Inwarding

There's a day in my cycle every month where I want to do lots of cleaning. We're going into winter and I'm spending actual time indoors. And folks are coming to tear apart the chimney, theoretically, and replace it.

So I've been overhauling the house. I had to take down the bookshelves that were up against the chimney. My livingroom isn't really big enough to leave the bookshelves sitting around. So I am rearranging the pantry to hold my bookshelves, putting my boxed books away in a closet, moving the kitchen shelving that's in front of the windows into the pantry so I can finally hang my curtains, taking the folding table out of the pantry, and maybe moving one bookshelf up into my bedroom for the farm reference books I'll be using in the next little while, like my butchery and sausagemaking books.

I should also probably go through all my canning and make sure the lids are all still sealed.

Right now everything is chaos but I'm happy to be working on a more useable space. This home is beautiful but not super useable -- the rooms are barely big enough to put beds in, and the walls are gothic-arch curved so shelves can't go up against them. Over time I'm developing strategies that work better for me.

In other news Tucker and I are working through a communication... course? together recommended by his therapist. The fact that it's voice rather than reading is a bit of a challenge since neither of us receive into that way particularly well. I don't really believe that any one set of tools is the Right One, but having a mutually agreed upon way of communicating about concepts is helpful. My hope is this will give that to us. I don't know how optimistic to be about it; I think he's starting to slide down back into his depression from before the trip and that brings in a more defeatist mindset overall. On the other hand he's still participating and he's definitely still making significant efforts to be kind and supportive of my feelings.

We definitely hit a bump this weekend anyhow. We've been pausing to chat about the course as we go through it and yesterday we got back into the original issue (I'm still reading it as "is it ok for me to have strong emotions in his presence" though I'm hoping that's a misread and waiting on clarification still) and I expressed that I'm still having some waves of reluctance/anger/etc from the last couple years of the relationship where he wasn't communicating with me, and that even though he's communicating now I'll probably keep having those emotions pop up once in awhile and I don't think there's away to just make them go away-- they'll fade over time as he keeps showing up. He doesn't want to have been told about that periodic nor to have been (and possibly ever be?) made aware of it. I started speaking from a place of anger, stopped what I was saying, and explained that this anger wasn't about anything he was doing right now but that it would come and go and he shouldn't take it personally, it was just a feeling I'd have sometimes. He was not ok with that.

So I'm struggling to know what he thinks I should have done.

My emotions are big and loud and all-consuming in my head, it's where the storm in Greenstorm comes from. From all the counseling and reading and whatever I've done it seems that non-traumatized neurotypical people, when their emotions get big and they get disregulated, they are "supposed to"(?) be able to do some grounding and breathing exercises and the physiological responses go away and they can go back to the subject fairly soon and maybe need to take a couple breaks to re-regulate but pretty much can continue. One of the things that convinces me that my brain isn't wired that way is that I can't do that.

If I talk or write my way through something I can become ok over a course of several hours to a day. If I do nothing the intense physiological response subsides after about 2 hours but if I approach the topic again I'm right back in it in slowly subsiding 2-hour waves for the next several days to weeks. If I try to do breathing and grounding exercises designed to get me into my body I experience extreme pain and what feels pretty much like a kind of death of self. This is what I understand to be an autistic meltdown. I *can* ground externally, go outside and let my mind disappear into the land and feel more ok, but I can't come back to the subject for awhile while I'm doing that still and I can only do it in tiny glimpses, like exposure therapy, over many days, before I can come back to it.

That is to say, if I'm feeling angry my options seem to be to talk about it and maybe it'll subside in ten or twenty minutes or to withdraw and do journaling or to withdraw for a long time and let it subside. Now, I'm not saying that talking about it looks like yelling or being mean; it's explaining what my internal story and pain points are, basically describing the emotion properly, invoking the narrator to channel the internal experience instead of necessarily living it.

Anyhow, we'll no doubt get into that together more later but it derailed the course this weekend. I had to sit through a couple hours of that internal storm before it subsided, I had to die and come back again.

It's kind of amazing to think that other people don't have this kind of mind. I'm envious of that in so many ways, but it's also a relief to know that it's not just that I suck at regulation. It's genuinely a different experience for me. I remember my mom being bewildered about the whole thing when I was a kid and trying different things to get me to calm down; I quickly learned to put on a perfectly normal and pleasant face while I was in meltdown, to not admit or show any sign of it. Folks who require that of me are not my friends. Not talk about it or process with that person verbally? Sure. Take physical space apart? Sure. Reassure someone that it's my mind doing stuff and probably isn't personal, so they shouldn't take it too seriously? Sure. But not to express that I have the emotion at all, either by word or tone or expression, while still maintaining the facade of physical and emotional intimacy? Nope.

I'm still in it a little bit. Luckily I'm home alone, it's quiet, and I can turn my hand back to work and cleaning.

Inwarding

There's a day in my cycle every month where I want to do lots of cleaning. We're going into winter and I'm spending actual time indoors. And folks are coming to tear apart the chimney, theoretically, and replace it.

So I've been overhauling the house. I had to take down the bookshelves that were up against the chimney. My livingroom isn't really big enough to leave the bookshelves sitting around. So I am rearranging the pantry to hold my bookshelves, putting my boxed books away in a closet, moving the kitchen shelving that's in front of the windows into the pantry so I can finally hang my curtains, taking the folding table out of the pantry, and maybe moving one bookshelf up into my bedroom for the farm reference books I'll be using in the next little while, like my butchery and sausagemaking books.

I should also probably go through all my canning and make sure the lids are all still sealed.

Right now everything is chaos but I'm happy to be working on a more useable space. This home is beautiful but not super useable -- the rooms are barely big enough to put beds in, and the walls are gothic-arch curved so shelves can't go up against them. Over time I'm developing strategies that work better for me.

In other news Tucker and I are working through a communication... course? together recommended by his therapist. The fact that it's voice rather than reading is a bit of a challenge since neither of us receive into that way particularly well. I don't really believe that any one set of tools is the Right One, but having a mutually agreed upon way of communicating about concepts is helpful. My hope is this will give that to us. I don't know how optimistic to be about it; I think he's starting to slide down back into his depression from before the trip and that brings in a more defeatist mindset overall. On the other hand he's still participating and he's definitely still making significant efforts to be kind and supportive of my feelings.

We definitely hit a bump this weekend anyhow. We've been pausing to chat about the course as we go through it and yesterday we got back into the original issue (I'm still reading it as "is it ok for me to have strong emotions in his presence" though I'm hoping that's a misread and waiting on clarification still) and I expressed that I'm still having some waves of reluctance/anger/etc from the last couple years of the relationship where he wasn't communicating with me, and that even though he's communicating now I'll probably keep having those emotions pop up once in awhile and I don't think there's away to just make them go away-- they'll fade over time as he keeps showing up. He doesn't want to have been told about that periodic nor to have been (and possibly ever be?) made aware of it. I started speaking from a place of anger, stopped what I was saying, and explained that this anger wasn't about anything he was doing right now but that it would come and go and he shouldn't take it personally, it was just a feeling I'd have sometimes. He was not ok with that.

So I'm struggling to know what he thinks I should have done.

My emotions are big and loud and all-consuming in my head, it's where the storm in Greenstorm comes from. From all the counseling and reading and whatever I've done it seems that non-traumatized neurotypical people, when their emotions get big and they get disregulated, they are "supposed to"(?) be able to do some grounding and breathing exercises and the physiological responses go away and they can go back to the subject fairly soon and maybe need to take a couple breaks to re-regulate but pretty much can continue. One of the things that convinces me that my brain isn't wired that way is that I can't do that.

If I talk or write my way through something I can become ok over a course of several hours to a day. If I do nothing the intense physiological response subsides after about 2 hours but if I approach the topic again I'm right back in it in slowly subsiding 2-hour waves for the next several days to weeks. If I try to do breathing and grounding exercises designed to get me into my body I experience extreme pain and what feels pretty much like a kind of death of self. This is what I understand to be an autistic meltdown. I *can* ground externally, go outside and let my mind disappear into the land and feel more ok, but I can't come back to the subject for awhile while I'm doing that still and I can only do it in tiny glimpses, like exposure therapy, over many days, before I can come back to it.

That is to say, if I'm feeling angry my options seem to be to talk about it and maybe it'll subside in ten or twenty minutes or to withdraw and do journaling or to withdraw for a long time and let it subside. Now, I'm not saying that talking about it looks like yelling or being mean; it's explaining what my internal story and pain points are, basically describing the emotion properly, invoking the narrator to channel the internal experience instead of necessarily living it.

Anyhow, we'll no doubt get into that together more later but it derailed the course this weekend. I had to sit through a couple hours of that internal storm before it subsided, I had to die and come back again.

It's kind of amazing to think that other people don't have this kind of mind. I'm envious of that in so many ways, but it's also a relief to know that it's not just that I suck at regulation. It's genuinely a different experience for me. I remember my mom being bewildered about the whole thing when I was a kid and trying different things to get me to calm down; I quickly learned to put on a perfectly normal and pleasant face while I was in meltdown, to not admit or show any sign of it. Folks who require that of me are not my friends. Not talk about it or process with that person verbally? Sure. Take physical space apart? Sure. Reassure someone that it's my mind doing stuff and probably isn't personal, so they shouldn't take it too seriously? Sure. But not to express that I have the emotion at all, either by word or tone or expression, while still maintaining the facade of physical and emotional intimacy? Nope.

I'm still in it a little bit. Luckily I'm home alone, it's quiet, and I can turn my hand back to work and cleaning.

Safety in numbers

So a lot of my energy/money goes to my farm, which is primarily dedicated to breed preservation. That is, I keep my freezer full but I'm maximized neither for feeding myself nor making money. I'm maximized for being able to have as many people keep Ossabaw hogs as breeding stock as possible.

I'd been maintaining two boars for the genetic diversity, knowing I needed to downsize to one but really waffling on who to keep. I'd also been starting to cut down my original sows and keep offspring.

The other day I got a call from someone who was looking for an adult breeding pair, just two, to keep as homestead pigs. It sounds like his situation is perfect to keep Oak, from the Ontario line, and Nox, one of my original sows. They're both very friendly animals, they're a little on the smaller side, and I think they'll be a good fit. That's a substantial relief since it means none of those boars will go for sausage, they'll be in a breeding home, and Ossabaws will be introduced to a new town.

If I actually successfully get a deposit from them this will be very good.

Safety in numbers

So a lot of my energy/money goes to my farm, which is primarily dedicated to breed preservation. That is, I keep my freezer full but I'm maximized neither for feeding myself nor making money. I'm maximized for being able to have as many people keep Ossabaw hogs as breeding stock as possible.

I'd been maintaining two boars for the genetic diversity, knowing I needed to downsize to one but really waffling on who to keep. I'd also been starting to cut down my original sows and keep offspring.

The other day I got a call from someone who was looking for an adult breeding pair, just two, to keep as homestead pigs. It sounds like his situation is perfect to keep Oak, from the Ontario line, and Nox, one of my original sows. They're both very friendly animals, they're a little on the smaller side, and I think they'll be a good fit. That's a substantial relief since it means none of those boars will go for sausage, they'll be in a breeding home, and Ossabaws will be introduced to a new town.

If I actually successfully get a deposit from them this will be very good.

FB posts

Tl;dr if you want to keep genetic diversity in domestic animals, and/or you want there to be domestic animals in our future, actively buy animal products from small diverse farmers. Also I'm burnt out and struggling some.

You can save seed from rare plants and skip growing it for a couple years. You can keep those seeds in a freezer for quite awhile and you don't lose the variety. Animals are different. To preserve domestic animals you need a big enough gene pool of live, young or breeding-age animals. Sure you could freeze semen and ova and hope someone revives them someday but that requires a lot more tech and it isn't being done to the breadth of genetics we need to preserve. Plus, animals have not only genes but culture. Three years ago my geese did not know how to dig for potatoes or shake their own apples off trees: they learned. My sows make better nests when they're around older sows who have made nests.

If you believe animals are a useful and necessary part of ecosystems and human food systems-- obviously I do, for many reasons I won't detail here, but you can definitely ask me about it-- this is a hard time. We're losing an awful lot of our diversity.

Feed has gone up from roughly $14/bag last year to $20/bag this year for me. That's a lot more money out of my pocket, my discretionary income, every day. Animals eat every day. I'm trying to figure out ways to keep this working but I'm not sure I've recovered from the 2018 evacuation or the covid abattoir disappearance where I couldn't legally sell meat to reimburse costs.

I don't really *like* selling meat to people I don't know, either: meat is the outcome of a pretty intense and special relationship between me and my animals. That relationship should also include the person who eats that meat: it should be done with reverence and something like love. So I waffle on what to do, I spend money to feed animals in order to keep the breed alive, I spread the genes and support other folks raising animals when I can. I spend money on feed instead of on housesitters for vacations and so I don't really take vacations, and I burn out, and I feel dark about the future of all of this.

When I put my hand to these plants and animals I can feel the chain of people who made domestication and husbandry choices generation by generation. Every person who breeds a plant or an animal makes choices that change it, just a little bit, honing it for the next person, fitting it better into the environment. One break in the chain and animals are lost, plants may be lost. I'm a link in that chain. In cold winters oils and fats are so important to survival, and they're hard to get from plants and take good soil (which will be mostly underwater soon, tbh) and a lot of physical labour. If someone needs a small, very hardy animal that can forage and sort itself pretty well over winter and provides huge number of calories at some time in the future they will have that animal, in part, because of my work with Ossabaws and various geese. Maybe they will be able to have a kinder community because of it. If someone needs to grow vegetables in a short season (short because it's north, or because part of the season is too hot or too dry to grow in) they will in part have those because of my stewardship and spread of those seeds. I have trouble thinking of charging for that too: the more people have these seeds the more likely they are to survive.

