59. Please break my heart.

On letting it hurt.

Late summer ancestor altar featuring the 3 of swords from the Aquarian Tarot🌻

Greetings from the fourth week of my unintentional summer publishing hiatus; apropos of Leo season x Mercury retrograde, I’ve had so much to say, but can’t seem to find the words, the time, the right way to say it.

Still, we made it to the other side of summer, past that edge of the year the ancients found laden with heat, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs, and bad luck. The brightest dog star in the summer night sky, the star for whom these dog days are named, is called Sirius, which means glowing or scorching, and I don’t think I need to tell you that sometimes, it can be damn near impossible to tell the difference.

I was born on a dog day night in Georgia, I’m no stranger to the heat—I love the lushness of it, the ever-mounting crescendo of cicadas over a riot of mimosa blossoms; the tight, clean feeling of my skin in the sun after a swim. Glowing.

But some days, the heat has a sinister bent: sharp, antagonistic. Some days, the morning air hangs heavy with no rain, just an orange haze and the stink of a dead raccoon on the sidewalk. Scorching.

Still, I need to walk, I need to see the trees and say their names: Black Walnut, Persimmon, Catalpa, Weeping Willow. I need to snake a figure eight around the park, the high school, the pizza shop, the man living in a camper and his ever-growing compound of trailers and EZ-up tents festooned with Christmas lights by the woods where the first sassafras leaves are turning red, and coyote and deer emerge at dawn and dusk.

Blessedly, now, the heat has let up, and an unmistakable chill is in the air. The clouds are crisper, the sky is bluer, the days are shorter, the marigolds and sunflowers are high and ripe.

Last week, we moved our son into his college dorm room (there are no universities left in Gaza, my heart whispers, to no one but me). It was fun and silly and on the way home I said to my husband that I didn’t feel sad, not really, that I was excited for our kid, and besides, we would see him so much; he was just a few subway stops away.

Back home, I made myself a salad with chopped turkey and apples and cashews and French vinaigrette and sat down at the kitchen table. As I ate, I slowly became aware of the sensation of being pummeled by wave after mounting wave of exhaustion: as if all the vigilance and worry of nineteen years of mothering came home to rest in my body all at once, bone-deep and heavy enough to drag me to the bottom of the sea.

I pulled myself up the stairs, undressed, crawled into bed and wept like a baby, bereft. When I couldn’t sleep, I opened the find my app on my phone and watched the little green circle of his location move around the city: now he’s at McDonald’s. Now he’s at the thrift store. Now he’s back in his dorm.

It feels like my heart doesn’t ever stop breaking.

Sunflower and Dahlia at the Weaver's Way Co-op farm at W. B. Saul High School in Philadelphia. 8/10/24

Over the past ten months, I have had tense but cordial exchanges with several friends about the genocide in Palestine. Some of these friends express their private distress, but have yet to speak out against Israel: one shared that they were afraid of losing business, and another said what good would it do?

Dialoguing with the people in my life who hold this position has been a tenuous balance to strike: I have tried, here in this newsletter, in the streets, and on social media, to model and encourage action, to affirm our society’s shared responsibility to stop the slaughter, but I have mostly refrained from directly admonishing anyone for their point of view or inaction. I’ve lived in this uneasy truce with these loved ones, and even had some clarifying conversations, even though—to be clear—I find silence in the face of genocide indefensible.

But when Joe Biden stepped out of the race and Kamala Harris stepped in, everything changed. Many people who were privately critical but publicly silent about the genocide suddenly got vocal: not against the genocide, as I might have hoped, but rather in favor of one of its highest-ranking and most iron-clad supporters. The uneasy truce gave way to a slew of messages in my inbox and on my timeline with a fresh energy of disdain.

Around the same time that a cisgender person told me that if I don’t support Harris, I am failing to protect trans people, my beloved friend, a trans Jewish woman in Asheville, North Carolina (which is currently presided over by a Democratic mayor, governor, and president), was assaulted by Zionists at an anti-genocide teach-in at a public library then arrested, doxxed, repeatedly publicly deadnamed, threatened and traumatized, and then suspended from her job for the pleasure. Her picture was published above the fold in a right-wing newspaper, the day Donald Trump had a rally downtown. They’re trying to get me killed, she said. I’ll never sleep again, she posted.

How shocking to be threatened by the specter of a future that is already here; how disorienting to be warned about the impending doom of the thing that is already happening.

I keep thinking about circling back to the dialogue, but every time I open my phone to start to type the words about how we can stay with the hard conversations and love each other enough to be real and try to find our way back to a common ground, Israel bombs another school. Another dozen children’s bodies—each one as singular and sacred as my friends’ children or mine—beheaded, or ripped to shreds so unrecognizable as to be returned to their families in a bag of combined human remains weighing roughly the same amount as their child’s body once did. And instead of typing words of reconciliation I want to throw my phone into the river, I want to light my hair on fire, I want to burn the whole world down. Scorching.

I know, intellectually, that conflict can be generative. But too often, to me, it feels like punishment, banishment, heartbreak. I’m weary of the looming threat of losing love every time I experience conflict, or talk about feeling hurt. I want to change this.

I talked on the phone with my friend

Keia Mastrianni

, pie queen, sober queen, queen of my heart, who gave me gentle counsel about anger, and the danger of it eating us from the inside. When I got off the phone, I felt that sense of dread, like I was doing it wrong again, like my friend was trying to talk me down from the ledge again.

