus this morning to pick up the CSA, because the phone rang and it was Anna, because the phone rang and it was Natalie, because, even though I spend an inordinate amount of time sad and worried and ruminating over my friendships1 and who is mad at me and why, and who I’m mad at and why, the truth of the matter is that I’m actually incredibly rich in love and friendship and sometimes, I find the wherewithal to let it wash over me, to soak it up, to let it in.
Yesterday morning, I packed my backpack with water, snacks, a book, and sunscreen, and stepped out of my house and into the world. The air was clear for a change—an actual cool breeze greeted me as I walked to the subway—and I rode to 30th Street Station, bought a ticket for $10.75, and caught a New Jersey transit train to the shore. At every stop the train picked up more beachgoers—smiling faces and tote bags full of towels and arms full of umbrellas and folding chairs. By the time we arrived in Atlantic City an hour and twenty minutes later, the train was clamoring with sun hats and flip flops and bright chatter.
I walked from the station to the boardwalk through the streets of Atlantic City, which seemed to be basically a mall set on a city grid, past the Frank Sinatra wing of the Atlantic City Medical Center, past Caesar’s Palace and Bally’s casinos, over the boardwalk and onto the beach. I claimed a patch of sand and attempted a makeshift shelter from two ragged sarongs and some dowel rods I gleaned from the $1 flags at the boardwalk peanut shop. It worked for a while and I felt very clever and stylish, but eventually I got tired of fixing it when one corner or another blew away, and moved over to the shady side of another mall, a towering behemoth set on a pier, jutting out into the ocean.
I read my book, then swam a little: the water was choppy and cold and greenish-brown against the deep blue sky, and the shock of it was invigorating. I ate my granola bar and an orange, and drank the kombucha I bought. Everyone was there: whole families of hijabi women laughing in the water, old men in shoes and long sleeves scouring the sand with their metal detectors, a tall, lean girl in braids giggling as she chased an umbrella cartwheeling away from her in the wind. There were camera crews shooting models in the surf, bass thumping from the nearby beachside bar, skittering crabs and seabirds and coquina clams.
I came to the ocean to do ritual, even though I’ve been spiritually adrift since Glo died three years ago, because she was my teacher. Glo made the mundane world sacred in a way that was so humble and so grounded and so completely real that it became transcendent, and otherworldly, and she brought me into that world with her, and that world doesn’t exist without her. After she died, many spiritual people whom I trusted, including my own therapist of eleven years—a skillful Jungian analyst—slipped off the edge into COVID denialism and conspirituality, and I didn’t know who to turn to, or what to do. So I stopped; I went quiet, I went inside.
But the spirit still needs to be fed, so I came to the ocean to make offerings: to give it all to the sea, to bathe myself and be made new, to mark meaning in time. Yes, Leo season and yes Venus retrograde—but also a year since surviving last summer, a year since being wracked with another wave of losses: two deaths and another shipwrecked friendship. It’s Leo season again, and I feel anxious, as many of us with complex trauma and complex grief do: always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“What if there is no other shoe? What if the worst is over.” says Jess.
“You can be anxious. You can feel whatever you are feeling. Don’t gaslight yourself into thinking you should be feeling any differently than what you feel,” says Anna.
“You can remove the second arrow,” says Natalie.
“The second arrow?”
“yeah, it’s a Buddhist teaching. The first arrow is feeling bad about whatever bad thing is happening; the second arrow is feeling bad about feeling bad. You can’t avoid the first arrow, but you don’t have to get hit with the second one.”
I didn’t get to do my ritual the way I had imagined it, because it was too crowded and the timing wasn’t right. But I swam, and I rested, and I threw some things into the sea, some pine cones and acorns and feathers and stones, little gifts I had been collecting on my altar all year. I marked a new cycle, I drew a line in the sand between then, and now. I walked back to the train station, and rode the packed train back to the city with all my weary, sweaty, sandy, sunburnt fellow travelers, and something in me had, indeed, changed. I slept late, I tended to the chores, and then I talked for hours with my very wise, kind, generous friends, feeling gratitude, feeling connection, letting it wash over me, soaking it up, letting it in.
Home
Vegan Kheer (Indian rice pudding)
This week I found myself with an overabundance of leftover white rice. After making fried rice (with the recipe from Joy of Cooking) and a rice, chard, and pork broth soup (with things hiding in my freezer), I used the last of it to whip up some fragrant vegan kheer. It was so diggity dang good, so here’s the recipe:
Combine in a saucepan and bring to a boil:
2 cups of cooked white rice
1 cup of non-dairy milk (I used soy)
1 cup of canned, unsweetened coconut milk
1/2 cup maple syrup
5 cardamom pods
1 stick of cinnamon
1 inch of ginger, peeled
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Reduce heat and simmer, stirring frequently, for about 15-20 minutes, or until the mixture thickens and smooths. Serve warm or chilled. Optional: add raisins and/or pistachios after removing from heat, or as a garnish.
Ace of Pentacles
In Amy Zerner and Monte Farber’s The Enchanted Tarot, the Ace of Pentacles is called “Reward” and represents good luck, wishes bestowed, fortune, and “a great sense of stability and earthly power,” where “the very surface of the earth parts to offer you the treasure you have been longing for.” Generally, Aces represent new beginnings and Pentacles represent the earth element: money, worth, value, substance, the body. Therefore, the Ace of Pentacles heralds a new beginning in the realm of money-making endeavors, and also knowing one’s own worth.
This echos the themes of the current Venus retrograde, which began yesterday: a reckoning, a revision, a reclamation: of your worth, your value, your earthly power, your bodily treasure. For the next 40 days and 40 nights, we get to re-write our narratives of connection, values, and self-worth. I hope you dig deep in your life, your relationships, and your sense of self—and find riches beyond measure. I hope that the earth opens up and pours out her treasure for you, and that you receive it, lavishly, today and every day.
Home + The World 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. Currently, all content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
a feature of anxious-ambivalent attachment style