57. Seeing things.
Greetings from the morning after the former president (who is also a presidential candidate) survived an assassination attempt. I don’t need to tell you that this event marks another palpable shift into an even bleaker political landscape. I don’t need to tell you that we are living into a world-defining epoch, that we are sailing our tattered ships into uncharted waters, that we are being swept into an escalating timeline with no precedent. I don’t need to tell you to be careful, to keep your wits about you, to hold fast to that which is good.
You already know.
I want to tell you instead about this tree stump in the Scottish Highlands that we saw when we got off the train in Arrochar and walked to Loch Long for lunch but all the chippies were closed, and how utterly alive it is even in its death, especially in its death:
I want to tell you how I finished the book The Flowering Wand by
, and how it has given me so much hope to remember that all these thousands of years of empire trying to suppress paganism and animism and ways of knowing and existing that cannot be defined in a word that ends in -ism have been utterly in vain, how our relationship to earth and life is insistent and eternal and inexorable and how the book has helped me to be gentle with myself when recognizing my challenges living in pro-social, communal, earthly ways because it turns out that there’s been a concerted effort since Crete and Minos were invaded by the Greeks 5000 years ago to suppress these ways of living. And how her words point a way through the current maelstrom:Climate collapse will not be solved by techno-narcissism. Patriarchy will not be cured with shame and guilt. Racism cannot be cut out of our brains with a sword. Neither can we escape the system by running to the forests. The wounds of patriarchal capitalism live in our hearts, and they will fester whether or not we sleep under an open sky.
Instead, I want to offer the wisdom of Dionysus’s probing, interrogative vine. What if we looked to plants for advice on how to revolt? What if we asked the Animate Everything for slippery suggestions? I am always drawn back to that life-affirming quote from activist Toni Cade Bambara: “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” Responding to this approach, feminist writer adrienne maree brown invites us into “pleasure activism.” How can our pleasure, our vine-like questioning and probing of the system, begin to confuse the systems that constrict us? How can we, like ivy, begin to encircle the hand that holds the sword, until it is so tightly bound it can’t help but drop its weapon?
I want to tell you about the full moon in Capricorn, about friendship and friendliness, about how I’m experiencing a vital and vigorous renewal in trust and fun in community, of sweetness and love in community, how the revolution is irresistible this summer, bratty and boisterous, up all night.
I want to tell you about taking pictures.
My son, Jasper, dove head-first into film photography this year, and for his high school graduation, our lifelong brother-friend Jaye Bartell gave him a gorgeously refurbished 1960s Olympus Pen FT half frame1 camera, a true legacy gift, and Jasper is truly obsessed. Probably a good 40% of our conversations are now about the Pen FT: Listen to the shutter. So satisfying. Did you know that the light meter is built in? Look at the font. So cool. Look at the case. Did you know that the other cameras you would have to advance the film twice, but the Pen FT you only have to do it once? et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I, too, have long been a visual storyteller, and love taking photos on my phone. So when we arrived in Scotland, I wanted to take pictures of everything, a pretty normal thing for humans on vacation, but my orientation towards capturing the moment rather than being in the moment gave me pause. Am I appreciating beauty or extracting content? Are we all just always in conversation with the algorithm now?
But isn’t this what writing is, too? I’m going about my day, and something strikes me as meaningful, or beautiful. I look to the left from the cramped middle seat to try to get a glimpse of the sunset as the plane is taking off from JFK, but instead I see a young man in the window seat make the sign of the cross, his eyes closed in reverence. His gesture strikes me, shifts me out of my previous thought trajectory—it tells me a complete story of humility, of surrender, it tells me something of his background. It is a tiny moment that knits him, and now me as a witness, into a lineage of ritual going back a thousand years. It evokes a feeling, a poignancy, and I want to capture the feeling, to describe it, to explore it, but most of all I want to share it. I want to give it to you.
So I open my little notes app on my phone, and to the bulleted list labeled home + the world I add:
someone making the sign of the cross just after takeoff
And now, here, weeks later, in the quiet of the Sunday morning after an assassination attempt on a former president (who is also a presidential candidate) I can revisit that moment, I can enter it and expand it. Isn’t that what writers have done for millennia? Cave painters, pottery etchers, dancers and cantors and songcatchers and photographers? We capture the moment. We evoke meaning. We share it.
When you have a camera, you see things, Jasper said.
On our first day, in London, we visited the Photographer’s Gallery on the edge of SoHo, a remarkably comprehensive 4-story gallery, studio, bookstore, cafe, and community center for photography in all its forms. Jasper stood, mesmerized, at a wall of dozens of different kinds of film, and I purchased a disposable half frame film camera to shoot on the trip.
We left for Scotland that night.
We traveled light, backpacks only, sleeping on trains and in hostels. We had a few days of glorious weather but for the most part, the sky was characteristically Scottish: rainy, grey, and cold. We drank peppermint tea and played gin rummy in the club car, we gathered seashells on the blustery shore, we sailed on ferries over lochs and channels, we watched the moon rise from the sleeper cabin.
In my day-to-day life, routine has become a life raft: after spending a few decades impulsively jumping off literal and metaphorical cliffs, I now take solace in the safety and predictability of structure, sobriety, and sunscreen.
But travel necessarily interrupts routine, and little by little, day by day, I found myself relinquishing control: letting go of the schedule, not wanting to carry so much, not panicking because the conditions were not ideal for sleep but rather just accepting being tired, laughing in the delirium, shedding some of the rituals and talismans against uncertainty and risk, leaving my umbrella at the hostel and getting caught in the rain and instead of clenching, bracing, wincing—squaring my shoulders and lifting my face, letting it wash over me, noticing, noticing, noticing.
Seeing things.
Noticing that the mausoleums and the flowers are like the ones back home but different, different sizes and colors and you can’t quite place them, but at a certain point you kind of stop trying to categorize them and instead just let it move through you and begin to make its own rhythm.
So I walked, sometimes alone, sometimes alongside my family, I rode boats and trains and subway cars and I noticed, I saw things. I saw hedgerows of butterfly bush, Queen Anne’s lace, thistle, and daisy and blackberry brambles. I saw rosa rugosa and rosa laevigata by the seashore, and on our last day in Scotland, I ate fudge and drank fennel tea on the ferry to the Isle of Arran, and when I looked back to the shore, I saw wind turbines doing cartwheels on the hilltops. I saw cloud formations of a horse, a unicorn, a ballerina, a whale, and I saw a gigantic baby, truly the biggest baby I’ve ever seen, a perfectly smooth, enormous, classically beautiful, cherubic baby, wearing a giant gold wristband.
As the ferry returned that evening from the little island to the bigger island, as the sun set and we prepared to make our way back on a smaller train to a bigger train to an airplane, I noticed: I want to leave behind the worry but I know I never will, so I pray instead to let go of the worry about the worry, to cast that in the water behind me.
We returned home from the chill and the mist to a season of rot and rut and heat, to a season of everything ripening too fast. I was supposed to start my new job on Monday, and then it got pushed to Tuesday, and at first I was frustrated—I had put on my new dress! But then I remembered that my old friend was in town, and he was going down the shore with another friend, and I caught them just in time to get picked up at the subway station, and we drove out past Atlantic City and ate olives and nectarines and Ethiopian fried chicken on the beach and swam in a thick, hot fog, coming home sandy, pockets full of shells.
Sophie Strand writes in The Flowering Wand: unlike the vegetal gods that follow him, connected no doubt by a lively mycelium below ground, Osiris is not in control of the elements. No. He is the elements. He doesn’t passively watch as the Nile floods the land, nourishing the soil. His body is the river, swelled by monsoons in the highlands of current-day Ethiopia, and withering into death and the underworld during seasons of drought. Modern-day myth analysis tells us that Osiris is a dying, resurrecting god. But it is more accurate to say that he is a thinning and thickening river, a seasonal manifestation. A riverine process that is rightly honored as divine.
Like Osiris, I’m not just in a body, I am a body. I’m not just of the earth or from it, I am the earth, and so are you, and we really don’t have edges and borders as much as we would like to think we do. Where does the tree stump end and the moss begin? When is the moment of death for the tree, if every cell of xylem and phloem is constantly enlivened and transformed by fungus and insect and lichen and seeds and snakes?
I’m not just in an ecosystem, I am an ecosystem, and I was born, purple, slippery, waxy and squalling, into a vast and living world, not just into a family, or an empire, or a nation-state that closes ranks when trouble comes. I belong here, beyond these temporary constellations, and so do you, to this the vast and cacophonous earth. We belong to each other.
The sands are shifting. The edges are dissolving. It can feel like we are utterly disintegrating. But perhaps if we identify ourselves with the greater forces of life, of change, of dissolution, of regeneration, rather than with whatever current and temporary formations our individual lives, our society, our security, our routines, our schedules take—if we can relinquish some of the talismans we set against uncertainty and risk—we can see things as they are, in their beauty and their squalor, we can capture the moment, enter it and expand it, we can make it new again, and again.
The World:
There is so much to say about The Discourse™️ regarding newly minted Art Monster Alice Munro. For now, I will just recommend these three essays:
Andrea Robin Skinner’s original essay (the un-paywalled link can be found in this TrueLit subreddit)
What if your mom is a famous feminist and she didn’t protect you from sexual abuse? By
(paywalled)what I’m doing about alice munro by
Taylor
Home + The World is a 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.
Dear Temperance is a new Tarot advice column for paid subscribers! Send your burning life questions with the subject line “Dear Temperance” to homeandtheworld@substack.com or through the contact form at my website www.jodirhoden.com. If your query is chosen for publication, you will receive a year’s paid subscription for free. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
Half frame means that the camera uses an 18×24 mm vertical (portrait) format, producing twice the pictures on a roll of 135 film as the regular 36×24 mm format.
New t-shirt alert: Structure. Sobriety. Sunscreen. ;)
Also, the big baby! I want to squish it.
I love you. I am nourished by you.
I am so bone weary of the unprecedented times, this helped. Thank you.