49. Sign of exaltation.
Listen to me read this essay:
Greetings from the blackberry winter, from the chill and bluster of March after a warm week full of impossible flowers and never-before-seen blue skies. Greetings from the full moon hanging heavy on the horizon like a gleaming porcelain dinner plate. Greetings from the kitchen table, where a hand-held radio plays Temple University WRTI your classical and jazz source and it’s time for Evening Jazz with Greg Bryant who reminds us after playing Con Alma by Dizzy Gillespie that music is the healing force of the universe, and at the center of the sound is love. Greetings from gin rummy, greetings from Key Lime La Croix, greetings from chicken & grits and candlelight.
I haven’t wanted to write, still don’t want to, because I’m having a hard time feeling what I’m feeling. I’ve been walking around in a kind of glum stupor, ever since my… I can’t seem to type it… what are the words? My best friend departed this earthly realm? My constant companion crossed the rainbow bridge?
My dog died.
My dog, Sugar, she died.
On Monday.
Last week, we were hiking in the Wissahickon Valley, and other than a new, barely perceptible yet unmistakable wolfiness about her—something in her gait and the hunch of her shoulders that seemed newly feral—nothing was amiss. A week later, she had lost all her faculties, most likely from a brain tumor, which, I have come to learn, is common in dogs of a certain age, causing intermittent and then cascading neurological symptoms and ultimately, the aforementioned death.
This numbness I’m feeling is not normal for me. Usually, for better and for worse, I can count on having access to a wild array of often very intense feelings. But now I just feel blank, and cold, and dull, and torpid. Nothing holds my interest. The full spectrum of light and color has narrowed.
It feels like this:
At four in the morning you sit on the kitchen floor next to her body. You light a candle, you write in your journal. You have a mild panic attack worrying if you did too little, too late, followed by extreme planning mode, thinking about how to wash all the blankets and where to put them. You wonder why you are not feeling anything. You do the Wordle. You look up just in time to see the the cat on the other side of the room looking at you, making direct eye contact while peeing in your slipper. You finally find your tears, all of them, when you have to wake up your family and tell them the news. You take off all your clothes and crawl in the bed, but you can’t fall asleep.
It feels like relief at knowing how the story ends.
You and your son drop off your husband at work and go to the Moonlight Diner to wait for the vet to open, and you talk about dopamine and high school dating dynamics with puffy eyes over mediocre hash browns and anemic scrambled eggs.
You call the vet to tell them you’re no longer coming in for an appointment because the dog has passed away, but you are bringing her body in for cremation instead. You really appreciate the inappropriately loud, high-key flamboyant gasp of the vet tech when he heard the news, because yes, thank you, it IS shocking.
On the way to the vet, your son puts on These Days by Nico and you lose it all over again—everything is so tragic and so beautiful. The sun has never been so bright. The cherry blossoms have never been so pink. You think of Gaza (because you are never not thinking about Gaza).
What a luxury to mourn a dog.
I don’t mean that in the way that maybe I would have meant it in the past. In the past, I might have said such a thing as a self-admonishment, a dismissal, something to negate my pain, as in: who are you to be so selfish, to deserve to grieve so extravagantly, indeed, to grieve at all, when so many do not have the opportunity.
Whereas now, I mean it as in: how incredibly grateful I am to have the space to process the experience of losing my dog, when so many people all over the world are fighting for their survival and don’t have space to grieve their animals, to say nothing of their homes, their children, their parents, their spouses, their livelihoods, their very existence.
I mean it as in a prayer: I dedicate my grief to the world’s grief. May we all love so well. May we all be so loved. May we all mourn extravagantly, honorably, every passing. May we all live these mundane, sacred days.
In her latest letter on Monday’s lunar eclipse and the (meta)physics of time,
talked about divesting from the illusion of control. Many people come to astrology in an effort to predict their way out of pain, she says. But pain, too, is a fact of life. An essential source of friction. In this, it can be a teacher.In
’s recent letter on living in these times of constant existential threat, she shares:Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön suggests that we keep our hearts and minds open, befriend our monsters, and find the “cool emptiness” that doesn’t seek to attribute meaning to everything.
When we stop fighting the groundlessness of freedom from imputed meaning, emptiness becomes an experience of awe, of the infinite, of limitless space.—Pema Chödrön
I’m not sure I’ve been able to access “cool emptiness” from my place of numbness, but now that I’ve taken the couple of days it has taken me to write this, my feelings are indeed flowing once again. I’m uncorked, unblocked, unfrozen, fluid. Because I am a part of this world, not separate from it, my grief merges with the grief of the world, and we are one.
It is said in astrology that a planet at home in a sign is in its exaltation. Venus, planet of love and beauty and relationship, just entered Pisces, the signature of the cosmic ocean of expansiveness, empathy, merging, and oneness. Venus in Pisces is in the sign of her exaltation. Sugar left on the day of the eclipse. She was our lucky star, and for a brief moment on the slate of time, in our home, she was in her exaltation.
Goodbye Sugar Dog, train dog, trash dog, mountain dog, rascal.
Rest in flowers, rest in treats.
The World.
The response to my last letter, where I shared my story of losing my job due to my advocacy for Palestine, has been tremendous, and tremendously heartbreaking.
48. Witness.
Many people wrote to me from all over the country—from California, Washington State, Washington DC, Chicago, Maine, New York, Iowa, and more—to tell me the same story over and over again and I really hope we can listen:
Health care workers, educators, social workers, academics, and other professionals in higher education, corporate, nonprofit, and government institutions across the country and across the Western world are facing extreme vilification, smear campaigns, shunning, shaming, disciplinary action, contempt, cancellation, lost opportunities, revoked teaching privileges, rescinded research grants, accusations of bias, racism, and unprofessionalism, forced resignations, and firings for, in some cases, merely acknowledging the existence of Palestinians, or for merely expressing concern for how Israel’s actions might be affecting students.
One letter writer, a teacher, was suspended for harassment after merely sharing a reading list about Palestine with their colleagues. Another described decades of loneliness in their workplace due to their principled stance on Palestine.
These consequences of speech are not more important than what Palestinians are facing every day, have been facing every day for a hundred years, but they are what is happening where we are located, and therefore they are the lever on which we can apply pressure.
This is why it is so imperative that everyone takes a stand, whatever that looks like for you. This is why we all need to be loud and getting louder in our (not complicated at all) understanding that killing and starving children is never OK, that Israel is a nation-state, not a religion, that Zionism is not Judaism, and that there are no conditions, no action or intention from “the other side” that will ever justify a genocide, that this has to stop now.
It’s not about virtue signaling or an unreasonable expectation that everyone be a foreign policy expert when they’re just trying to be a food influencer or whatever. It’s about the fact that we live in a society, and in a society, in a culture, in a community, we are responsible for one another. It’s about the fact that the more people speak out, the more we normalize resisting genocide, the safer we all are, the stronger the resistance becomes, the more chance we have of saving literal lives. Every day without a permanent ceasefire means hundreds more lives lost.
Recommended actions:
Tomorrow is Land Day, with actions, demonstrations, and protests all over the world in solidarity. Find your community and stand together for humanity. Jewish Voice for Peace and Palestinian Youth Movement are good places to start.
Recommended reading:
The latest issue of Hammer & Hope, which is dedicated to Palestine, with essays by Angela Davis, Arundhati Roy, Darryl Li, Nicki Kattoura, Noura Erakat, Howard Zinn, Michelle Alexander, and many more.
A question.
I have always loved the intimacy and vulnerability of the advice column format of essay writing.
is a classic, as is Dear Therapist by Lori Gottlieb. Of course, there is the brilliant and by , and my newest fave, by .So, due to my newly underemployed status, I’m thinking of starting an advice column of my own, one that would be paywalled, as a bonus to my paid subscribers while keeping the weekly essays free. What do y’all think?
While I am, technically, a therapist, I’m envisioning this column as coming more from an “ask a Gen X internet witch” angle. If you have a burning life question you would like to see answered in this format, email me at: homeandtheworld@substack.com with the subject line advice column. Anyone whose question is chosen to be answered in the column will get a year-long paid subscription (or paid subscription extension), for free. Submissions will always be anonymous, and may be edited for length and clarity.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I hope you are able to find rest, and ease, and comfort in the coming days, wherever you find yourself, at home and in the world. 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. If you wish to support my writing with a one-time donation, you may do so on Venmo @Jodi-Rhoden. Sharing
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Aw, SUGARRRRR!!! I’m so so sorry for your loss. Sugar was a sweet potato. ❤️ and yes, on the advice column! Also hmu if you want company writing /coffee shop sitting next week or walking in the Wiss!