Whenever someone gets breeding stock from me and grows their own animals out, or gets seeds from me and shares their own saved seeds with friends, or learns a skill from me and shares those skills with friends: that makes it worth it. When people honour the connection of their food and their ecosystem and their body, that brings me so much joy.

When I'm burnt out I think, if folks today don't support diversity then they don't deserve to have it given to their future generations. It's not a good way to feel.

So I'm looking at what to do going forward, I don't know what that will be at this point. This is just a rambling post in keeping with my Dinosaur Farm videos, trying to be real about what this experience is for me without shining it up any and maybe looking for some words of encouragement. I'm putting myself into a bit of a farm business class to see if that helps me thread all these needles and come up with some sort of useful tapestry of action.

Meanwhile I'll likely be down to the coast with ducks and geese (and maybe pork?) and soap this fall; once I have abattoir dates I'll be taking deposits.

I know a lot of you are actively working to make the world a better place in your area of knowledge or expertise. This is mine. I wish us all so much success.

FB posts

Tl;dr if you want to keep genetic diversity in domestic animals, and/or you want there to be domestic animals in our future, actively buy animal products from small diverse farmers. Also I'm burnt out and struggling some.

You can save seed from rare plants and skip growing it for a couple years. You can keep those seeds in a freezer for quite awhile and you don't lose the variety. Animals are different. To preserve domestic animals you need a big enough gene pool of live, young or breeding-age animals. Sure you could freeze semen and ova and hope someone revives them someday but that requires a lot more tech and it isn't being done to the breadth of genetics we need to preserve. Plus, animals have not only genes but culture. Three years ago my geese did not know how to dig for potatoes or shake their own apples off trees: they learned. My sows make better nests when they're around older sows who have made nests.

If you believe animals are a useful and necessary part of ecosystems and human food systems-- obviously I do, for many reasons I won't detail here, but you can definitely ask me about it-- this is a hard time. We're losing an awful lot of our diversity.

Feed has gone up from roughly $14/bag last year to $20/bag this year for me. That's a lot more money out of my pocket, my discretionary income, every day. Animals eat every day. I'm trying to figure out ways to keep this working but I'm not sure I've recovered from the 2018 evacuation or the covid abattoir disappearance where I couldn't legally sell meat to reimburse costs.

I don't really *like* selling meat to people I don't know, either: meat is the outcome of a pretty intense and special relationship between me and my animals. That relationship should also include the person who eats that meat: it should be done with reverence and something like love. So I waffle on what to do, I spend money to feed animals in order to keep the breed alive, I spread the genes and support other folks raising animals when I can. I spend money on feed instead of on housesitters for vacations and so I don't really take vacations, and I burn out, and I feel dark about the future of all of this.

When I put my hand to these plants and animals I can feel the chain of people who made domestication and husbandry choices generation by generation. Every person who breeds a plant or an animal makes choices that change it, just a little bit, honing it for the next person, fitting it better into the environment. One break in the chain and animals are lost, plants may be lost. I'm a link in that chain. In cold winters oils and fats are so important to survival, and they're hard to get from plants and take good soil (which will be mostly underwater soon, tbh) and a lot of physical labour. If someone needs a small, very hardy animal that can forage and sort itself pretty well over winter and provides huge number of calories at some time in the future they will have that animal, in part, because of my work with Ossabaws and various geese. Maybe they will be able to have a kinder community because of it. If someone needs to grow vegetables in a short season (short because it's north, or because part of the season is too hot or too dry to grow in) they will in part have those because of my stewardship and spread of those seeds. I have trouble thinking of charging for that too: the more people have these seeds the more likely they are to survive.

Whenever someone gets breeding stock from me and grows their own animals out, or gets seeds from me and shares their own saved seeds with friends, or learns a skill from me and shares those skills with friends: that makes it worth it. When people honour the connection of their food and their ecosystem and their body, that brings me so much joy.

When I'm burnt out I think, if folks today don't support diversity then they don't deserve to have it given to their future generations. It's not a good way to feel.

So I'm looking at what to do going forward, I don't know what that will be at this point. This is just a rambling post in keeping with my Dinosaur Farm videos, trying to be real about what this experience is for me without shining it up any and maybe looking for some words of encouragement. I'm putting myself into a bit of a farm business class to see if that helps me thread all these needles and come up with some sort of useful tapestry of action.

Meanwhile I'll likely be down to the coast with ducks and geese (and maybe pork?) and soap this fall; once I have abattoir dates I'll be taking deposits.

I know a lot of you are actively working to make the world a better place in your area of knowledge or expertise. This is mine. I wish us all so much success.