Seconds

Mom and my brother just pulled away. It's Saturday morning and they were here just over a week. I'm actually sad to see them go, previously I would have been so relieved to have people out of my space that it would have overwhelmed everything else. I am not over-peopled these days. That's nice.

I keep wanting to write about what having mom in my space is like: she wants to clean things and help, but occasionally throws out valuable things and definitely puts things in odd places. I wonder if she could feel loved if she didn't do things to help out, and/or if she enjoys that feeling of cleaning someone else's space because there's no requirement to and it's a nice gift. I'm not annoyed enough right now to write about what got lost or thrown out, though. I'm just here in myself, being a little and and feeling my house be spacious around me.

7kg of soap is on its way to Quesnel in trade for my opal heart ring with a leaf. Shortly I'll go down and eat pancakes, I was flipping them for my family and didn't have time to eat. I'll talk to Tucker on the phone-- we left off our conversation about what if he buys a condo the other day because he had to catch his plane. I'll feed the ducks and geese and pigs and carry water. I'll put pallets into the greenhouse so they're acessible when it snows. I'll go get some grain and shovel it into containers. Maybe I'll work on the pig roof or sit in front of the stove on the floor with dogs and a book. Maybe I'll make a round of sausage.

Tomorrow I'll work on the pig roof, carry straw, and hopefully fix the serpentine belt on the Tundra with help from the toyota geek from work. I'll lie on my bed and feel gravity. I'll take pictures of where the frost first melts on my roof, giving me the map of my trusses that transfer heat faster than the insulated spots.

All that, but: the days will unfold forward from this one moment of quiet. I'm here, breathing. I am alone in the silence of the house humming around me. Moment to moment, I continue to exist.

Edited to add: oh, the veil is thin. That's why it feels like this here. Imminent.

Seconds

Mom and my brother just pulled away. It's Saturday morning and they were here just over a week. I'm actually sad to see them go, previously I would have been so relieved to have people out of my space that it would have overwhelmed everything else. I am not over-peopled these days. That's nice.

I keep wanting to write about what having mom in my space is like: she wants to clean things and help, but occasionally throws out valuable things and definitely puts things in odd places. I wonder if she could feel loved if she didn't do things to help out, and/or if she enjoys that feeling of cleaning someone else's space because there's no requirement to and it's a nice gift. I'm not annoyed enough right now to write about what got lost or thrown out, though. I'm just here in myself, being a little and and feeling my house be spacious around me.

7kg of soap is on its way to Quesnel in trade for my opal heart ring with a leaf. Shortly I'll go down and eat pancakes, I was flipping them for my family and didn't have time to eat. I'll talk to Tucker on the phone-- we left off our conversation about what if he buys a condo the other day because he had to catch his plane. I'll feed the ducks and geese and pigs and carry water. I'll put pallets into the greenhouse so they're acessible when it snows. I'll go get some grain and shovel it into containers. Maybe I'll work on the pig roof or sit in front of the stove on the floor with dogs and a book. Maybe I'll make a round of sausage.

Tomorrow I'll work on the pig roof, carry straw, and hopefully fix the serpentine belt on the Tundra with help from the toyota geek from work. I'll lie on my bed and feel gravity. I'll take pictures of where the frost first melts on my roof, giving me the map of my trusses that transfer heat faster than the insulated spots.

All that, but: the days will unfold forward from this one moment of quiet. I'm here, breathing. I am alone in the silence of the house humming around me. Moment to moment, I continue to exist.

Edited to add: oh, the veil is thin. That's why it feels like this here. Imminent.

Threshold 5-year plan

Because anything good I've done has been built on the back of a veiled "fuck you" to what it seems like the world is forcing me to do:

Year -1: What I've done: Page wire fence around the home couple acres. 5 fields plus main yard fencing mostly completed: orchard field, winter field, wood field, back field, main field plus fencing tacked onto the next field. 3 fairly permanent pig houses built in winter field. Raised beds removed and replaced with lasagna-bedded rich soil ~2000 sqft then ~3000 sqft (that last thousand is super competing with aspens though). Added one pop-up 20x12 greenhouse, one lean-to animal space/greenhouse 10x20. Taken down a couple aspens.

Refinance mortgage. Fence driveway "airlock" and two new fields in the back. Remove lean-to greenhouse. Get a quote for fixing the workshop foundation, if it can be done. Take down extra aspens and cut to season. Potentially run pigs in the small corral by the neighbours' house to prepare for orchard if they can be convinced. Re-side fabric pop-up greenhouse? Convert 2021 grain trial area to berries & grapes. Look into walk-in coolers. Wire in generator panel. Plant oaks in the back. Try making a small log cabin in field orchard. Plant woodfield in tomato, squash, and corn trial. Design main garden maze. Figure out the mud part of driveway. Exclude geese from main lawn/figure out guardian dog solution. Build postal box for driveway. Build pig houses in additional fields, ideally that can be used as greenhouses off-season (2-6). Replace deck and south roof. Egg stand out front?

Acquire tractor. Fix workshop. Quote for pole barn. Plant field orchard. Convert wood field to veggie trials. Front landscaping/trimming. Deal with workshop: either disassemble or fix foundation. If disassemble, quote for pole barn. Build on two more fields, extending back at least to the pond. Figure out guest house. Cut gate in north front fence. Financing for high tunnel greenhouse?

Refloor chicken coop. Build walk-in cooler, guesthouse, and root cellar maybe as a unit, if workshop isn't fixable. High tunnel greenhouse along north edge of property. Standpipe in by greenhouse and animal wintering pen. Culvert and fill back and side swales with earthmover.

Threshold 5-year plan

Because anything good I've done has been built on the back of a veiled "fuck you" to what it seems like the world is forcing me to do:

Year -1: What I've done: Page wire fence around the home couple acres. 5 fields plus main yard fencing mostly completed: orchard field, winter field, wood field, back field, main field plus fencing tacked onto the next field. 3 fairly permanent pig houses built in winter field. Raised beds removed and replaced with lasagna-bedded rich soil ~2000 sqft then ~3000 sqft (that last thousand is super competing with aspens though). Added one pop-up 20x12 greenhouse, one lean-to animal space/greenhouse 10x20. Taken down a couple aspens.

Refinance mortgage. Fence driveway "airlock" and two new fields in the back. Remove lean-to greenhouse. Get a quote for fixing the workshop foundation, if it can be done. Take down extra aspens and cut to season. Potentially run pigs in the small corral by the neighbours' house to prepare for orchard if they can be convinced. Re-side fabric pop-up greenhouse? Convert 2021 grain trial area to berries & grapes. Look into walk-in coolers. Wire in generator panel. Plant oaks in the back. Try making a small log cabin in field orchard. Plant woodfield in tomato, squash, and corn trial. Design main garden maze. Figure out the mud part of driveway. Exclude geese from main lawn/figure out guardian dog solution. Build postal box for driveway. Build pig houses in additional fields, ideally that can be used as greenhouses off-season (2-6). Replace deck and south roof. Egg stand out front?

Acquire tractor. Fix workshop. Quote for pole barn. Plant field orchard. Convert wood field to veggie trials. Front landscaping/trimming. Deal with workshop: either disassemble or fix foundation. If disassemble, quote for pole barn. Build on two more fields, extending back at least to the pond. Figure out guest house. Cut gate in north front fence. Financing for high tunnel greenhouse?

Refloor chicken coop. Build walk-in cooler, guesthouse, and root cellar maybe as a unit, if workshop isn't fixable. High tunnel greenhouse along north edge of property. Standpipe in by greenhouse and animal wintering pen. Culvert and fill back and side swales with earthmover.

Civil blood

The world I live in doesn't have a thing/person binary.

It has only a functional boundary around entities, depending on the scale on which I'm working at the time. Biological definitions are ruled by their exceptions and I find no truths in common wisdom or social definitions of seperateness.

As such my experience of life is like passing through a school of flowing fish and seaweed: it's contact upon contact, sensation upon sensation, with what might be conceived of as environment, individual, and superindividual all at once.

When I sink into this feeling I can report on it only from the very edge of language. My counselor asked, what would it look like to not always be translating for people? She doesn't understand that _people_ is literal. In order to interact with humans I need to translate into words, into behaviours, into expressions. When I have true space I become what I've never seen elsewhere and cannot explain.

Untranslated, I feel everything as having a real existence. When I sat down to write this, before I made it though the preamble, I was going to say: I feel everything as alive. I can't access a meaningful societal definition of alive right now, though, I can't access the culture where "people are not things" is supposed to have meaning. Instead things are all imbued with meaning, with capacity to both give and recieve relationship. Things have an innate concept of self which is mediated through our relationship to them, through their relationship with humans which are meaning-making machines and through their relationship to actual reality, which humans access only as the barest flicker in a dark cave.

