54. Are you OK?
when I would feel unmoored…. Or when I would feel overwhelmed by what was going on in the world, I would just say to myself: “Hope is a discipline.” It’s less about “how you feel,” and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning. And you’re still going to struggle, that that was what I took away from it.
It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. Like, you have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible, to change the world. Mariame Kaba, the Intercept
Recently, I’ve had a few friends in different ways reach out to express that they were concerned about me or worried. I know it comes from a good place, the way any good friend would be concerned about their good friend who lost a job the same month their dog died and is now posting dozens of angry instagram stories every day about a genocide. Any good friend would hope their friend was not spiraling into despair, and it is natural, and kind, to reach out to check in, and say hey, are you OK?
And the truth is, they are right to worry; I’m not really OK. I’m not OK, but it’s not because I’m speaking out. I’m not OK, but it’s not because of the grief that has now become a constant, tender loving companion in my life. I’m not OK, but it’s not because I’m ranting or chanting or marching in the streets multiple times a week (these are the things that make me feel sane).
The reason I’m not OK is the horror and despair I feel at seeing exactly how many people seem to find this current state of affairs acceptable or even desirable; how few people actually are able to show up to this moment in any meaningful way, how many people, in my life and beyond it, are either coolly indifferent, or cheering on the slaughter.
Who could possibly say that they are OK right now?
And because of this, because I’m not OK, because I am fighting an uphill battle with despair and cynicism every morning, sometimes are you OK feels less like how can I support you or I’m sorry this is happening and more like you’re making it weird. Sometimes the question feels like a subtle admonition to tone it down.
What’s weird is, I’m also really happy. Like, I’ve never been so happy. Last week I was sitting at a bus stop in Germantown for over a half an hour waiting for the H, eating a cinnamon apple granola bar from Aldi, and I was so happy, like, positively just elated, and I knew it. I felt it in the moment. And I thought, I’m so happy right now, so peaceful and so content, you would think I’m at… where do people go to be happy? A concert? A beach vacation? Disney World? None of those places would actually make me as happy as I am right now in this moment, sitting at this bus stop in the sunshine eating this granola bar.
And I think it’s for a few reasons. First and foremost, my happiness stems from my recovery from alcohol use, because, almost five years in, living life without a daily hangover is still an absolutely wondrous miracle. Secondly but also entwined with the first, is having the tools of a mindfulness practice, which has changed my life in terms of my ability to soothe my boredom and restlessness and just let myself be—in my body, in the moment. Not always, but enough.
But as much as anything else, I know I feel happy because I’m a stranger, because nobody at this bus stop knows me or cares to, because I have relinquished many roles and identities from my life and I feel utterly relieved of the performance of them.
I love my family to an insane degree, I love my menopausal body more than I have ever loved my body, I love these trash-riddled streets of this city just as they are, without condition. I love every small thing, especially the flowers and the birds.
And this happiness, my happiness, exists side-by-side with my despair, which is equally real, and equally all-encompassing.
In the past, I’ve been told that I have too high standards that I hold people to account, but I actually think the opposite is true. I am so quick to give people the benefit of the doubt in the name of acceptance, I let so many things go by me because of the love I feel for the people I love, and the fact that I know where people’s stuff comes from; all of our weird little habits of mind and idiosyncrasies and unexamined wrongheadedness because I know I have them too, exuberantly so. But really, I give my love away so easily. I like you if you like me. I love you if you love me.
The pain I feel, what makes me not OK, is the chasm growing between myself and those who remain silent.
We are carrying a light from the beginning of time to the end. No matter how many have tried, it has never been extinguished and it will not be put out now. It is within so many of us and it is growing brighter and brighter and wilder and wilder. Will we descend into genocidal chaos and climate catastrophe? Or will we rise to the occasion, and evolve into a species that understands how to be different, and be equal, and be free and be of earth. I suspect we will do both. But I want to be with you on the side of us forever. So I say, we shall not be moved. -adrienne maree brown at The People’s Graduation, May 16, 2024
I keep saying hope is a discipline because I’m trying to will myself to remember. But why does it hurt so much? Why is it so hard to remember?
On Sunday, I participated in a March for Palestinian Healthcare Workers. It was a beautiful action, with a hundred or so healthcare workers in scrubs—marching, singing, observing music, observing silence, and impassioned speakers—to honor the hundreds of doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other health care workers who have been killed, sniped, shot point blank in the head at their patients’ bedside, bulldozed into mass graves, hands ziptied behind their backs, still wearing their scrubs.
I was asked to make a speech, and when the march ended in the street in front of Thomas Jefferson University, my former employer, I got to speak to my experience of being forced to resign for refusing to be silent about Palestine. It still boggles my mind. But what is worse to me than the cowardly administration doing what cowardly administrators do, is the apathy of my coworkers, who did and said nothing. What if every therapist in the clinic posted that same flyer on their own bulletin boards? What if every nurse refused to be silent? Would they fire us all? We’ll never know, because most people simply cannot be bothered to take a risk for what is right, and that is why I’m not OK. That is what keeps me up at night.
