42. Love in freedom.
“Love in freedom is the only condition of a beautiful life.” - Emma Goldman, Anarchism and other Essays
Greetings from this auspicious new moon, this first new moon of this brand new year. I’m off work all this week, and I had high hopes of a productive staycation: caulking and painting the trim around the new doors, making a budget for 2024, planning for a trip in the summer, sorting through boxes of files, cleaning out the closet, and, of course, writing with abandon—but instead I’ve been sleeping in, puttering around with my plants, reading; taking baths while Django Reinhardt plays softly in the candlelight. My son and I made our best shepherd’s pie yet (I think it was the super-concentrated stock from the Thanksgiving turkey that put it over the edge); we watched The Departed on a weeknight. I’ve had some good phone calls with friends and yesterday I got a haircut. An embarrassment of riches.
I took the week off for no other reason than because I have the PTO built up and I can, a wondrous fact that is not lost on me or my gratitude. My job has been challenging lately, but not for the reasons you might think: supporting my clients—women in recovery from opioid use disorder—is the best and most hopeful thing about my working days. Rather, my challenges arise from my constant chafing against the indifference and dysfunction of bureaucracy, my pressing need to say everything that is on my mind at all times, and the ensuing misalignment between what I mean when I say what is on my mind and how other people perceive what I say (which is often, to my great surprise, unfavorably).
I want to have my cake and eat it too: I want to tell the truth, shame the devil, and still come out smelling like a rose. Or, more to the point: I recognize that this repeating story-cycle in my life—that when I am truly myself, I am inevitably rejected, that I will not be liked, be loved, or belong if I say what I really feel—is an ongoing, neverending recapitulation of my foundational relational wound: the deeply ingrained belief that the cost of my authenticity is exile.
I’m listening right now to the excellent new book by Gabor Maté with his son Daniel Maté: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. The book seems to me to be Gabor’s masterpiece: a synthesis of all his work up to this point, including the excellent In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a beautiful memoir about addiction and trauma that had a profound impact on me. In The Myth of Normal, Maté writes that every child has two primary needs: attachment and authenticity, and that, tragically, in our toxic culture, most of us find early on that we must choose between the two. He writes,
The dilemma is this: What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel? What happens, in other words, when one nonnegotiable need is pitted by circumstance against the other? These circumstances might include parental addiction, mental illness, family violence and poverty, overt conflict, or profound unhappiness—the stresses imposed by society, on children as well as adults. Even without these, the tragic tension between attachment and authenticity can arise. Not being seen and accepted for who we are is sufficient.
Most people abandon their true selves (authenticity) to please others and keep their relationships (attachments), even if they are ones that are toxic and destructive. If the choice is between ‘hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need’ and ‘being myself and going without,’ I’m going to pick that first option every single time. Thus our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction where we secure our physical or emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel.
I suppose, then, that the inverse could be true; that it should come as no surprise that the more aligned I become with my intentions and my purpose, my true self, the less people-pleasing I do, the more I notice that some people perceive me as threatening, offensive, rude, or dismissive—but it does come as a surprise, every time. It haunts me; it’s my worst fear.
But there’s a gift to be found when your worst fears are realized. For so many years, I knew my drinking was dangerous and problematic, and I tried desperately to moderate, explicitly because I was terrified of the thought of having to quit. I drank to escape myself: to continue to suppress my authenticity so that I could continue to please others. Thankfully, blessedly, I could not moderate my drinking. What a gift that the bargain finally became untenable. And so too: any other transaction that would have me sacrifice freedom for love.
I’ve been struggling to write lately, because all I can think about is Palestine. Either nothing matters, or everything does; either life has no purpose or every little thing must be an infinite universe of meaning—and I’m inclined to believe the latter. And if everything has meaning, then all I can do is grieve and mourn and fast and pray and march and dream and read and talk about Palestine—but I worry that you don’t want to hear about it anymore, that life must go on, that there’s a finite amount of times I can say Palestine before I squander the goodwill built over the year of writing this newsletter; that you will walk away: such a shame.
I wish I could change everything, make the world more humane, more beautiful, more sensible, more tolerable, and then I could think about other things. I wish I could. But I can only offer who I am, what I have. I can only do my best to tell the truth and shame the devil, to write what is on my heart, and hope that it can be of use, that it is enough, that when each of us is at our most authentic, that this is precisely the moment in which we feel the most accepted, the most loved, the most celebrated, the most free.
Home
On Sunday night Duncan and I attended a candlelight vigil in Fairmount Park for the children of Gaza, and I made some poppy art to add to the altar. Poppy anemone (anemone coronaria) is the national flower of Palestine. Like the watermelon, the poppy flower bears the colors of the Palestinian flag (red, green, black, and white), and therefore stands in for the flag, as Palestinians are restricted from flying their own flag in their own homeland. Poppies are also used by many cultures globally as a symbol of remembrance. Here’s a quick how-to on paper poppies:
Start with red construction paper or tissue paper (I only had one piece of red construction paper, so I combed my old magazine collection for images featuring the color red, and made my poppies as collage). Next, fold the pieces in half and cut out the petals, pear-shaped and attached at the fold like a bow tie. Then layer four of the “bow ties” on top of one another at cross quarters, and affix with a little dab of glue. Cut out small black paper circles and glue those in the center, then draw the crown of stamens with a sharpie. You can use a hole punch to thread the flowers on a pipe cleaner stem to make 3D paper poppies, but I opted to glue them onto paper.
Though we cannot know the precise number due to Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure, at least 12,000 children have been killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces since October 7th. There is really no way for our minds and hearts to assimilate this information in any way that makes sense, but mobilizing ourselves in any way, even in the smallest gesture of making poppies out of paper, by singing a song or speaking out or participating in public ritual, helps mitigate the impacts of moral injury, emotional paralysis, and spiritual collapse that is the natural result of witnessing so much unbearable suffering, which can help us to continue to take principled action to do everything we can to protect the children who remain.
The World
Today begins the preliminary hearings of the genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands, based on Israel’s ongoing violations of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against the Palestinian people. The convention defines genocide as acts such as killings “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This ruling would be an important, actionable, and legally binding determination condemning and implicating Israel and the USA in the ongoing crimes against humanity currently being carried out in Palestine.
What you can do:
Sign the petition in support of the case against Israel at the ICJ.
Call your representatives (here’s a quick tool to get all their contact info at once), and ask them to make a statement in support of South Africa’s case, and, of course, to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
Follow these instagram accounts for more information: @so.informed and @watermelonmovement. 🍉🕯️
A Card
“Everything is Fine” is a bonus version of the 10 of Swords included in the Modern Witch Tarot by Lisa Sterle. The 10 of Swords is basically the lowest low: the final blow, ruin, failure, collapse. What I love most about this particular take is that its origin story is a perfectly symmetrical illustration of the meaning of the card itself: Lisa created this image at a low point in her career as an illustrator, to capture the sense of futility and defeat she felt working in ways that she did not feel were aligned with her purpose or joy. She posted the image, and it immediately went viral, boosting the profile of her comic book projects and, ultimately, leading to her landing a publishing deal to create the now-bestselling Modern Witch Tarot, moving her out of the rut she was in and into new life as an artist.
This is not to say that every negative experience has to have a happy ending to be valid, but it does point to the message of the 10 of Swords that only by telling the truth, by acknowledging and experiencing our lowest lows can we complete the cycle and begin anew. Also, of course, it conveys the feeling of life in the era of the never-ending doomscroll *exquisitely.* Please be kind to yourself, today and every day. xo
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. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi