I am sitting here this morning with a cup of hazelnut coffee, which I sometimes make for my grandmother, who, still, even in death, takes it with cream and sugar.

It seemed like the right thing to do, the day after Dolly Parton’s passing, which feels like a kind of summoning of femme power, an invitation to recognize the gift of a person who chooses to shine bright even when all they have access to is rhinestones.

They were very different women, and in some ways, very much the same. For example, my grandmother, like Dolly, was an icon. She wore memorable wigs and monochrome outfits and had an unforgettable voice and could not be ignored in any room she walked into. She developed her look at a young age and stuck with it, a glamour queen until the very end.

She was also, unlike Dolly, not known for being particularly kind. She was difficult, especially for my mother, who she left behind when my mother was just five years old. She was able to take only one of the children with her, and she chose my aunt. I know that hurt them all in ways they felt differently.

My mother and grandmother locked wills for as long as I can remember, grandma insisting on visiting twice a year exactly, on the same holidays. She refused to go outside to smoke, so she would set her elbow on the table in our tiny dining area and hold her cigarette out the window as she talked. She was always talking. Later she quit smoking, and smelled instead of mint gum, ginger candies, hazelnut coffee, and cat hair. She never traveled without her cat, whichever cat it was at the time.

We all change with age. But some things on her never did: her high silicone breasts, her dark curly wigs, her makeup, which, when she went for her last hospital stay, was still strewn out on the ironing board in her spare room.

What both changed and stayed the same was her voice. On her deathbed, it could no longer shape itself into words, but it was nonetheless recognizable as hers and only hers. It was a voice I’d been hearing since infancy. The familiarity of it was its beauty.

I heard in the sound of it every choice she’d ever made — every word she’d ever uttered, every cigarette she’d ever puffed, every time she’d yelled or laughed or sang. These moments were all there, and I heard them all at once, this thing that had begun as the scream of a baby and over nearly nine decades wound its way into this rich and croaking final form.

Marcy was a ferocious creature — she’d had to be, to get divorced in the 1960’s and somehow convince a landlord to rent to her as a single mother, to insist on living independently and becoming her own person, a woman who, after one too many losses of her cats to a feline leukemia the vet told her was coming from her apartment, got a pet skunk named Coco who lived in her closet. Without the need to hibernate, the skunk grew to unmanageable proportions and my grandmother took to giving her whiskey for the pain. One time, she sent her fifteen-year-old daughter to the liquor store with her ID, and when my aunt told the clerk to pull from the bottom shelf, explaining that it was for a skunk, the clerk said, “Aren’t they all?”

My grandmother worked as a waitress and saved her money to buy property and then took a real estate class so she could retire and say she was a retired real estate agent instead. She was proud and flawed and sometimes incredibly cold. She had some terrible beliefs that she never openly questioned. She also openly supported me when I came out, and even supported my top surgery, and had no difficulty, despite her age, shifting to use my chosen name. She had a collection of mystery books about cats and a closet full of wig heads and, in her sunken living room, a statue of a jaguar wearing a gold chain that I will someday get tattooed on my thigh. She was complicated and alive and she was my grandmother and now she’s gone and also, somehow, more here than ever.

Death’s like that. You think it takes people away but it just disseminates them. From stardust we are become and to stardust we return and on any given night if you go outside and make an offering and stick your tongue out you can taste your beloveds again on the wind.

Still, it’s hard when they go.

Last week some dancers in Seattle put on a show called Keeping. One of the dancers told a story about maybe burning down a childhood home and his birds dying in the fire, and just like that, the home was in the room with us, and the birds, alive and animated again.

This dancer is a beautiful person who is also one of the only people my late dog Woody ever wanted to be held by, besides me. Some of my favorite photos of Woody are with this dancer. (Woody, by the way, was an old gay man trapped in a chihuahua-terrier body. He loved the gay nude beach and if I let him off leash there, he would fully cruise.) As I sat in the front row at this show, I felt Woody with me, so happy to be remembered, so happy to be watching this beautiful dancer beautifully dance. He would never have been able to be in the front row while he was alive, not even in his carry bag, but he was right there with me in spirit that night.

I told the dancer about this afterwards. He said to me, “You are keeping Woody,” and suddenly I understood what the whole show was about: what we keep with us in this life of constant churn and change and loss — whose names, whose memories, whose voices live inside our bodies for as long as we are here.

We are what we love. We are the things we keep.

A couple nights after that, I had a dream about Woody, the first dream since I ushered him across the veil in March. In the dream I was holding him in my arms and immediately knew it was him just from the feel and nothing had ever felt better. I was so happy.

I fed him special salted kibble, the salt grains glistening on the outside, and held it to his lips, which he flapped into my hand, eating like a horse. We were inside my grandmother’s house, and when he went to sleep in my arms and I was afraid he was dying again, a friend, who was also the voice of my grandmother, said in the dream, “He’s less afraid of dying now that he understands it’s just the next station.”

The next station, I thought to myself, before pressing more salted kibble to his lips, and I understood then that he is a horse now, or maybe I’m just imagining that because I put his old harness on a vintage horse plushie who now sleeps in my bed every night, or maybe that’s why I got the horse just before he died and why I put the harness on to begin with, maybe we’re all just saying yes to each other, me and Woody and the harness and the horse, maybe it’s all a dream and we just keep dreaming each other into being in all these ways. Maybe dying is just going to the next station. Maybe I understand everything. Maybe I understand nothing at all.

The day before yesterday, I went on a beach adventure with my friend and their dog and their roommate’s dog, a gorgeous beagle literally named Dolly Parton, who always had to pee right where the other girl had peed and who stalked along the ground sniffing like a dog detective from a movie. Their apartment is full of Dolly art, Dolly lore. We name, we give language, we honor, we altar, we decide what to carry forward. We decide what to keep even before we know we’re going to lose it. That decision is the thing we call love.

The decision to love is always a decision to attach in some way. It is a deal with the devil. It is a guarantee of future pain. What you attach to, you must someday detach from, whether that’s the body of another or the body of this planet or this body of your own.

Someone asked me the other day about my first love, and I remembered when the dogs came home and crawled under the covers that first night, assembling themselves, one on each hip, and a warm wave of love swept down my body from head to toe. It was the first time I’d ever felt it like that, complete, unafraid, finally giving in to the undeniable sincerity and security of canine attachment.

If this were a movie or a children’s tv show you would have seen this falling-in-love as a special effect, like a rainbow shroud, englittering me and turning my body new colors, like that coat-of-many-colors song Dolly sang, which my mother, in turn, sang to me.

As that love sparkled into me, my first thought was, “Wow, this is really going to hurt someday.” And my second thought, “I’m choosing it anyway.”

Love devastates. Life hurts. Bodies suffer. It’s such a beautiful thing to choose it anyway. To choose how to live, and how to use your voice, what to hold onto while you’re here and what to leave behind when you go.

Dolly leaves behind her voice and so many songs and an example of a way that a human can be. You can refuse to let anyone make you feel insignificant. You can refuse to allow the denigration of anyone else. You can operate from a place that insists on joy and freedom and self-expression even when people keep trying to drag you into hating on others or yourself. You can refuse to see yourself as a failure and instead see every “mistake” as an opportunity to learn. You can just keep living. You can choose what to keep. Or, what to let death keep for you.

I’ll keep Dolly Parton and her voice, alongside my grandmother and the memory of her voice, her own brand of iconic and unapologetic femme, and her cats and Coco the skunk and the jaguar statue, and my dogs, Woody and Moon Pie, and my dancer friend and his pet birds, and that performance and that night, and that day at the hospital, and every voice I’ve ever heard, and every song I’ve ever loved, and the song of myself, which I’m still writing.

And that’s more than enough. That’s already larger than life itself.

ok I owe you an apology. forgive me. I’m still finding my voice. I’m out here trying to un-language myself. I want to write to you in ways AI could never. even if that means I have to just keep…

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In my third summer on the farm, I found a ring-necked pheasant in the road, dead from a head injury inflicted by a car. He was still warm.

I could not bear the thought of his body being run over again and again, so I moved him out of the road, then carried his remains to a fallow part of the fields, where he …

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“do you ever feel like a plastic bag?” katy perry sang and we all scoffed and said, no, of course not, what a corny line

while secretly knowing yes, yes, exactly

we know what it’s like to be used and discarded without regard for the work it took to make us

we…

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Note: This essay is a follow-up to last week’s piece, “night blooms,” and will make a lot more sense if you’ve read that one.

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Nicotiana flower is sticky, just like its kin, tobacco. I notice this as I gently tie a strip of white fabric around the stems of mine, attaching it to the rails on my balcony. It leaves a residue on my fingers, an echo of scent that stays with me even after I have walked away.

Technically…

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cw: genocides

There’s a place on the coast of so-called Oregon they call Cook’s Chasm, where the ocean rushes into a narrow channel and churns against itself, seeking an outlet it will not find. The surface froths in a way some might describe as rabid. When the tide is high enough, water rushes into a small cavern, quickly becoming more than it can hold, and shoots up and out from a small opening, spraying into the wind. A little further down is Thor’s Well, a hole in the rock which appears to suck the ocean into itself before bursting with overwhelm and releasing the water back toward the sky.

You can hike down and off the trail to stand at the water’s edge. At high tide, it is spectacular. The sound surrounds you; the spray will mist you so hard you walk away soaked. During a storm, it is dangerous to go near the chasm. The waves meet their match in the rock but still have to go somewhere. They will grow taller than all of it, taller than you, sweep you away, smashing into the crevice, turning you to pulp, your blood quickly blending with the brown of the bubbles.

It is easy to describe the sea as violent, but the sea is simply being a sea, driven by the winds and the gravity of the moon, continuing to move even in the face of the immutable. It expresses itself, because it must, even if the only place to put its energy is a hundred feet in the air.

It all has to go somewhere.

Returning from my grandmother’s funeral a couple of months ago, I stood at the edge of this chasm, seeking sublimation in the sound and sensation. My mind grasped for metaphors, then noticed all this naming took me away from the experience of being there. The ocean is bigger than my personal psyche. That’s why I need it.

I longed to un-name the place and strip it of projected meaning. It does not belong to an English sailor or a Norse god, to my childhood memories or my present feelings. It belongs to itself.

This place is more than the ocean or the stone or the tides or the storms or the winds. On the maps it is called Cape Perpetua, but before this, it was, and still is, Halaqaik, the “exposed place” where the Alsea people burned prairies, hunted, fished, and dug for clams along the abundant coast before the great British asshat James Cook came along and renamed it for a Christian saint, decimated the Alsea with smallpox, and forced survivors into a prison-like world called the Alsea Subagency, where many died from the horrific living conditions. By 1879, only 118 Alsea people were still living on their lands, but they were then swiftly removed to a reservation to make way for more white European settlers to claim their lands.

I watch the water roll in to the chasm named for this man, whose legacy was death, disease, and colonial domination, who was killed at last on February 14, 1779, by native Hawaiians after he attempted to kidnap their king and shot a protestor dead. The mighty waves feel small compared to the rightful rage felt around the world over all the life that this man took from this planet. I pray for his legacy to be smashed to pieces against these rocks.

When I am here, I want to experience it as deeply as I can without dying. I want to feel the fear. I step as close to the edge as I can before some internal gyroscope pulls me back. I imagine what it would be like for my body to be in this water, swirled and slammed by fast-changing water into slow-changing rock.