I am in relationship to a bucket or a car or a landscape as much as I am to humans. They are all deserving of respect and acknowledgement and care from me. What I understand of my society feels flickers of this around the edges but is mostly silent on this web of connection, relationship, gift, and obligation.

Those relationships get neglected when I live too much in the human world. Whether or not I fulfill my physical obligations I forget the attitude of respect and acknowledgement, the internal emotional nod of greeting and recognition towards what I interact with. It's a loss and an impoverishment of my life to forget these connections. When I don't take the time to make my meanings then things are left meaningless.

The human world seems in many ways to engage in an assault on meaning. Consumerism is the encouragement of fungibility and momentary functionality. The minimalist fashion of the day tells us never to love any object for relationships we have to it: if it's not immediately useful we should discard it. When we look for relaxation or joy we're told to go to a new location, one with which we have no relationship, to always be seeking out the new rather than deepening our relationship to our current space. Novelty is privileged over meaning. Scarcity of relationship is privileged over abundance. Monogamy and the nuclear family is only this pattern writ into other humans: few and prescribed relationships that must be discarded if we want different or more, and characterized as less meaningful if abundance is grasped for.

I met someone who relates to landscape how I do: as entities. They live far away and let me language through concepts I've never tried to express. I think it's good for me. There's a meme that talks about how to rewild yourself: don't wear clothes and do move your body how it wants to be moved, it says. That's novice level. The next step is to move out of human exceptionalism and take a place in the community of everything around. We move so far away from that, we declare war on the idea of meaningful relating to anything except humans even to the extent that we're willing to extinguish species rather than navigate relationship with them.

Meanwhile I'm here in relationship tonight. It's a lot of intense sensation I've been away from for awhile. Time to turn off the laptop and experience it, possibly while watching for the northern lights.

Finally

Awhile ago the concept of "ask" and "guess" culture started to make the rounds: the idea that some groups of people tended to communicate in explicit verbal language about something ("can I come visit/do you want the last cupcake/will you rub my back?") and other groups of people tended to use suggestion or cueing to avoid an explit ask/yes or no situation ("I'm free this weekend/I'd hate to throw this away/my shoulders are sore after that workout"). There was a bit of a sense originally that explicit or "ask culture" was better in some way, but also that it's hard to communicate across that gap. Someone from "guess culture" might be communicating their no in a way that's missed by someone from "ask culture" and someone from "ask culture" might not understand when they're being requested to do something by someone in "guess culture", etc.

Well, the poly podcast I listen to has started referring to these as "high context" and "low context" communication cultures. The idea is that if folks have a homogenous cultural background they have context to correctly interpret unspoken exchanges, whereas if there's a heterogenous group they tend to do better if they fall back on explicit verbal statements because folks don't have the context to pick up on subtext.

I appreciate these terms a lot better than the somewhat fraught ask and "guess" cultures. It also places the communication schemes in - ha - context, rather than straight up implying that one is better or worse than the other.

Finally

Awhile ago the concept of "ask" and "guess" culture started to make the rounds: the idea that some groups of people tended to communicate in explicit verbal language about something ("can I come visit/do you want the last cupcake/will you rub my back?") and other groups of people tended to use suggestion or cueing to avoid an explit ask/yes or no situation ("I'm free this weekend/I'd hate to throw this away/my shoulders are sore after that workout"). There was a bit of a sense originally that explicit or "ask culture" was better in some way, but also that it's hard to communicate across that gap. Someone from "guess culture" might be communicating their no in a way that's missed by someone from "ask culture" and someone from "ask culture" might not understand when they're being requested to do something by someone in "guess culture", etc.

Well, the poly podcast I listen to has started referring to these as "high context" and "low context" communication cultures. The idea is that if folks have a homogenous cultural background they have context to correctly interpret unspoken exchanges, whereas if there's a heterogenous group they tend to do better if they fall back on explicit verbal statements because folks don't have the context to pick up on subtext.

I appreciate these terms a lot better than the somewhat fraught ask and "guess" cultures. It also places the communication schemes in - ha - context, rather than straight up implying that one is better or worse than the other.