51. A holy mess.
I wasn’t going to look at the eclipse. I intended to stay indoors, prayerful. But as my husband made his way towards the world outside, backpack on and skateboard in hand, I changed my mind, compelled—suddenly I just wanted to be with him, with the others, to marvel together.
We spread a small blanket in the grass next to the fountain in Logan Square, and ate granola bars as the Ben Franklin Parkway filled with people: grandparents with grandchildren, elegant old ladies, tourists, teens, and frumpled co-workers who seemed to have stumbled out of cubicles in nearby buildings—awkward co-workers with giant donut-shop pitchers of melted-ice coffee in their afternoon hands, having stilted co-worker conversations, but then, maybe, a spark of something. An affiliation, a connection. A loosening in the jaw, in the shoulders. A deep breath for the first time in a while. It’s nice to get outside.
The smell of clove cigarettes wafted across the grass, and, even though we were not in the path of totality, for a few minutes the world grew quiet and eerie and dark, and time unspooled from time. People wandered, enraptured, looking upwards through magic glasses, then slowly, the light grew, the tape unpaused, and the fountains came back on and the Mr. Softee ice cream trucks geared up their carousel songs again. The clouds and the crowds broke up and dissipated, and the co-workers went back to their cubicles.
But maybe now, something was different. Maybe something almost imperceptible had shifted, maybe somebody realized that they got the thing that they wanted, but that it was for a version of themselves that doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe somebody opened the window and let the noise and the grit and the smells and the weather in.
I’ve been thinking about community, and what it means, and how it is our only salvation, and how that’s a damn shame because most of us can’t even figure out how to peaceably share a bathroom at home or a microwave at work, much less organize to seize the means of production. How in the hell are we going to build a new world in the shell of the old when we can’t even tolerate people smells on the subway or waiting in line at the DMV? How are we going to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world when we can’t figure out how to be neighbors without quibbling over trash day, or surveilling each other with ring cameras?
I sit on a park bench in Rittenhouse Square eating lunch, one in a long line of people sitting on a park bench in Rittenhouse square eating lunch, facing another long line of people sitting on the park benches opposite me, the whole square lined with people eating lunch on park benches, like spokes on a giant wheel, or stitches on a quilt block, while a continuous parade of silly dogs walk by, tethered to every kind of fancy human talking into the air, having conversations through their earbuds, when suddenly out of nowhere, the guy sitting next to me whips out a harmonica and starts to play it, lovely.
I go home, to my family, to the place where everybody congregates in the kitchen in our bedclothes, to the place where I am known. I look up and out the window just in time to see the man across the street stretching to stick his head and torso as far out of the 3rd floor window as he can, surreptitiously smoking out over the porch roof, cigarette in one hand, the other furtively fanning the smoke away from the window, looking back to see if anyone has caught him in his private, secret pleasure shared only with the birds and me.
Last weekend I was visited by two friends whom I hardly knew in the flesh, but whom I have admired and grown to love through each of their writing and and thinking and living in the world as seen through social media (and who have been brought closer together in the past seven months through our mutual bewilderment at how few of our friends and associates have been willing to lift a finger or say a word for Palestine, and have become each other’s ad hoc instagram support group). I tricked myself into believing that they were only here to sleep at my house while they attended a conference, to keep myself from feeling afraid of the fact that they had come to see me, to keep myself from feeling afraid of being seen.
But they came and I was awkward and stilted and felt like I was doing eye contact wrong and I cried a lot and they stayed. I let myself be seen, I let myself become undone, I let my days become derailed and unmade and was taken all the way outside myself, eclipsing all ideas I thought I had about myself, when I thought it would be too much but I couldn’t get enough, when I remembered that it’s normal to cry every hour on the hour because my friends are so beautiful, when they left and I cried again, a sea change of salt tears, not wanting to forget any little detail, when I turned to tell them whatever little thing popped into my head but they were gone. I want to live like this. I want to live like this until Palestine is free and I want to remember how to live like this after Palestine is free, after everything is free.
The days keep flowing through my fingertips like water. I do a single thing, like voting early, like drinking mint tea and peeling an orange, and the day is over. I make a delicious vegan Alfredo sauce and the day is over. I water the plants, I wash and fold the sheets, I put the sheets away neatly on the laundry room shelves and the day is over. I let it happen. I let time unspool. I let myself become undone.
I tend the sliver of land on which I live, I tend the creatures who live in my home, I read and I study liberation, and I create documents and articulations of my own growth through writing, through movement, and even though I don’t have a job to speak of, all of these tasks are labor, and are actually most especially and most importantly tasks of relationship.
I have been afraid of being seen and loved in friendship and community because I have been wounded by community and I have been ruthless in community. I have been heartbroken and cast aside in friendship, so much, and I have been careless and reckless in friendship, a heartbreaker. I have been wounded in family, so deeply that I thought I wouldn’t survive. And I have struck back furious, savage.
I have endured exile, self-imposed and otherwise. But now, something is different. Something almost imperceptible has shifted.
I know now that it’s a lie that we are all just bad at relationship, at community. It’s a lie told by the people who crush hope for a living, who bank on our belief that we are bad at it, who feast on our fear that we can’t be trusted, that we can trust no one.
I know now that the salvation and the salve is not to be found in the opposite of these things that hurt me, not in getting away from the wound and the world, but by going deeper into it: I have to pack the wound with salt and let it burn, I have to dig out the splinters and let it bleed. I have to dress the wound with care and reverence.
Today Venus—that great benefic goddess of love, queen of women and friendship and femmes and queer folk, ruler of romance and beauty and art and creativity and abundance—touches Chiron, the wounded healer, the teacher, the orphan. As astrology is a symbolic language, true in the way that poetry is true, this signature offers an opportunity to look with our most loving eyes at our deepest psychic wounds—to peel back the bandages, to wash our wounds, to anoint them, to massage the bruise with salve, with salvation—with willow bark and lavender and rose and camphor and myrrh.
Healing is never complete, it will never be. Healing is not static, it is not a two-dimensional frame, it is not a trophy or a medal hanging on the wall, it is not a pretty picture. Healing is a living, breathing, bleeding, oozing thing. Healing is a cacophony.
Healing is a holy mess.
Maybe we don’t yet know how to live in community, or how to trust that we will be loved for who we are, but we learn by doing. We learn to love by loving.
We have to try.
And maybe it’s not that we’re doing it wrong, but it’s just that this is what doing it looks like: a little spark of something. An affiliation, a connection. A loosening in the jaw, in the shoulders. A deep breath for the first time in a while. It’s nice to get outside.
Maybe we take these little sparks wherever we can find them, and nurture them, and maybe we place them in a little nest of old news and blow ever-so-gently on the embers and shield them from the wind as they crackle and grow; maybe we feed them little scraps of fortune-cookie fortunes and to-do lists until the flame licks higher.
Then it really starts to grow: we feed it all of our old journals, our embarrassment and our shame, we throw in the degrees we never got and the books we never wrote, all of our missteps and failures, then when the flames grow and build and get more and more hungry, we start to throw in other things—the office microwave, the furniture, the file cabinets, the clinical notes, the house where we grew up—until it becomes a great, bright conflagration, a powerfully illuminating light by which to read and write, a fire by which to cauterize the wound, by which to make bricks to build dwellings and pots to make food, by which to make bread and bake it on the stones, giving it all away, because everything is free now.
Home.
Some happy lil kitchen projects this week:
a beautiful cucumber salad made with gochugaru chili powder and Old North Shrub1, a vinegar syrup handmade by Jamie of Old North Farm, which was a gift from one of my houseguests,
! (Be sure to check out her beautiful substack, Pleasant Living).a sauerkraut infused with mustard seed and foraged dandelion and violet leaves and flowers. I usually always have a batch of kraut going, with a basic formula of 2 grams of salt for every 100 grams of cabbage, plus some caraway seed, simple. But, inspired by April’s latest
letter, where she made sauerkraut with nettles, I added in the foraged bounty and the mustard seed.Not pictured: ham stock from the leftover Christmas ham carcass in the freezer, and
Japanese sweet potato oven fries with a truly inspired cranberry goat cheese dipping sauce. Chef’s kiss.
The World.
Decolonizing Therapy
In keeping with my tradition of recommending books that I haven’t finished reading yet, please allow me to wholeheartedly endorse my current audiobook selection, Decolonizing Therapy by Dr. Jennifer Mullen. This is a kind of book and message that I have sometimes had a hard time metabolizing in the past, feeling defensive of my chosen profession, or embarrassed or ashamed of the ways I have upheld colonialism through my social work practice in the past, or just feeling too under-resourced and over-capacity to absorb and apply its lessons. But the free Palestine movement has blessedly changed all that for me, and I find myself feeling supported, eager, and unabashed in my learning and unlearning.
Specifically, this book makes me feel less crazy. Again and again, I am learning to connect my individual experiences of failure and trauma with the overall systemic and ongoing process of colonization, and recognizing that 1) the system is designed for us to fail, because 2) the economic system of colonization, capitalism, is maximally extractive when we are traumatized and 3) that everything—all oppression and all liberation—is connected.
I wept when I listened to this passage because it spoke so much to every single job and community organization I have been a part of in the eight years of my social work/social justice career since selling the Cake Shop and before:
The Mental Health Industrial Complex
The Mental Health Industrial Complex (MHIC) continues to medicalize spiritual and emotional dis-ease, creating further trauma in the person, at the hands of the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) (Gallagher, 2016, para. 12). We decolonize our therapy in order to take back our land, our cultures, our lives, and our ancestral healing—which we can find at the roots of many of our helping professions. In decolonizing our therapy, we agree to unpack and stand in solidarity to decolonize and heal every other system across the board. Our liberations are deeply intertwined because colonization and the emotional and physical effects of its malignancy have made us very sick.
For example, for many people who do not have access to high-end private practice therapists and coaches, community mental health and nonprofit group practices are the go-to for mental health needs. These practices and nonprofits primarily employ recently graduated social work, counseling, and psychology students at the rate of $30–50/hour for a 55- minute session, for which the group practice charges anywhere from $150– 200 an hour. Often these offices are not providing payment to the early-career clinicians for administrative work, such as notes, outreach, referrals, or meetings. These early career clinicians are often struggling to receive proper supervision, working other jobs to meet their basic needs, paying student loans, dealing with intense vicarious trauma due to the material they are helping to hold, are overworked with 40–80+ cases a month, and move from job to job due to constant microaggressions, burnout, bias, and acts of discrimination. Furthermore, the approved therapeutic methods of early-career clinicians at these kinds of organizations are often confined to CBT and “clinical” modalities that introduce other kinds of problems.
In turn, clients have poor outcomes because there is constant burnout and turnover within the staff. This continues to affect people seeking support and increases feelings of abandonment and mistrust in the system. With addiction cycles, trauma stops being processed, symptoms arise, violence toward self or loved ones increases. The behavior is eventually criminalized, especially when a person is BIPOC. This is an example of how our fields exploit and perpetuate violence on freshmen as well as the community they should be serving. By forcing the practitioners to work within the narrow confines of the system, they are being forced to inflict the same harm on the people they want to help that they themselves have received.
Naomi Klein at Swarthmore
This week, I also had the honor of seeing Naomi Klein, author of Doppelgänger: a Trip into the Mirror World speak on the campus of Swarthmore College, in a lecture entitled Israel, Palestine, and the Doppelgänger Effect. The basic premise posited by Klein was that Zionism is based on a false assumption that the Nazi holocaust was this uniquely horrific and specific event that is unique to Jews and has never happened before and must be guarded against forevermore, rather than the truth which is that Nazism was the horrific logical conclusion of the colonial violence perpetrated by European settlers all over the world against many different kinds of people for centuries. She argued that placing the holocaust at the center of history rather than seeing it as an extension of colonial violence has allowed Zionists to perpetrate the same violence upon the people of Palestine (which in turn reminded me of what
has been writing about incest, and how the taboo against incest is so powerful that it allows incest to continue to be perpetrated unchallenged at mass scale, because it becomes so “unthinkable” that no one is allowed to acknowledge it when it is happening). She urged us to place the holocaust in its proper historical context in order to understand it and be able to truly say “never again.”She ended her lecture by saying, “I’ll say this because it’s almost Passover, I think we are goin to see a great exodus from Zionism.” May it be so. Sameach Pesach.
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
with someone you think would enjoy it is also a great way to support the project! Thank you for being here and thank you for being you. ⚔️❤️ JodiFrom Old North Farm’s website: At its most basic, shrub is a beverage made of fruit, vinegar, and sugar. According to Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste, “Shrub is a colonial-day drink whose name is derived from the Arabic word sharab, to drink. It is a concentrated syrup…that is traditionally mixed with water to create a refreshing drink that is simultaneously tart and sweet. In the nineteenth-century, the drink was often spiked with brandy or rum.”
❤️❤️❤️
Thanks so much for the shout out! Love the idea of dandelions & violets!
& I have Doppelgänger queued up for my next audiobook!