Then I imagine what it would be like for my body to be this water, and I remember that I already know.

I know what it is like to surge in a way I can’t stop, carried away by my own energy, summoned by forces larger and older than me, narrowed by the circumstances of this moment into a place I cannot not-go.

I have places in me that feel stuck, overwhelmed by energy. Sometimes I even churn against myself, becoming filthy and unclear, slamming into the edges and roaring louder the narrower things feel.

I am angry at the traumas that have shaped me in this way, creating walls of stone, eroding so slowly that any change feels imperceptible. I am angry at the forces of immense violence that have shaped the world and suppressed indigeneity and diversity and self-expression everywhere. I long ferociously to break through my inner walls and tear down systems of oppression. By any means necessary, at any cost. I continue to find that the outer work begets inner work, and demands it. I grow impatient with my own healing, frustrated, losing hope. I at least want to break free within myself. I work so hard at it. Why then these dead ends?

I felt this way today and told a wise friend, who asked me to describe the feeling in words. Instead, I sent her a video from the edge of the chasm.

“So much motion in the stuckness,” she observed.

The ocean is the ocean. All of it. It is powerful. And this narrow chasm where its only outlet is to shoot high into the air, like it’s a blowhole — this is a place of spectacular beauty, one I descend toward willingly, one I would feel lucky to see during a storm, when it is even more “out of control,” even less contained.

I don’t blame the ocean or call it violent. It’s doing what it has to do, in this place where it has nowhere else to go. The spectacular spray is a necessary expression under the circumstances.

It’s the same water as the water that grazes your toes gently a few miles away; in fact, this water was there, being that water, not so long ago, and the water that’s there now was here before and will return before long.

Maybe through observing the ocean we can begin to understand. Everything is connected. Love that cannot rage cannot be love.

Right now, I honor only two Greek “deities” as embodiments of energy I wish to cultivate: Eros, the god of passion, and Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution.

Eros burns on my windowsill, reminding me that passion is gloriously unstable and that living in a way that feels fully alive requires me to accept the rise and fall, ebb and flow, crash and churn of constant change. There is no greater pleasure than when I can meet the moment as it is and not hold back awaiting certainty, which only arrives after the sliver-window of true possibility has passed. It is terrifying to practice this level of presence, and I rarely succeed to the degree I wish to, but it is a path to which I am deeply committed.

Nemesis watches over my space, a sword in one of their hands, imbalanced scales of justice in the other. She is here to right past wrongs because there is no other way to achieve justice, balance, or peace. Nemesis must be called upon, understood, and embodied in the places where great harm has been done.

For me, Eros and Nemesis are deeply connected. Erotic attraction feels like a move toward balancing something in the world that is deeply out of balance — the more wide the gap to be closed, the more satisfying the connection. Eroticism opens me to life, and relationship, which opens me to pain, which opens me to a deep awareness of injustice and a deep longing to make things right.

the world trembled, my print of Nemesis reads, 

the throne fell to the ground 

pour the wine, dear friend
pour the wine

These words are drawn from an Armenian revolutionary folk song, “Gini Lits / Գինի լից / Pour the Wine,” which celebrates the assassination of Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman official who in 1915 directed the genocide of Armenian people, who were already suffering from massacres and oppression, as well as various forced displacements within Ottoman-controlled territories.

His project began with deportations of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders, followed by death marches into the Syrian desert, mass rapes, the establishment of concentration camps, forced conversion to Islam, sexual violence, and other tactics common to genocide, including the assertion that it was necessary to kill them all. Talaat Pasha told the German newspaper Berliner Tageblatt:

We have been blamed for not making a distinction between guilty and innocent Armenians. [To do so] was impossible. Because of the nature of things, one who was still innocent today could be guilty tomorrow. The concern for the safety of Turkey simply had to silence all other concerns.1

Substitute “Armenians” for “Palestinians” or “migrants,” and “Turkey” for “Israel” or “America,” and we are squarely in 2025.

The horrors of the Armenian genocide cannot be overstated. Corpses lined the roads of deportation. Drowned bodies floated in the lakes, got stuck in the gorges. Officials sent corpses down the rivers, resulting in epidemics downstream. Children hid under corpses to evade capture. More than a million people died. Their homes were marked “abandoned” and given to Turks. And the whole of Europe knew what was happening, the whole time.

Those whose bodies survived endured unimaginable violence, including forced de-Armenianization. They were stripped of their names and culture, including their language. Women were taken into sexual slavery or else married to Muslim men. Children were likewise given to Muslim families and often exploited for sex and labor.

Many of the refugees who made it to the Russian-controlled territories that eventually became the Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan still died there from illness, injury, or starvation, as the Turks destroyed their crops and blocked access to food.

These things were done to them not by some distant entity called “the state” but by the people who made these choices.

In response, Armenians fought back, including through an effort called Operation Nemesis. Seven of the genocide’s primary architects, including Talaat Pasha, were assassinated by revolutionaries.

And Nemesis joined the revolutionaries in dancing on their graves.

Rage, revenge, passion, desire, fury — these forces are magnificent. They not only have a place in this world, they have shaped this world and will continue to. Without them we are missing part of what it is to be alive, to be an ocean, to be humanity. Without them we are tamed, subdued, shut down.

I learned, for my own safety in this life, to suppress these feelings as much as possible, even if it meant denying myself presence, pleasure, creativity, connection, and magic. My capacity to be with the majestic and the overwhelming has ebbed back and forth like tides.

Without channels for expression, I have at times turned against myself or those closest to me. I have been frustrated by my ability to build glorious tension and then fumble the full expression. I sit on dozens of essays that I have been too afraid to publish until they are no longer relevant. I have bit my tongue and sat on my hands so many times that they often turn against me. I know I am not alone because the phrase “inner turmoil” is common, as is “in-fighting,” while real, flowing fervor is difficult to find in this world.

Perhaps this is why I am drawn to this chasm, this place where the rock has formed just so, where the immense tension created by the narrowness of the channel churns and changes — frothing as it enters, careening as the waves approach the dead end where they will come even more alive, swooshing into the cavern and then exploding into a vertical fountain of glory, the walls dripping with salty aftermath in its wake.

I place myself at this edge, knowing full well I could get caught in a sneaker wave. The risk is part of the thrill. I let myself be showered by a phenomenon indifferent to my presence. I slip off my shoes (not recommended for safety) and reach my toes into the stone, feeling for this place’s older name, the stories that churn underneath colonial frameworks and insufficient metaphors.

There is a bigger, older story, one we are all deeply woven into, one shaped over generations by mighty forces, one only our most powerful emotions can change.

Change, they will. Fall, all empires do. Pour the wine, dear friends. Pour the wine.

I encourage readers and listeners to learn more about the Armenian struggle, which is what led to the creation of the word “genocide,” including the 2023 invasion of the autonomous region of Artsakh by Azerbaijani militants, which resulted in a near-total displacement of its residents.

You can purchase the Nemesis print I referenced through Entangled Roots Press. One hundred percent of sales goes to All for Armenia to support refugees from Artsakh. You can also support All for Armenia directly.

Thank you as always for your support.

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note: I think I am going to stop putting in content warnings. You can reliably expect every issue of this newsletter to explore difficult subjects. Food is never just food; it contains the whole story of us. While I expect to always write about individual and/or collective traumas, I pledge to always weave ideas together within a container that I hope makes them easier to process. I hope this works for you, and I am always open to feedback.

Every spring, one of the first edible plants to emerge is rhubarb, its pink stalks peeking out from under wide leaves. Mature plants can be ready for harvest as early as March. You do not need, and should not use, a knife to harvest it. Simply pick a stalk, grab it close to the roots, twist, and pull. It should pop off easily. If you only take what you need, and never more than a third of the plant, it can remain harvestable until the end of June.

