41. Satsuma season.

Satsumas and pomegranates at the La La Lil Jidar event last night in West Philly

I haven’t won a game of solitaire in weeks.

I sit at the kitchen table and shuffle the cards, laying them out one by one. I try to solve the puzzle, thinking, like a compulsive gambler, this time it will be different. But every time, it’s the same. I run out of options, the thing remains unsatisfied, incomplete—and I’m confounded. I don’t want to get up from the table without four kings smiling up at me from four tidy stacks, so I shuffle and start again. I feel like a cursed character in a Carson McCullers story, chain smoking at a diner booth decade after decade with the same worn deck of cards. Which reminds me: I could really go for a cigarette right now.

Speaking of things that make me want to smoke and puzzles with no solutions: today completes one full year and forty-one installments of writing this project called

Home + the World

. Happy birthday, baby!

Over this year I have endeavored to write about exile and estrangement, within myself and from my natal family (natal family being a term that I recently picked up from

Jeanna Kadlec

, a term which I love because it is so much more elegant and concise than “biological family” or “family of origin,” while having the added mystique of the aquatic, the maritime, the oceanic: family as a deep dive, a natatorium, a sea of ancestors in which one must sink or swim).

But my hope is that the thesis of this project centers foremost around the daily work of repair upon the rupture of estrangement (and the trauma that preceded it); the ways that the abuse of power that plays out in our individual lives is a microcosm of that which plays out on the societal level; and finally and most crucially, how these traumas and ruptures are also the very fulcrum of our own necessary transformations, our quests to reclaim our humanity, our identity, our integrity—our souls. 

So much has changed in a year, and I am not the same person I was on January 1st, 2023. My thinking has been challenged and complicated by new mentors, new co-workers, new clients, new (and old) friends, by the thoughts and ideas of so many people: writers, artists, culture workers, care workers; thinkers and feelers and doers—and most profoundly by the current zeitgeist of grief and liberation on the hearts and tongues of so many earnest humans around the world, which I’m starting to think might just represent a sea change in humanity’s evolution.

Holly Whitaker

writes about Ken Wilbur’s theory of breaking not branching:

In Sex, Ecology and Spirituality, Ken Wilber talks about our capacity… to self-transcend or go beyond what came before. Societies, cultures, environments, organisms, all do this naturally—they evolve. But not in the way we have come to think of evolution, as some natural, linear progression. Rather, he asserts (by referencing multiple scientists and philosophers (Laszlo, Gould, Simpson)) that evolution happens through sudden leaps, deep-seated transformations—not piecemeal adjustments. He also points out the theory of quantum evolution, which shows that ‘abrupt alterations of adaptive capacity or bodily structure’ are what account for missing links’.

In other words, he posits we don’t move forward by branching, we move forward by breaking.

And only when enough pressures amount.

And then we become unrecognizable.

And then we are left looking back at the record left by a phantom self we can’t fully grasp we ever really were.

How did she become me?

I am doing some healing, and for me, that looks like a little more space and capacity to tolerate some of the negative feeling states around noise and information, and leveraging that millimeter of increased capacity to stay with the pain, to increase my tolerance for other people going through it in different ways, and extend them more grace, noticing a millimeter more acceptance when someone else is frustrated at me or feels judged by me, or maybe needs to take space from me for reasons I don’t understand—and letting it be OK that I don’t understand.

I am doing some healing, and writing this Substack is a significant catalyst for that healing, and you who are reading this who I am talking to across time and space are supporting and holding and facilitating this healing in me and I am incredibly grateful for that.

And I know that I am not separate from the world, that my healing is your healing, that our healing is the world’s healing (and if that’s not the case then it’s not actually healing, it’s something else entirely); that every good and holy thing that happens to me or to you happens to the world, to the human family, for all of us, and likewise every cruel and crushing thing that happens anywhere happens to me and you, too.

And sometimes every little thing is so beautiful.