After my speech, while other speakers said their words, I helped pass out flyers to passersby explaining our action. The flyer described the partnerships Jefferson has within Israel, including multi-million dollar biotech research projects and facilities. And most people took the flyer, and were genuinely interested in knowing what this group of “healthcare heroes” had to say about their institutions’ complicity in the biggest global issue of our time. But many people looked away, refused to extend their hand to receive a flyer, refused to acknowledge the existence of the flyer, the hand reaching out, the person attached to the hand.
This is why I’m not OK. This is what keeps me up at night. The inhumanity of indifference. The banality of evil, in Hannah Arendt’s words. The people who watch my stories and never say a word on their own timelines. Or worse, the ones who have muted me, left me on read. I can’t abide it. It utterly breaks me.
Listen I’ve had my moments with cancel culture, with social justice policing and identitarianism. I know people shouldn’t feel coerced into making a statement about something they don’t want to, but as my friend, the proprietor of the cutest little plant shop in Asheville, NC (Palm and Pine) said, “yea, they don't have to.. but WHY DON’T THEY WANT TO.” Why don’t they want to speak out? I’ll never understand it. (Also look at these lil prickly pears! They were started from cuttings from our old house on Westwood. 🌵💚)
So I feel cut off. I feel shut out. I feel desperate and confused by the moral apathy of the world. I’m not OK. But I am committed to hope. I am committed to the discipline of it. I am committed to learning how to turn my attention away from people, places, and things that make me feel empty and hollow and broken and turn my face to the sun, plant seeds of joy and connection, and tune in to the riotous abundance of life that is happening all around me.
Anywhere that the worst of humanity is on display we can also find the best of us; and I see it everywhere: first and foremost, in the steadfastness of the Palestinian people themselves, who face down total annihilation with their dignity and humanity intact, but also in the students demonstrating integrity in the face of violent repression, a grievous betrayal of our society’s obligations to our youth; in the faces of the writers and plant shop owners and health care workers and artists and everyday people standing up to Zionist bullying and choosing to lose opportunities and friends over losing their humanity, the people who cannot abide silence, cannot abide complicity, and are, in the words of adrienne maree brown, moving our life force in solidarity with ending the nakba (scholars of belonging, faithful to a future unlike any day we have ever lived).
Delivering the speech that day was like an exorcism. It’s really a lucky thing, on a personal level, to have been able to do this. Most people don’t get the opportunity to stand in the street and have their say in front of the workplace that did them dirty, with a microphone and a supportive audience. I opened my mouth and all the hornets that had been banging around in my chest flew out, one by one, and I was left with a gentle hum, and a peace. It was a catharsis.
Two friends and I sat on metal stools in a school gym in Chinatown to watch a documentary on Grace Lee Boggs. She said: the radical has over-emphasized the role of activism and under-emphasized the role of reflection.
So I’m taking that in. I’m reflecting.
I planted the Palestinian kousa squash seeds I was gifted at the La La Lil Jidar exhibit and performance in December; I walked in the woods with a friend. I rode my bike to the co-op, I wrote a little newsletter. I painted the trim around the door.
In the end I think it is better to speak out and become disillusioned, to be disabused of so many false notions of allyship, friendship, community. It is good to be humbled, to be brought down to the earth, to be brought to my knees, to be confused, to be forced to simplify, to reduce, reduce, reduce.
To walk the earth, to sit at the bus stop, waiting, not expecting or feeling entitled to being understood or liked but knowing that far beyond likability, far beyond being accepted, understood, celebrated, there is the the fact of knowing within my fiber and sinew and marrow and bone that I belong to this earth, and she to me, that I am welcome here.
Home.
Springtime herb bundles for smoke cleansing:
This week I gathered a few handfuls of mugwort, lavender, and rosemary from the little garden bed out front, and made some herb bundles for ritual burning and cleansing. I love a Palo Santo or a sage wand as much as the next witch, but I also understand that the purpose of magic is to connect us—to the land, to the spirits which animate all life, to each other, to ourselves. And so it only makes sense that the plants we use in ritual should reflect the place we live and our own traditions, and not cause harm—either by colonial cultural appropriation or by the overharvesting and commodification of plants that are sacred to a particular place and people. This was my first time making my own herb bundles, but after a little research I decided to do it this way: I gathered the herbs and let them dry out for a day, so they just started to wilt but were still soft, then bundled them in twine and hung them in a cool, dark place to dry, rotating every day or so for airflow. 🙏🏻
The world.
Arundhati Roy on the role of the writer:
I never accept that added profession of being an activist, because I think that reduces what writers used to be, all writers—not all writers but many writers—write about the world they live in without needing to be called activist, that’s a very new word and that word has been added on because the idea of what a writer is in the world today has been reduced into a commodity, you know you’re supposed to be an entertainer who lives between literature festivals and bestseller lists or something. For me, I am a writer, I write sometimes fiction, sometimes nonfiction, I write about the world I live in. Sometimes in an exterior way, sometimes in an interior way, sometimes in all kinds of ways, which is what happens in one’s fiction. So I would just say that you know the world is very busy classifying and codifying and putting people into silos, and especially today when majoritarianism is on the rise, it’s our job to be unpopular, it’s our job to stand alone and say what we really think, not as activists, but as writers.
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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I felt this Jodi….I ‘m not okay either….but all of us fighting this good together will be not okay together ❤️
You're a beacon for so many others, and most importantly you're a beacon for yourself 💛 Thanks for this (and, side note, thanks for making audio files for these!)