My second year on the farm, I found a rhubarb plant in a neglected container in the orchard. I loved to snap off a fresh stalk, chop it into pieces, and eat it on the porch with a bowl of sugar for dipping, tasting the sweet and sour at both extremes and feeling them melt together on my tongue. What a gift.

It’s curious to me that the word rhubarb basically means “foreigner.” The plant made its way to Europe along the Silk Road, originating in cold, high plains, including Siberia and China, where it was used extensively as a medicine. It commanded a high price in Medieval Europe, mentioned by traders in the same breath as saffron and rubies.

Rhubarb, the word, evolved from rha barbarbon, words that in ancient Greek basically mean “not from here”: rha, used to denote the Volga River, in Russia, and barbaron, a sweeping term the Greeks applied to anyone who wasn’t them. So rha barbaron is a foreign thing from the Rha; a foreigner from a foreign land.

Eventually, rhubarb became a staple in Europe, and especially in England. Despite becoming widely cultivated locally, rhubarb kept its name in English, its "foreignness" simultaneously invisible and right there on the surface.

This past may seem like ancient history, but it stays embedded in the present, often unconsciously, in language and ideas we may go our entire lives without examining.

The word barbaros is an echomimetic word, meaning it emerged from an imitation of sound. It came from the Greeks making a mockery of how other people spoke. All other languages, they decided, sounded like gibberish: bar-bar-bar.

This is the origin of the modern English word “barbarian.”

From the beginning, barbaros was a derisive and supremacist term. It centered the Greek language and ways of life as inherently superior to all others, which were rendered not only strange but inherently bad. It carried the same connotations that “barbarian” does today, implying that the people in question lack intellect, self-control, and inherent value.

What was actually a limitation of their own minds, of their own capacity to perceive other people’s worlds as equally real, the Greeks projected outward onto others. They used this, not only to justify expansionist conquests and the enslavement of foreign people, but they also turned it inwards, against other Greeks, particularly those who did not fit in to their narrow definition of civilized greatness.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The notion of supremacy cannot exist without a twin belief in others’ inferiority. Whatever the words it uses — noble, civilized, advanced, great — it always exists in comparison to a perceived other. Supremacy always needs something to define itself against.

And yet, if we take the word “barbarian” to mean rude, uncivilized, or intellectually inferior, I cannot think of anything more fitting of that definition than hearing another language and deciding that it must be gibberish just because you don’t understand it.

Which civilization is more advanced? The one that grows contentment and culture from its own soil, spreading through mutual desire and connection? Or the one that cannot survive without stealing?

During one of the last years I attended a family Christmas at my parents’ house, we had a “white elephant” gift exchange. After dinner, everyone dropped into the sunken living room, where presents in wrapping paper and bags were piled in the center on the cream carpet.

You may already know how this game works: Everyone brings a mystery gift, then draws a number, and each person selects one of the packages to unwrap in front of everybody. If someone has a later number, they can “steal” a prior gift. In my family a gift can be stolen up to two times, and the first player also gets to go last. Rules vary, but the gag of not knowing what you’re getting — and the fact that the item could be a gag in itself — is part of the fun.

A couple of people had shown up that year without a gift and wanted to play, so one of my family members went upstairs and rooted through the shelves to find and wrap a couple things that they could be confident nobody would miss.

Close to the end of the game, someone unwrapped one of these found items.

It was a hefty paperback copy of Mein Kampf.

Yes, that Mein Kampf. Adolf Hitler’s manifesto.

“What?” the person who had wrapped it said, when I reacted with horror. “I found it on the shelf.”

I was shaking. I didn’t know what to say, though I protested the book’s flippant presence in the room, and protested again when one of my uncles used his turn to “steal” the book, then sat down and started flipping through it as if it were a cookbook or a travel guide.

It felt especially awful to me that this was happening in a room full of people united by our common Germanic ancestry, in a religious lineage of Christian Zionism that was simultaneously staunchly pro-Israel and deeply anti-Jewish.

But I was wrestling internally, too, with my own feeling of responsibility for this moment.

After all, I’d known that the book was there, on the upstairs shelf.

It had been there for years.

I was the reason it was there.

I was the one who had bought it.

I had found the book in the political theory section of my university’s bookstore, where it glowed like a forbidden object next to the texts I was buying for class. I never read it, but it stayed with me, next to Hegel and Heidegger and the other dead German men whose ideas have shaped the world. Eventually it made its way to my parents’ home, where I was keeping everything I didn’t really want but couldn’t figure out what to do with, and from there, into hands I did not trust.

Back then, Mein Kampf was a mystery to me. I didn’t know whether the book was actually influential at the time of its publishing or whether it had simply gained notoriety after Hitler rose to power.

The truth is a little bit of both: As Hitler’s popularity increased, so did sales of his unwieldy manifesto. He wrote it while serving a prison sentence for high treason, hoping to pay off some of his debts. It sold poorly at first, only picking up momentum in 1933, after he took control of the country. By 1939 it had made him very rich; by 1945, more than 12 million copies had been sold. In an ironic move, given Hitler’s ableist attitudes, they even published an edition in braille.

One of the driving ideas in Mein Kampf was the belief that it was necessary to create lebensraum for Germans, which translates, literally, to “living room.” Hitler framed the goal of taking over land and resources as a noble cause. He made his case for who belonged on the land, and who deserved to be driven out, centering those who both spoke German and could be said to be Germanic by “race.”

Antisemitism was a way of making Jewish people who had been in Germany and surrounding countries for centuries into “foreigners,” along with Slavic people indigenous to Eastern Europe, who Hitler aimed eventually to enslave or deport to Siberia as well, and Roma and Sinti peoples who were already persecuted as outsiders. The Nazis also made “others” out of many ethnic Germans, especially if they were disabled, transsexual, or otherwise non-compliant with the visions of empire.

These ways of thinking long predated Hitler’s book and his rise to power in 1933. By then, Christianity had already been used for nearly two thousand years to assert European dominance around the world. Racial pseudoscience had been codified at the University of Göttingen in the late 1700’s, where scholars assigned people to various lineages based on which languages their communities spoke, which is how the notion of “Semitic” people came to be. The term “antisemitic,” used specifically and exclusively to target Jewish people, was an invention of German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879. Starting in the 1880’s, Roma and Sinti people in Imperial Germany were subject to escalating surveillance, incarceration, deportations, and draconian laws, including work requirements for children. Lebensraum, a term coined by German philosopher Friedrich Ratzel in 1901, had been around for several decades and already shaped German foreign policy, including the conquests of World War I.

When we understand what was actually in this text and the context in which it arose, it is a lot harder to write off historical Nazism and even Adolf Hitler as unique evils in the world.

Instead it helps us see how the twin ideologies of supremacy and inferiority have spurred many of history’s greatest horrors. The Greek empire and “barbarianism.” Lebensraum and antisemitism. Manifest Destiny and the making of Native Americans into “savages.” Modern Zionism and the dehumanization of Arabs as “terrorists.” MAGA and anti-immigrant bounty hunting. They’re all the same thing: justifications for genocide of some people so that others can have more.

And ultimately, they are all futile. You can only take so much before you deplete the source.

As supremacists have done to people, they have done to the planet, to the soil, to culture. Eventually, the plants simply stop growing, and we are left with only what supremacists can produce for themselves, which is to say, nothing at all.

Migration is normal, for plants and people. There is always movement. We have the planet we do and all the foods we do because algae migrated onto land, because birds and other creatures carried seeds over the waters, because people traveled and met one another. Things go wrong, and beings are forced to move. Things go right, and beings have the capacity to explore beyond their known world. All this motion begets life. We would not be here, any of us, without it.

