40. In the bleak midwinter.

Turns out that these December-blooming cherry trees in my neighborhood might not be harbingers of impending doom after all: likely they are the autumn-blooming variety prunus subhirtella ‘Autumnalis’ Rosebud Cherry, which blooms in spring with a smaller bloom in late autumn.

I missed my writing day on Sunday, and rather than accept that fact and post a re-run, in true Mercury retrograde fashion, I scrambled: attempting to write in the stolen, in-between moments of the busiest week of busy season, scribbling on the backs of envelopes and napkins (metaphorically speaking); hunching over a tablet on a 30-minute train ride to Chestnut Hill to pick up some stocking stuffers at the co-op, over lunch at my desk eating sesame cucumber salad out of a twee metal tin, on the 32 bus to the Art Museum for a white elephant gift for the office holiday party, on the kitchen counter while the pasta water boils.

These efforts have been largely unsuccessful, just a few phrases here and there, but the ideas have been coalescing in their own way—like a sourdough slowly rising in a cool corner of a winter kitchen—and now here I am in this candlelit dark, on the darkest night, in the dark of the winter solstice, and I think maybe I can get this letter out into the universe on this sacred day, or close enough. Perfect is the enemy of good.

On Sunday, while soaking in the bathtub not writing, I opened my Chani astrology app and read the affirmation of the week:

Rebirth is my right, but it requires me to make a sacrifice to its fire. I offer my self-pity, my arrogance, and my resentments in exchange for my renewal.

Moi? I thought to myself, with fake incredulity. Self-pity? Arrogance? Resentments? Oh, how I laughed and I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. And then I said: deal. And the universe and I spit in our hands and shook on it, and now I have to make good on my promise. So here goes:

In exchange for rebirth, I, Jodi Rhoden, do hereby sacrifice:

• One cup of self-pity called why is no one checking on me when I’m sick and brokenhearted and haven’t posted to instagram in three days?

• Two pounds of it’s-my-job-and-mine-alone-to-fix-the-world-and-all-who-dwell-therein-and-set-right-that-which-has-been-torn-asunder-now-and-for-evermore-flavored arrogance

• And eighty-seven gallons of extremely combustable, highly corrosive, wildly volatile, ultra-concentrated resentment, bottled and corked over the course of the various, sundry, multitudinous, and myriad failures, oversights, omissions, cruelties, vagarities, obscenities, slights, indiscretions, and offenses perpetrated by other people, in general and specifically, both historically and presently, both knowingly and unwittingly, upon little. old. me. All the ways and times I’ve felt unseen and unloved, undervalued and overlooked, trespassed and impinged upon, undermined and misled, every petty jealousy, every vengeful thought—I offer them all.¹

My mentor shared in mindfulness practice this week that she recently performed a solo of the song “In the Bleak Midwinter” in her community chorus concert. The song is based on a 19th century poem by Christina Rossetti and if, like me, you attended church three times a week for the first 18 years of your life, you might remember that the song is about the birth of Jesus and it ends with:

What can I give him?
Poor as I am
If I were a shepherd
I would give a lamb
If I were a wise man
I would do my part
But what I can I give him
Give him my heart.

The song stayed with me all week: I went for a walk in the rain and thought in the bleak midwinter. I stepped in a flurry of gingko leaves, gold turning to rust, the weeping willow a shower of pale yellow twigs, and thought in the bleak midwinter. I sat at my desk and watched the light drain from the sky at 3:30pm and thought in the bleak midwinter. I listened to a few versions: Annie Lennox has one, and so do Sarah McLachlan, James Taylor, and Julie Andrews, but the classic cathedral choir recordings are the only ones that seem to me to really capture the spirit of the barren landscape, the water like a stone, the snow on snow on snow (metaphorically speaking) of the deep, midwinter solstice darkness.²

Blessed Yule.

Of course, this season of all seasons, this season of war in the season of Christmas, I can’t help but think about the biblical Jesus, and how the headlines in the news and the stories of the world of the besieged echo the words from the Sunday School lessons of my childhood: Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jordan, Egypt, the Red Sea, the Sea of Galilee; pregnant women with no place to go; fishermen, bakers, farmers, vintners; olives, hyssop, fig and cedar.

