76. Cold Snow Moon.
Every day I watch the terror grow and every day I have to work, run errands, do chores - how to describe that contradiction, and how to survive it.
“Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.”
Franz Kafka’s diary entry, August 2, 1914
All day on Sunday I tried to circle around to getting some writing done, feeling pressured within myself that it was Imbolc and the full moon and I should be doing something meaningful, until I gave up and took a bath and read every saved tab in my phone. Later I left to go to the co-op, listening to an astrology podcast in the car. The sky was purple and salmon and pink and I turned a corner at the top of a hill and ran smack dab into the full moon rising over a rusted train trestle, the feeling of which is the exact opposite of the feeling of listening to an astrology podcast, puzzling on the angles and aspects of the planets and houses; it was the feeling of the mystery of being an animal on an earth with snow and a moon and train trestles and night and day. Then my son Jasper came over with his roommate and we lit candles and we made sweet potato, kale, and white bean soup and cornbread and oatmeal cookies and listened to Lucinda Williams and the feeling I had was one of this being enough, a feeling that this is what life is for. That if we have soup and cornbread and a candle and some music and the full moon and people we love, that is enough, more than enough, it is everything.
Of course at the same time everything is getting worse, more horrific every day, and it feels like giving birth, the way the waves of pain mount to such a crescendo that you think you really cannot take any more, and then you find some impossible way to endure it, and then another wave hits, even more profound than before. Again and again. Every time you think you have a handle on it, or you’ve oriented somewhat to the terrain, another wave of horror washes over you. I can only pray that something new and beautiful will be born from all this pain, that all this death and struggle and bloodshed will not be in vain. As one of my clients likes to say, you gotta GO through it to GET through it. And we are really going through it.
I’m old enough to remember when the Department of Homeland Security and ICE were born, the opportunistic child of anti-Arab racism in the aftermath of 9/11 and an illegitimate president, and we knew then exactly what it would be used for, and we were right. We know that every president since then has expanded it’s terroristic power, including Obama and Biden, and that its legacy rests in the slavery and genocide that built this most violent nation-state, just as it is occupation and genocide that is building the new nation-state of Israel. And so even as we recognize that this abuse of power is nothing new, we can also see that the violence is increasing in scope and scale and with none of the previous cover of respectability or decorum, which is itself a form of terrific violence.
So I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that many of us are thinking about what we might be called to do in the coming weeks, months, and years, and that, frankly, many more people are going to die fighting for a world that, despite what the powerful would like you to believe, is not cooked, but is very much worth fighting for, every inch and blade of grass and every child and every snowfall is worth defending, yes, even with our lives.
On Sunday morning, my writing group met early (as has been our habit lately) to light a candle and read some poetry, to have some kind of vigil for the grief we are living through. I searched my bookshelf for something to share, and grabbed Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, off the shelf. I opened to a random page, and landed on her quoting a poem by Rumi:
I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
I’ve been studying Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. The book, if you’re not familiar, is a dense and profound text of corrective feminist history regarding the witch hunts in medieval Europe. She explains, vividly, how the centuries-long campaign of terror waged against women know as the witch-hunt “was an attack on women’s resistance to the spread of capitalist relations and the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability to heal.” She illustrates how the “enlightenment” demanded severance from our bodies, from the land, and from magic; how the mechanistic view of the body was brutally forced upon the world, through witch hunts at home and colonization globally, forcing us/our ancestors to internalize the master/slave relationship within our bodies rather than understand ourselves as whole and inexorable elements of a mystical cosmos.
For me this ancestral work has been the missing link connecting everything: the cultural currents towards somatic healing, rewilding, animism; the revolt of our bodies in the forms of unmanageable chronic illnesses and addiction, the crisis of climate change, the collapse of our social institutions. The story isn’t over. History is not written. We are still fighting against our annihilation. What they wanted us to believe was natural and inevitable and a foregone conclusion is merely a sad but brief anomaly on the slate of time.
When we allow ourselves to think at such a scale, we can see that our deaths are tiny, but that maybe they could mean something. When we think at this scale, we can see that, not only has it always been this bad, but that our ancestors have endured so much worse. When we allow ourselves to think at such a scale, we can see that we are a part of something so much bigger and more meaningful than our individual lives.
This is all to say, I hope we can be brave. I hope we can rise to this moment. I believe that we can.
Home:
The Sun.
I pulled the Sun on Imbolc morning at writing group. Even as we are almost two weeks into an interminable deep freeze here in Philly, the light is still returning, the days are growing longer. The Sun is the Truth, ever invincible. The Sun is happiness, vitality, trust, playfulness, joy. The longer we endure the cold, the more we settle in and find our peace and rest in the dark, the closer we come to spring. The earth is waking up, imperceptably, under the soil, and so are we.
The World:
Recommended reading and listening:
This podcast with Holly Whitaker and Dr. Ingrid Clayton, the author of the book Fawning:
This brilliant take down of Bari Weiss and her vile publication by rayne fisher-quann:
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Home + The World is an occasional newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links, tarot, 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.
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⚔️❤️ Jodi