To wit: sometimes, you get off the subway in the morning to a rain that smells like the sea—a little fishy, a little sweaty, a little balmy—like Tallahassee in the winter, when the satsumas were ripe and we lit the burn pile in the lower pasture, ash raining down like snow on Christmas morning the year my grandmother died, when no one could (bear to) make the dinner, and so we all piled in trucks and drove down to Port Saint Joe to eat hush puppies and cheese grits and fried grouper at the fish camp instead of ham and mac and cheese and blueberry delight.

On Friday nights the Philadelphia Museum of Art is free and it’s always a scene: the Great Stair Hall—three soaring, columned stories lined with 15th century Baroque tapestries presided over by a 15-foot tall gilded statue of the goddess Diana—bustles with live music, a bar, and a thousand tinder dates. This past Friday, the clinic closed early, and I had a little time to kill before meeting my family there to check out the current main exhibition “The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989.” I rode a sharebike to Rittenhouse Square, then I sat on a park bench and talked on the phone to my friend Michael in LA for an hour, while a man with a shopping cart methodically removed every item from the trash can nearby, inspected it, then emphatically strew its contents across the lawn: plastic to-go containers flying across the park like frisbees, jugs of half-drunk iced coffee; hoagie wrappers and half-eaten tacos and lettuce like confetti, while a red-tailed hawk lit gracefully above on a bare sycamore branch.

Donghyun SON (b.1980), Portrait of the King Series, 2007-8. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 (random art patron for scale)

On the train heading home from the museum, a man did a double-take at my keffiyeh and said, in a heavy accent, I like your scarf.

Thank you, I replied.

Do you wear it for Palestine? he asked.

Yes, I replied. Tears welled in his eyes. I nodded in understanding, and we bumped fists as he got off at his stop.

Last night I followed the illuminated blue line on my phone’s map to an address above a pizza shop in West Philadelphia. At the top of two narrow flights of stairs was the warm buzz of a crowd—gentle punks and hipsters and hijabi women and elder intelligentsia and queer folk—finding their seats on cushions on the creaky wooden floor, or lining up for food along the buttery yellow walls of the wide, spacious studio lined with string lights—banana trees and monstera leaves in every corner, reaching towards the sky beyond the windows.

Along the front wall of the space, under tapestry-sized panels of photographic portrait prints, a zigzag of tables overflowed with aluminum trays full of food: hummus drenched in olive oil, tabouleh garnished with mint, pickled carrots and green beans heavy with clove and salty brine, okra softly stewed in tomato, rich lentils, rice studded with cardamom and almonds, stewed lamb, creamy tahini cauliflower, a dozen kinds of nuts and seeds and dried fruits, rosewater spiced rice pudding, and a table piled high with pomegranate: split open, succulent, juices spilling onto a bed of prickly pear paddles, next to a basket of satsumas.

The outer walls of the studio were lined with photographs: an exhibition of images made between 2003 and 2022, documenting the lives and stories of the human beings living under occupation in Palestine.

This Earth Will Remember Me, 2005, by Aisha Mershani, part of the La La Lil Jidar (No to the Wall) collective’s exhibit on display at Studio 34 in Philadelphia until January 29th, 2024. This farmer, Ayed, is from Budrus in the occupied territory of Palestine. You can hear Ayed’s testimony at lalaliljidar.org.

I gathered my plate and found my place on a wide cushion, and sat, cross-legged in the crowd, as the artists Huda Asfour, a Palestinian composer and vocalist (and PhD biomedical engineer, NBD), and Farah Barqawi, a Palestinian feminist poet and author, took the stage. Huda played the oud (an Arabic lute) and sang, and Farah shared poetry and prose, about heartbreak, about her mother still in Gaza, about finding yourself across time zones, across lands, across continents, across the world, yearning for home.

Whatever happens to a room full of people silently sitting together, listening attentively—happened to us in that room. Maybe it’s attunement and maybe it’s resonance but whatever it is it is bigger than any one of us, bigger than the sum of us, and we need it, we need the nourishment of it, the hydration of it, the empathy of it, the expansiveness of it; now more than ever, it feeds us. We need the unsolvable puzzle. We need the pomegranates and the satsumas. We need beauty and humility and humanity. All life depends upon it. Happy New Year, my friends.

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