I can’t square it in my mind: a country filled with people celebrating the birth of a radical Palestinian Jewish refugee (who read the Romans for filth and was murdered for it), while simultaneously raining bombs down on the sacred humans, men, women, and children in those same holy lands, destroying even the land itself. I can’t fathom it, it crushes my heart.

Of course, this season of all seasons, I can’t help but think about my clients, the women in the clinic who are each and every one absolutely stressed the fuck out about Christmas. Their kids each want hundreds of dollars worth of tech and toys and brand name clothes, they’re mostly single moms, most of them grieving, often without family support at all, and they’re busting their asses to make Christmas magic with an EBT card and a SEPTA pass, going from one end of the city to the other to participate in various toy drives, and that’s if they’re lucky and got really organized and signed up in October, and these things are not separate: the bombs dropping on the holy land, the crushing pressure of consumerism on the survivors of the opioid epidemic, the opioid epidemic itself, the earth pushed to the limit.

I don’t feel the “Christmas Spirit” this year, I feel itchy.

I feel the bleakness of midwinter.

I feel the hopelessness and helplessness and the enormity of grief. I feel the vastness of suffering, I feel the utter pain and collapse of disappointment in everyone who has failed to rise to meet this moment.

I feel it.

And that, right now, in the darkest hour of the darkest night, may be all that we can do, when we have nothing to offer but our resentments, and nothing to gain but our rebirth.

We sit in the dark and we feel the feelings and we sing the songs. Like any chorus, we know that when we stop to take a breath, the other voices carry the note across the gap. We know that our hearts, too, are a sacred fire,³ and that by not looking away but by breathing in the pain of the world, and breathing out life and peace and sustenance and hope, we can transform our resentment and our arrogance and our self-pity into heat and light and warmth.

And so may it be.

Blessed solstice.

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Home.

Another thing I did on Sunday instead of writing was to make stock from the leftover turkey bones and gizzards, stuck in the freezer at Thanksgiving. I like to add one little clove of star anise to my stocks along with all the savory herbs, garlic and onion, (and a good splash of vinegar to draw the calcium out of the bones), simmered for at least 12 hours, and now my freezer is full of quarts and quarts of nourishing broth for soups and meals that will last me the rest of winter.

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The World.

We owe the people of Palestine our endurance. Here are a few quick tools to email your elected officials to demand a permanent ceasefire now:

• Friends Committee on National Legislation

• Ceasefiretoday.com

• Jewish Voice for Peace call to action

As a social worker, my professional code of ethics requires me to take political action to speak up against injustice, and to advocate with elected officials for humane policy. I hope each of us can find our lane of principled action that is sustainable and aligned with our values.

Art by Resi Bhaskoro on instagram.

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Judgement.

Judgement is the second to last Tarot card in the Major Arcana, just before The World, which represents culmination, fulfillment, liberation. Judgement is the crossroads. Judgement is the tipping point. Judgement is the call that cannot be ignored. Judgement is the will to change, Judgement is a change is gonna come. Judgement is the reckoning, the witnessing, the accounting, the truth-telling, the rising above. Judgement is the rebirth. Blessed Solstice. 🙏🏻❤️‍🔥🕯️

Major Arcana XX: Judgement. Pamela Colman Smith, Rider Waite Smith Tarot, 1909

Home + The World is a weekly 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. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. If you wish to support my writing with a one-time donation, you may do so on Venmo @Jodi-Rhoden. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.

⚔️❤️ Jodi

1. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more seen in regards to how I come by my honest resentments than when I read this paragraph in YES I AM AGAIN TALKING ABOUT

Heather Havrilesky

’s Ask Polly: “most of them are secretly huge people pleasers who turn on a dime and displease other people in dramatic ways, then feel massively guilty and ashamed about it and can’t let it go. They refuse to budge an inch at times and make righteous and indignant statements about how the world should be in order to assuage their guilt and shame, and then they turn around and give way too much to people who don’t show up for them at all. This self-erasure swings them back into self-protective mode.” IT ME. I’m being read by all my newsletters this week.

2. Even though in modern astronomy and astrology, we think of the the summer and winter solstices as being the first day of their given season, in many cultures around the world and certainly the European folk tradition from which this song derives, the solstice actually marks the midpoint of that season. Ergo, midwinter is a traditional name for the winter solstice, also known as Yule.

3. As my mentor shared while advising me in the practice of Tonglen