73. Refuge.

ft. Neptune in Pisces and mulled cider

Greetings from the gasp and delight of waking up to the first big snow of the season—thick, soft tufts and drifts blanketing every rooftop, sidewalk, and tree branch in that first blurry blue light of day. Greetings from the Christmas cactus in bloom, from the tea and the laundry and the dishes, greetings from the blessed ordinariness of this ordinary day.

Yesterday, December 13th, marked five years since the day we put the dogs and the cat and the Christmas cactus in the back of the car and drove the crest of Appalachia from North Carolina to Philadelphia. We arrived in the night, lights twinkling on the bridges over the Schuylkill River, on the skyscrapers, on Boathouse Row. The next morning, it snowed just like this snow: waves and dunes of snow, soft and light, burying everything; and that morning felt just like this morning: a refuge of cold, and calm, and quiet; a new way to be.

Lately, writing is a slog. I feel, like always, an urgency to be a writer and yet, I don’t work on my book, I don’t pitch magazines, I don’t apply to residencies. I just let my thoughts build up in drifts and waves (mostly in the shower and on public transit, or while reading), try to bank them in my notes app, and then, at some point, a wave crests, and I spend a Sunday typing out a newsletter.

And these crescendos are fewer and farther between. Maybe because to get the words out on the page means I’ve made sense of at least some of the things going on inside me and in the world, and, in this time of deepening disintegration, sense making is getting harder to come by, or maybe because, like everybody else, I don’t want to face what I know is waiting for me on the page: eventually I’m going to have to write about seeing my father in October for the first time in seven years, ostensibly on his death bed, and how I’ve never felt more like a stranger, or more estranged; eventually I will need to share my discovery that, much to my dismay, my accumulated griefs and losses, particularly those sharp, bright wounds of abandoned friendship, rather than making me more refined and equanimous, have just made me more skittish and weird.

Last week, a client was expressing feeling aged and weary from recent years of overwork and a couple of significant breakups. They lamented that the pace of life seemed to diminish their spaciousness and capacity for self-actualization. With a caveat acknowledging the reality of the struggle for so many of us, I asked them, what if these were actually the ideal conditions for your personal growth and self-actualization? What if what we have is what we need? What if being skittish and weird is more aligned with the truth of things?

I’ve been changed so much in these last five years, by sobriety, by estrangement, and probably most visibly to others, by Palestine, and a surprising number of my friendships haven’t survived the shift. It’s hard to confuse and disappoint people, but when was the last time you let something change your whole life? Like Maggie Nelson says in the Argonauts: to let the baby out, you have to be willing to go to pieces.

So I’m committed to accepting my pace. To facing the pain on the page. And to making things that please me. The slog is important. The days and weeks are important. Making sense of my life, the world, or at least taking the time to think through it, is important, maybe more important than ever, even as the place where being a writer overlaps with making sense of life through writing seems like an ever more narrow place. I want to write, the way a bird builds a nest: naturally, and without ambition. I want this writing to do something, to hold something. I want this writing to be a refuge.

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Home.

Christmas Cactus in the kitchen window; mulled cider szn, Jasper putting the star on the Solstice tree.

I’m feeling as grateful as ever for the love of my family and the safety and refuge of home. In my opinion, no snow day is complete without mulled cider, so here’s a simple recipe:

Mulled Cider

Combine in a stockpot or large saucepan:

• 1 gallon fresh apple cider

• 2 cups orange juice

• 1/2 cup brown sugar

• 1 whole orange, sliced (with peel)

• 1 whole lemon, sliced (with peel)

• 1 whole apple, cored and sliced

• 1 inch fresh ginger, chopped

• 2-3 sticks cinnamon

• 6 cloves

• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

• 1 pod star anise

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Bring just to the boil then simmer, covered. You can serve it right away, but it gets better the more you… mull it over. :)

The World.

Last weekend we caught the incredible special exhibition currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100. The Philadelphia exhibition, on view until February 16th, is the fifth and final show in the tour, and the only one in the United States. How incredibly orienting and inspiring to witness a generation of artists respond to fascism, genocide, and war with magic, ritual, mythology, and alchemy, finding refuge in nature and in their shared humanity. My favorite segment of the show, unique to Philadelphia, focused on artists who fled from Europe to Mexico and the U.S. during World War II, and included dozens of works by Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, who “first met as members of the surrealist circle in Paris in the 1930s…. escaping wartime France and landing in Mexico, where they would work and live as close friends.”

(L-R) Creation of the Birds, Remedios Varo, 1957; The Artist Traveling Incognito, Leonora Carrington, 1949; Birthday, Dorothea Tanning, 1942.

Naomi Klein offered a thoughtful essay on the exhibit, which she saw at the Pompidou in Paris, providing a great companion to considering these works and the surrealist movement as a whole, in ways that inform and enrich our own precarious time. Read it here.

A Card.

Speaking of surrealism, and the need for magic in these times of dissolution and disillusionment, I give you: The Moon. The moon is the archetype of finding our way in the dark, of living by our own lights, of lunacy and extra-sensory perception. This card exemplifies the ethos of I will succeed because I am insane. Yes, there are real dangers in the deep and the hidden and the unbidden, and yet, like every archetype we encounter on this journey, the only way out is through. The Moon speaks to our powers of intuition and the unconscious, as well as to the feral nature within. These themes are apt right now, as Neptune stations direct at 29 degrees Pisces. Being an outer planet, Neptune takes a long time to turn the ship around, so he will be sitting at this point, the last degree of the whole zodiac, for several more weeks before ingressing into Aries (which will be a horse of a completely different color). But for now, Neptune in Pisces brings a spiritual, creative, and compassionate energy to the end of the year, and the end of an era. It’s a good time to ride the waves, rather than trying to force an outcome. It’s a good time to dream.

Major Arcana XVIII: The Moon. Aquarian Tarot by David Palladini, 1970.

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 mutual aid and community care and movement organizing 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