67. Trust.
and a citrus olive oil cake with masa harina from concha emoji 🐚
Lately I am so busy. My cup runneth over, my plate is full. I notice how easy it is for me to default to that frenetic staccato that I learned in childhood, how filling my days and thoughts with one task layered onto the next is so familiar—a comforting buffer against uncertainty, a bid for validation, a talisman against powerlessness in the face of overwhelming change. I try to get back to a more even keel—but springtime is so urgent, and besides—there is a pleasure and a kind of freedom to be found in discipline.
I go to work and enter a state of sustained attention for 50 minutes at a time while the rest of the universe hangs in suspended animation. A client who only eats bread and milk. A client who misses playing baseball with their dad. A client who feels as if they are molting, shedding their skin. I must have heard the words longing and yearning a dozen times last week.
I wake up from a dream that is a sitcom, complete with laugh track, about a white suburban American family trying to survive in a tent camp in Gaza. So bleak I shudder to myself. I can’t shake the feeling all day.
I ride the bus home from the farm, shoes muddy, jacket soaking wet from harvesting kale rabe in the rain. My frayed canvas bag tips over, scallions and soil spilling out onto the seat next to me. I have become a “bus character,” I think to myself, amused.
I see a dog in Fishtown who looks just like Sugar, and I pet him and cry in the street with a stranger.
Longing and yearning never leave, they never leave.
Last week, ICE agents stood menacingly at the front door of the H-Mart. On Monday, I rode the Amtrak to New York City to visit my friend Gerrit who was there for work, and in the 30th Street Station I gave a dollar to someone who was panhandling. Instantly two cops (soldiers, really) swooped in out of nowhere and kicked them out of the station.
On the train, a young woman sitting next to me got a phone call from her lover in prison (if you’ve ever loved somebody that’s locked up, you know you take the call, wherever you are). I pretended not to hear as they talked about his case, his parole officer, his mom. She said she didn’t know how long before she lost her mind without him.
She hung up, pulled her jacket over her face, pressed her head against the glass blur window of trees and river and rain, and sobbed silently, shoulders heaving. I thought about offering her the slice of citrus olive oil cake I brought for Gerrit, but ultimately decided that the most loving thing I could do was to respect her dignity and privacy by ignoring her completely, ignoring her longing, her yearning.
If you are paying attention, you will notice: the enemies of life (prison guards, border guards, militarized police, dictators, occupying armies) are everywhere, gaining strength. If you are paying attention, you will know: this is not new, but the inevitable culmination of what has come before; decades, centuries. If you are not paying attention—something which requires deeper and more powerful feats of dissociation and numbing—you might wake up one day to find you have joined their ranks.
Who can be trusted? People are being snatched up off the street and sent to concentration camps because of their thoughts and beliefs—now, here—and we, collectively, are letting it happen. There are wars, and rumors of wars, and still—the lavender and mugwort are in leaf, the violets and dandelions in bloom, more ancient than any human empire, and more steadfast.
When I arrive in Brooklyn, the cherry blossoms and tulip magnolias are in full flower. Gerrit and I leave our phones at the apartment and walk for hours in the bluster and the cold wind, talking, through the bookstores and monuments of Fort Greene and Prospect Park, eventually ducking into a movie to warm our bones, popcorn and soda in an empty theater on a Tuesday afternoon, delighted like kids skipping school, friendship like the summer sun.
What does it mean to trust? To be truly trustworthy, to be worthy of my clients’ trust, or my own? I build trust with my clients by demonstrating consistency and care, by showing up every week on time, by protecting the borders and the boundaries—not just around their privacy and their sessions—but around my own life, my own psychic space as well, taking loving care of myself so I can have my best chance at being present for them.
What does it mean for my son to trust me? To believe that I will do what I say I will do, to believe that my behavior will align with what I say my values are? He observes my actions over time. I become worthy of his trust by earning it.
I used to be terrified of having power or resources—terrified of the weight of other people’s faith in me—because I was terrified of hurting people. I didn’t trust myself to wield my power wisely because I had been taught that my power was dangerous, that by telling the truth and being myself, I was victimizing the people I loved.
So I denied and suppressed my own power, which, as we all know from every archaic myth, medieval fairy tale, or science fantasy film franchise, is the perfect condition for creating monsters.
I spent so much time in the past trying to prove myself to be trustworthy, to be good, because on some fundamental level, I didn’t believe that I was. I overcommitted to prove my worth, then, when I inevitably failed to live up to my own hype, I blew up relationships and crumbled in shame. Cue the burnout. Cue the whiskey. Cue the frantic bids for affection and approval to try to outsource some crumbs of self-regard.
I spent many years like this, trying to source my sense of self from outside of myself, always an amateur when it came to me, the real experts being other people. But eventually, the pain of betraying and abandoning myself outweighed the fear of being abandoned for telling the truth, and I slowly stopped granting others authority over how I am defined (a work in progress; a lifelong project).
This is, I think, one of the meanings of the Audre Lorde maxim your silence will not protect you. If I silence myself, if I subjugate my truth for approval, or a simulacrum of safety, I have compromised my first and most fundamental relationship of trust with and to myself.
I am coming to know the kind of person I am, the kind of person I strive to be. I’m not afraid of that anymore. I give thanks for every failure to curry favor, for every time I was made to feel that my intensity was a chore, for every rejection that turned me inwards, back towards myself.
Every storm runs out of rain eventually, as Maya Angelou (and the country song) said. This political moment will not last forever, and the enemies of life have already lost. That’s why they’re so desperate, so insatiably cruel. They know they’ve lost their souls and it’s unbearable. But no matter the stultifying political atmosphere now, history will reckon and remember.
If we silence ourselves out of fear, if we violate our principles by failing to speak up for our neighbors—no matter the risk—if we lose our integrity, our honor, our word; if we breach the trust we build with one another, and within ourselves, we’ve lost everything, and there’s nothing left to even fight for. But if we hold fast to our values, our morality—not morality for morality’s sake, but morality as in the meaning we imbue into living, as in that thing that bonds us together, that makes us human—there’s no way we can lose.
Home.
It took me a minute, but I finally got around to baking this absolute star of a recipe from
of concha emoji, one of my favorite bakers on the internet (right up there with , , and 🥰) and WHEN I TELL YOU! This cake is so beautiful! I feel like it deserves its own whole category of cake. It’s that good. I’ve made it twice more already (it travels well, and makes a great gift!). I substituted Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose Gluten-Free flour for cake flour, and I made a vegan “sour cream” with coconut milk and lemon juice to make it dairy free. I used fresh extra virgin olive oil from my friends at the Alaqsa Halal Market in North Philadelphia, whose friends grow and process the olives in the West Bank in occupied Palestine.Do yourself a favor and try it:
The world.
Appalachia.
It has been six months since the geological event of Hurricane Helene changed everything in Southern Appalachia forever. Please take some time to listen to the voices of those who are “most proximate to the pain” of climate change including
from , from , and this beautiful visual poem by from :
Palestine.
We owe Palestine our endurance. Today I donated $100 to Many Lands Mutual Aid from your subscriptions. Yesterday, Hussein Alzaq, the leader of MLMA, posted this message on his instagram:
Unfortunately, guys, we are living a very bad night here after we were forced to flee again, as the occupation army is bombing very violently now. Until now, we have not found a safe place to settle in, and we are still searching.... The situation is very, very difficult, as yesterday we helped more than ten families evacuate from the Shujaiya neighborhood to western Gaza by providing them and their children with a means of transportation to save their lives. We are working very hard here in the midst of these very difficult circumstances. I love you very much and send you everyone's love. We hope that you will continue your support and think of us.
Please consider donating to their gofundme.
Pictured: 1) Many Lands Mutual Aid executive director Hussein Alzaq, a Palestinian former poultry farmer whose farms were bombed by the Zionist occupation, distributing fresh vegetables to families displaced from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in northern Gaza. 2) a flyer for Philly WAWOG’s second Palestine solidarity movement town hall of 2025 happening next Tuesday, details and RSVP here.
Home + The World is an occasional 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.
Home + the World observes the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and Jodi Rhoden is a proud signatory of the Writers Against the War on Gaza statement of solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Visit Home + the World on Bookshop.org, where I’m cataloging my recommended reading in the genres of memoir, fiction, 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. Find it here!
⚔️❤️ Jodi
So beautiful! And so happy you enjoyed the cake Jodi. :) Thanks for sharing.
🫶🏾🫶🏾🫶🏾