Notpocalypse

Further to my last post, the friends I do want to keep close are nearly all in some sort of depressive/emotional crisis. Most of them are externalizing it too, which means they're still in the "the world is objectively terrible and so I have to be emotionally destroyed and nothing can be done" which is-- I mean, that's where it's depression and not the much more manageable grief and feelings about change that one honours and uses to inform one's continued *living*. It's mirrored so similarly in so many people. Folks wrote about the covid mental health crisis months ago but right now it's worse than I've seen it.

In a lot of ways it feels like my society has become a death cult that cannot acknowledge the existence of death or change. It sits there staring at the drain it's circling, waiting to be sucked down, throwing the stopper as far away from itself as it can manage. Everyone wants it to be over but not too many people want to build anything after; they hope that if that dies then the next thing will just happen. Systems that are good for humans don't just happen; they take deliberate organization and work and compromise.

And I've always found the best way to make a change is to add something better to replace the thing I want removed. It's a bit of a permaculture concept too: design for the way that people behave naturally, for the way energy naturally flows, and the system will be more robust. Instead of removing caffeinated drinks from the diet, try adding non-caffeinated drinks you love. Instead of yelling at yourself internally to just put the thing away, make a good spot for it to live close to where it's used. Instead of struggling not to call your mean ex, make a standing date with a friend or friends for the particular time of day when your willpower is lowest. Introduce better things and they will displace the bad things. It just takes a but of thought to know what it is you're seeking in the thing to be replaced, and make sure that your alternative has a way for that need to get satisfied. With that thought up front, the rest just ...flows.

Which is maybe why everything feels like it's dying in my little social sphere. There's so much disassembly and so little building. For all that I live very present with death around me in the systems I manage I am a builder, and I like to contribute to building good systems or, maybe better, supporting folks who build.

Anyhow, in the midst of this I extra appreciate Josh. He's always broken the mold for folks I tend to spend time with and this doesn't seem to be getting to him in the same way it's getting to ...everyone else.

Depression has always been my greatest nemesis: it takes all my friends and loved ones from me year after year after year. They struggle, they resurface, I get them back sometimes but so much is lost. In the past I've promised myself I wouldn't date folks who are prone to depression, or who are prone to depression and who don't have explicit ways of handling it when it comes up other than to numbly wait until it subsides. I hadn't extended that to friends, though, and I guess the above principle still applies: if I'm removing those folks, who am I replacing them with?

But. What I really want, I guess, is folks who can lift their eyes towards something meaningful to them and who find satisfaction? in moving towards it.

As the poem says,

"With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."

Daily: focus

Oh no.

I'd just gently turned my focus back on myself.

I'd written about my plans for my home. I'd written about evolutionary breeding, about how the animals fit in here, about fields cropped by time series (winter rye and peas and greens finish; the pigs move into the field and eat what I haven't skimmed off; I plant napa cabbage and daikon on the field they just left since those can't be planted until July). I'd written about the tension between saving the best seed and planting it, and the selection forces of seed that goes through the pigs and volunteers, and how a major task in setting up the maintenance phase of this system is harnessing that.

I'd written about how the pig fields are the best garden this year and so I'll turn the newer south garden into berries but they need to be draught-tolerant berries because the u sask cherries aren't great that way.

I'd written about how meaningful and fulfilling it is for me to be enmeshed in this system.

I'd written about how I'm finally turning some of my patterning attention on my gorgeous-but-useless gothic-arch house which has no storage and no walls for shelves and that has a temperature inversion summer to winter when the 18C basement becomes the 30C wood stove room and how none of that suits my brewing/canning/seed saving. I'd written about begrudging money spent on inside my house instead of on the land but that it's starting to feel good to organize.

I'd written about how, even though I will likely leave this space, I need to think and act as if I'll stay here because I engage both with the presence of any thing and of its long shadow stretching out to the horizon and I can't do one without the other.

I'd written about how I feel more like myself here than I have anywhere since I was quite young, and how like when I was quite young I have especially no one to share it with. I'd written about how that was harder now than it used to be, because I see other people sharing their enthusiasms with other folks, talking about them together and doing them together. I want that but I also don't because my land is a layer of my skin and how do you handle someone else altering your skin?

I'd started writing about buying the property with A&E&T and how we'd looked at a 5 acre lot, flat and grassy, with two homes on it. I'd written that it's not that I need more production than I can get off a 5 acre lot minus the footprint of a driveway and two homes. It's about how a space like that would need compromise.

I was starting to describe how I want to plant standard sized apple trees, trees that will grow big and will feed people a hundred years after I'm gone. I was describing how I'd want to ring the property, not only in a privacy fence but in a hedgerow with hawthorn and saskatoon and sour cherry and wild plum and haskap and thorny gooseberry and fig and mulberry and a chaos of impenetrable habitat for small wild things. Those all demand so much space and their yield is objectively later and less per area than if dwarf trees with a couple-decade lifespan and a neat, tidy berry patch were planted. On 5 acres it's hard to do both, and because there's another gardener involved them some compromise is needed. I want enough space that I can compromise on some, but that we can each decide fully on others.

I'd written most of that and then the computer ate it: my wrist hit a part of the laptop that was interpreted as the keypad (it was not) and selected the whole text and I typed a key and flash! It was gone.

So I summarized but I lost the details of the intricacies of what I do here, and I lost the words that captured it with the enthusiasm and love I feel for it.

I'd realized I share the outputs here but not the process, not so often. That process is love. Thinking my way along the reality of what exists and finding a co-existence that elevates us both, that's love.

And looking at that, now, and what I just wrote about compromising and working with people, and sharing space with another gardener: I need to keep a piece of that love as a relationship just between myself and the land, though I like the thought of maybe also trying to engage in a shared relationship with the land as long as I have my own, to myself.

Anyhow, I've been writing so outwardly lately and I've noticed that. This journal has always been public because I need myself to be seen by the concept of a watcher, of a recorder. Somehow that's become tainted by my general sense that folks can't follow where I go with this very intimate relationship of mine. If any part of me is to be recorded, though, to be watched, to be set down for posterity-- it should be my relationship with the land, it should be the give-and-take steps in that dance. It's the central feature of my life and the rest is just details.

Return focus to what matters, and to enough of the life-scaffold that what matters can continue to matter. So mote it be.