52. Beautiful world now!

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9

Today is the ancient pagan high holy day of Beltane, the sexy and cacophonous feast of the irrepressible burgeoning of life, of the fecundity of earth, of the season of all good things green and growing; and it is also International Worker’s Day, the sexy and cacophonous global day of resistance and solidarity, of the fecundity of humanity’s shared struggle for dignity, for peace, for the irrepressible burgeoning of life.

Time, in fact, does not march onward into the distant future, but rather—it flows in cycles and seasons, and so we know, we feel, we’ve been here before. Today is May Day, once again, and the earth is alive and our hearts are aflame. Hallelujah and amen.

A week ago it was Election Day, and I worked the polls at a far-flung recreation center in Northeast Philly. My team of five fellow random poll workers sitting around a plastic folding table constituted a sitcom of characters so neatly typecast as to defy credulity: the self-described loud-mouthed Puerto Rican who immediately upon arriving two hours late, made herself a bed from folding chairs and went to sleep; an intelligent, soft-spoken man from Côte d'Ivoire who runs an ice cream truck (so peaceful and joyful!), a slight, shy, studious Vietnamese college student, a gentle giant in the form of a ruddy Irish teenager with autism from a rough-and-tumble home, who showed me hundreds of pictures of his cats on his phone; and me, whatever I am.

The most exciting things that happened all day were:

1. everybody talking shit about the state senator after she dropped off a box of soft pretzels and case of cold water and

2. three teenage girls who came in to use the bathroom because, according to everybody, it seemed like one of them might have been drunk.

By 2pm our erstwhile Breakfast Club had been visited by exactly 14 voters, and by 8pm when the polls closed, the total was 37. Voter turnout in the city landed at about 18% of registered voters, which is around half of what it was in 2020’s primary.

Philadelphia City Hall, Thursday, April 25th, 2024.

Two days later, I joined an anti-war march at City Hall, where a student walk-out from Temple met up with a group of community members, and together we walked over the Schuylkill River Bridge, and into West Philadelphia just in time to join together with the student and faculty walkout at Drexel University. Our numbers growing block by block, we marched onto the venerable old campus at the University of Pennsylvania, through rows of faculty with tears in their eyes, faculty who had just walked out of their classrooms holding signs that say “we support our students” and “Jewish faculty for a Free Palestine,” arm in arm as the students jubilantly ran onto the grass at College Green and set up their encampment, an act of principled civil disobedience with a clear, achievable, and reasonable demand: that their schools disclose their ties to genocide and sever them immediately.

What does it mean that representative democracy feels like languishing in Saturday detention and revolution feels like an ancient pagan rite of spring? What does it mean that the vast majority of people (more than 80% of people!) feel so cut off from their own sense of advocacy and agency—or so bored by elections of foregone conclusions—that they won’t even participate in the process? Is it a failure of these individuals, or is everything going according to the plan laid by the men who win when we opt out?

The satire writes itself.

On Saturday at the encampment, I participated in a group yoga class under a massive oak tree, while a Mennonite pastor gave a training on best practices for police interactions in the grass nearby, and a little farther down the hill was a group of people performed the Salah, Muslim daily prayers, where a massive Passover Seder for liberation would take place the next day. Tables overflowed with food, a supply tent overflowed with tents and tarps and sleeping bags, and there were comical amounts of bottled water in piles around the camp. The vibe was beautiful, reverent, somber, diligent, loving.

I keep thinking of these lines from America by Allen Ginsberg:

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.  

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere.

Next to the food table and the medic tent, a growing cluster of shelves full of books, zines, and poetry—called the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library—emerged, so named after the beloved Palestinian poet who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 6, 2023 along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister and her three children. He wrote his poem, If I Must Die, for his daughter Shaima. Shaima was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday along with her infant son (Refaat’s first grandchild, whom he did not live long enough to meet) and her husband.

At the end of yoga class I laid in shavasana, corpse pose. The teacher walked slowly, weaving in and through the patchwork of yoga mats on the grass, and recited Alareer’s Poem, If I Must Die:

If I must die, 

you must live 

to tell my story 

to sell my things 

to buy a piece of cloth 

and some strings, 

(make it white with a long tail) 

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 

while looking heaven in the eye 

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— 

and bid no one farewell 

not even to his flesh 

not even to himself— 

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above 

and thinks for a moment an angel is there 

bringing back love 

If I must die 

let it bring hope 

let it be a tale.

Scenes from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at UPenn. Communal yoga on College Green, the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library, music and fellowship under the stars, and a keffiyeh for Ben.

Tears streamed from my eyes down the side of my face and into my ears as I laid on my back, feeling myself stuck to the earth like a tiny thing pressed into this impossible earth through the force of love which is gravity, looking up into the infinite sky, and in my mind I saw a missile, the size of a pin prick at first, but slowly getting larger, and larger, and larger. In my mind I heard it screaming through the sky, louder and louder, closer and closer as it approached, and then I felt myself disappear.

But I did not die. I did not die like Refaat and Shaima. I did not die like Aaron Bushnell or Mahmoud Dahdouh, or Lalzowmi Frankcom or James Henderson or Hind Rajab. I did not die, not yet, not like the 35,000 people known dead from this massacre, not like the thousands uncounted, I did not die, and neither did you.

So we must live. We must let it be a tale.

There is nothing new under the sun.

We have been here before.

We will be here again.

We know what to do.

Bless this Beltane, bless this revolution, bless this fecund earth.

Photo from University of Georgia Students for Justice in Palestine.

---

Home.

Gluten-free chocolate chip cookies! I don’t know where this recipe came from “originally” but

Justin Cook

posted it on his instagram stories with the caption, fuck a paywall. Co-sign.

These were delicious, and are now going to be my go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe. I made a batch to bring to the encampment: perfect because they are halal and Kosher for Passover!

---

The world.

I’m loving watching my son Jasper’s film photography practice evolve. This one really hits:

35mm photo by Jasper Macfarlane

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

Home + the World

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. ⚔️❤️ Jodi