But then I laid on the bed under the fan.

What do I need? I asked myself, like I teach my clients to ask themselves.

I just need to feel this, came the reply.

So I felt it: the dread, the grief, the fear. Fear of abandonment. Fear of humiliation and shame. Fear of being misunderstood, misrepresented, maligned, persecuted. Fear of heartbreak.

It’s OK to feel these feelings, I said to myself. It’s OK.

I sobbed, I wept. I felt my heart break again and again.

Last weekend, we went down the shore, one last hoorah of summer. We swam, we ate water ice and french fries and dried mango while rainclouds and sunshine battled for center sky, and massive military cargo planes crossed low overhead (carrying bombs to Gaza? my heart whispers, to no one but me); women walked in pairs, pedicured toes in the surf, wide-brimmed hats and black bikinis, paisley pashminas draped light and loose across their shoulders.

I felt it all then: the heartbreak, the horror, the beauty and the balm. I walked into the water. I let the ocean take it, because it’s too much for me to hold. I felt it float off on the seafoam, I watched it wash out with the riptide, leveling out into the horizon. I gave thanks and I gave it all away: the terror, the freedom, the tears; this vast, boundless, heartbreaking love.

On the New Moon in Leo, my birthday moon, I drew the dreaded Three of Swords tarot card, the card of heartbreak, of grief, of separation and loss and sorrow. Normally I would flinch at the sight of it, maybe even make up an excuse to shuffle the deck again, to reject the pain, to put it off for another day.

But not this time. I saw the iconic swords piercing the heart in the card and I thought to myself: bring it on. go ahead, break my heart. you’ve only ever been true. break my heart, because I can survive. break my heart because my heart is all I have left. break my heart because if my heart can still break, then I can still fight, I can still love. if my heart can still break, then then I know I’m still alive.

How many times do I have to learn this lesson? The gift is in the wound, the blessing is in the curse. There is no shortcut, there is no loophole; there is no way around the heartache but through it.

Being alive, staying alive, staying awake to my life means that my heart will continue to break, again and again, that there’s no protection from it. As long as I am alive, as long as I am changing and growing, I will absolutely necessarily experience death, loss, change, heartbreak. It’s terrifying and beautiful and horrible and sometimes it feels so lonely but also it feels so right and ripe and full of life: life as in humanity, life as in animality, life as in earth, life as in the sun. Glowing.

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Home.

Sweet potato greens.

This week I received sweet potato greens in my CSA share, which I have never used before. Looking forward to making this recipe for sweet potato greens in coconut cream from Weaver’s Way Coop and Saul Agricultural High School’s Henry Got Crops CSA. And while you’re there, check out their extensive archive of recipes using local CSA produce!

Defenders of the Wild.

Huge thanks and congratulations to our friend T. L. Simons, who gifted us with a copy of his beautiful, brand-new, and already highly-acclaimed Defenders of the Wild, a cooperative board game of animals against machines, available for purchase next month! We can’t wait to dig in.

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The world.

Moving Towards Life by Marina Magloire.

This article about the “epistolary disagreements over Zionism” between Black feminist poet and activist June Jordan and her friends and co-conspirators Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich was deeply fascinating and troubling; how painful it must have been for Jordan to be an outlier for justice even among the most vocal critics of racism and imperialism. The essay was a needed reminder that even our most principled literary, poetic, and political heroes remain fallible, and that the struggle for liberation for all has a proud lineage of wise elders, poets, and truth-tellers. Read it here.

Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

Are you an artist, writer, culture worker or academic? Then you should sign on to PACBI, the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and advocate for your organization/institution/department to do the same. PACBI is one aspect of the larger BDS (Boycott/Divest/Sanction) movement. BDS is a coalition of over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations—trade unions, student groups, women’s organizations and refugee networks—formed in 2004 and inspired by the BDS campaigns that were successful in helping end apartheid in South Africa. 

Boycott/Divest/Sanction is in my opinion the most powerful nonviolent strategy against the current apartheid/occupation/genocide. The targets of PACBI are “complicit Israeli cultural and academic institutions” and never individuals or individuals’ identities or nationalities. It’s also cool in that PACBI specifically is not about “going after” any specific institutions, but rather it’s about the participating institutions preemptively making a choice to not participate in any and all academic collaborations with the apartheid regime. So it feels more pro-active than reactive, which is nice. 

There are clear guidelines, so nobody has to reinvent the wheel. Here is a great PACBI explainer on the Writers Against the War on Gaza website. There are individuals from WAWOG/PACBI who will consult with your organization to help you consider, craft, and implement your PACBI statement/strategy. 

Some examples of other PACBI cosigners: The academic boycott is supported by academic associations across the world, including the American Studies Association, National Women’s Studies Association, African Literature Association, among others. The Teachers Union of Ireland, Federation of Francophone Students in Belgium (FEF), the National Union of Students (NUS) in the UK, Qatar University Student Representative Board (QUSRB), the graduate student workers unions at New York University and University of Massachusetts Amherst, among others, have endorsed the academic boycott of Israel. There are no universities left in Gaza. 

Home + the World on Bookshop.org.

Home + the World now has a shop on Bookshop.org, where I’m cataloging my recommended reading in the genres of memoir, fiction, and—of course—healing, self-help, and social justice! If you purchase a book through my shop, I will receive a commission and so will an independent bookstore of your choice. Check it out!

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