Here in the United States, we are in a time of immense “othering.” Migration is being criminalized at a scale unprecedented in recent times. As I write this, I am reeling from the news that the U.S. Supreme Court has granted the federal government the right, not only to deport foreign nationals to any third country, but to revoke citizenship from people who were born here. Congress has voted to dramatically expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations, increasing the budget for the concentration camps they euphemistically refer to as detention centers from $3.4 billion to $45 billion. People are being kidnapped on the streets, held in facilities where they are deprived of basic human rights, and sometimes deported to prisons in third countries to which they have no ties.

It feels essential not only to acknowledge the scope and scale of these current inhumanities but also their origins. This nation exists because white European settlers fought wars to create borders and frame those outside them as barbarians. They created systems for border control, customs, and immigration, that determine to this day who can move freely and who cannot, who can be shot for seeking freedom and who will be rewarded for doing the shooting. Lands have been stolen, privatized, and sold to the highest bidder, a system that continues through real estate and gentrification as well as the ongoing selloff of what precious little lands have been reserved as “public” to logging, mining, and development corporations. The United States became an empire, fostering conflict and devouring global resources, forcing many of the same indigenous people it had driven off these lands to return as workers with limited status and few rights, all of which are now being rapidly taken away.

Colonialism is not a phenomenon of the past, but of the present. It is interwoven through all of our lives, and for many of us, in our DNA, in the story of our presence on this land.

I had forgotten about that Christmas gift exchange until recently, when I was at a party and a Jewish friend of mine mentioned that they sometimes go to estate sales and slap informative stickers on the more questionable objects they find.

“You wouldn’t believe how many people have items with sw*stikas for sale,” they said. “The family members usually shrug and say they were just in the family, or that they’re a ‘piece of history,’ as if that makes it okay.”

I told the story of the Mein Kampf Christmas, but I left out the part where I am the family member who first brought the book into the house. I still felt too great a shame. I needed to unpack that, to understand my role in it, to do what I had intended to do when I first bought the book at school. That’s how this essay came to be.

I hope it will serve for you as the forbidden book in the gift exchange: a reminder that what is hidden is still present, unless and until we decide to let it go.

One more taste of rhubarb, for the road.

Rhubarb’s popularity in Europe came in part because of its successful local cultivation, and in part because sugar became widely available, softening its sour edge.

But something magical also happened as people came to know the plant, expressing curiosity instead of judgment, learning its language. They figured out that it can be sweetened up in the growth stage through a technique that, despite being called “forcing,” actually requires a lot of care. The crowns are brought inside, to heated sheds, where they receive the warmth they need to grow but are made to reach for light.

Grown in this way, rhubarb’s stems stretch taller and thinner, lengthening the cells within the stalk, which makes them tenderer and sweeter, and turns their color a paler pink. Some English farmers even go to the trouble of growing them by candlelight to coax their sweetness up. In these circumstances, they grow so quickly you can actually hear them crackle as they stretch.

That is my wish for all of us, in these dark times: That we find ways to grow ever more sweet and tender, and to care deeply for one another, our love becoming fiercer with every outside escalation.

I am aware that I am publishing this after the end of rhubarb season, as the plant’s gifts have already unfolded fully for the year. You might save these recipes for next year, like I am: this rhubarb gastrique from Marta Sandini, this roasted rhubarb with sweet labneh from Ottolenghi.

Or you might buy some now, in preserved form. I strongly recommend the exquisite pink rhubarb jam from Ayako & Family, a second-generation Japanese-American business located in Seattle. It is magically sweet, sweeter than any rhubarb jam I have ever managed to concoct, and the proprietor, Sako, beautifully honors their mother’s immigrant legacy. You can find them at Seattle’s University District and Ballard farmer’s markets, and online at ayakoandfamily.com.

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