(no subject)

Spring is still springing. I'm vibrating too hard to sleep, though when Tucker is here it helps. A shocking amount of water is running down the gentle south slope of the pigfield under the packed snow -- snow which is invisible under the winter's manure, but which hasn't entirely disappeared. The rivulets are the size of my wrist, nearly streams in their own right during the height of the afternoon.

My blue muscovy is sneaking off at night, undoubtedly to sit on a nest. I can't find it. The americaunas are coming in to lay and my eggbasket is a mix of the lovely pinkish buff tinted chantecler eggs and a gentle palette of blues and blue-greens and aquas. Downstairs there are goose and duck eggs on every available surface, waiting for me to make pasta dough and refill the freezer.

I try not to spend energy going against my nature. Fighting myself never works. Instead I channel who I am into behaviours aligned with my values and see where I end up. It works for me but it requires me to pay close attention, both to many levels of myself and to what the opportunities in front of me really mean. I have many paths laid out in front of me right now.

Sarah Manguso wrote "Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little." I accept that I will drown a little.

Right now I'm canning marmalade. Our little grocery store is surprisingly lovely. The manager makes a point of bringing in things I'm used to from Vancouver but that are probably (?) exotic up here: starfruit, bitter melon, tapioca starch, okra, and, in season, seville oranges. I bought proper oranges, ugly and pithy and seedy, and sliced them up while watching The Flash with Tucker. It's a bit of a process: juicing them, taking out the pith and seeds, cooking the pith and seeds in water, slicing and simmering the peel, adding in the juice and the water strained from the seeds, adding in more sugar than really seems proper, ladling into sterilized jars (I need a one-cup ladle), then water-bathing.

There was a moment when I was leaning over the candy thermometer when I realized I've made so much jam in my life. I did big batches for Urban Digs farm, that was the same year I did my project to can one jar for every day of the upcoming winter at home. Every year since then I've canned jam or preserves. Even before that I remember canning peaches or nectarines with Ellen. Honestly I still have one jar of nectarines from that day, it sealed itself shut with sugar and no one has been able to open it since. That must have been ten years ago or more?

Sometimes when I go through the same action at the same time of year I can remember myself doing something similar previously. Today I could feel... it was a connection, not just to one moment, but to a series of similar moments over the years. I connected to a continuity of self I've rarely experienced.

I've been thinking back over the past a lot in the last few weeks. I was... I want to say almost driven by dreams and portents to reach out to Graydon more meaningfully again. We've known each other something like twelve years and been casually close for the recent many. The connection is lovely; he's always been ridiculously appealing to me on many levels. My memory is a black hole though, so I've been sifting through his memories about what happened, through my emails, and through my old journal entries. It seems we've done this twice before.

There are two sayings.

One is, "the third time's a charm"

The second is, "once is chance, second time's coincidence, third time is [enemy action/a pattern]".

We will see.

In any case both contemplating a new relationship and looking back at myself in those days, I'm grateful for so many of the people who have been in my life. I'm well-anchored right now in part because of the integrity and shared values of my current partners. I've been well-supported by friends, among others Adrian and Ellen who may eventually form a little intentional community with me were awfully present back in those days too. And most of all I have myself, and can trust myself to a level that seems uncommon for many folks.

I'm tired. My marmalade is done in the water bath. I'll take it out and either snuggle up with a book or write about interiority, the gaze of the oppressor, and autism. Maybe I'll be sucked fully into the past instead of peering at it through a window. I guess we'll see which shortly.

Manguso's poem finishes:

"Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the heart of everything that is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.

What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone."