Ugh

Perils of indie podcasts: I start listening to an autism podcast and the dude is low-key abusing his wife for the ten minutes I kept listening (as they talk he's tearing down her ideas, interrupting her, making fun of her for speaking, making fun of her for not speaking, all the while she's giving him enormous tolerance for doing the same sorts of things x 10)

Some resources to read, they may be the same article, for my own use later:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/well/live/autistic-burnout-advice.html
https://medium.com/autistic-discovery/autistic-people-are-the-experts-on-autistic-burnout-6992dca38615

Thorns

It's another prickly day. Hormones? Spaciousness? Dealing with contractors? Breakup stuff? Who knows. It's a day to be critical of things and to wrap myself in a little solitude as much as I can. It's like running my fingers along the texture of something to find flaws: today I'll find the any and all flaws, but I need to hold off on deciding what to do about them until I'm feeling constructive rather than destructive. Right now I just want to blow things up.

It makes me think about my longstanding dissatisfaction with mind-body duality. It's so pervasive that it's baked into the language at every bite. I'm sitting here, in what I suppose is my burnout, and there isn't a seperation: when I am feeling bad, I am feeling bad. When I have no energy, I have no energy to think or to move. When I can't be pecise and deliberate I both lose my thoughts and knock things over. My sense of how autistic folks work is that they're outliers on either end of the mind-body duality thing: sensory or emotional overwhelm doesn't "limit itself to the mind", whatever that means, but it travels into the functional vessel that expresses the mind and either controls it where neurotypical people would retain control, or it severs and results in dissociation and shutdown.

Even beyond that my mind, my physical self, and my environment are well-connected. Sunshine is happiness and energy, we know that. Gut microbiome influences mental inclinations, we know that. Lack of abundance is hunger is irritability and then tiredness. Uninvitingness is inactivity is high rates of depression. And so what we do to our minds, we also do to our bodies.

One step further, the individual-society dichotomy is getting extra play lately and it's also getting under my skin. People expect to make the world different by doing the same thing harder and that isn't, nor will it ever be, how it works. Humans are social animals and they do what the humans around them are doing: being cruel and belittling, overworking, or destroying in the name of lifting people to equality, finding peace, or building a different world seems remarkably shortsighted and I'm not here for it today.

I'm tired. It's been so windy here, there's no point in putting anythign anywhere: it will end up somewhere else. Cardboard boxes and feed bags are all against the fence or in the pigpen or thumping on the house. Boot-thieving mud is drying out quickly into workable soil. It's cold and biting out and maybe the ground is less dry than frozen, who's to know?

And with the idea of joining a small community coming up, I find myself wanting to be part of a community that isn't about hiding from the world, that isn't about whipping it until it obeys, but that has genuine vision and will turn some little corner of it into something better for people beyond ourselves, and outside our borders.

Borders? Bah.

Bones

Yesterday I ordered 15 chestnut seedlings from Zero Fox Tree Crops. They're descended from the Kelowna Gellatly chestnuts; basically someone planted a bunch of European and Chinese chestnuts there maybe 70 years ago and the trees have been thriving in close quarters ever since. Kelowna is harsh winters and very hot summers so it's different than the Cor, but it's a good start.

There's a second place I'll be getting trees from, called Nutcase on Denman Island, who have a mix of European, American, and I believe Japanese chestnuts. They've been doing some selection on them. Those trees may be able to wait on June though, or even getting seed from them this fall rather than seedlings.

If this sounds like a lot of trees, it is! Here's the thing: chestnuts are wind pollinated. They like to be close, and in groups. Given my experience with them in Agassiz, they like to be on slopes. Behind the house there's maybe 1/6 of an acre of steep slope with alder (a very short-lived) on it currently that really needs stabilizing, and that strip is a total of 3.5 or so acres of hill. I haven't been up there but it's older trees with what may be some gaps. Chestnuts may not produce so much in the shade but they can grow closely shading each other and a little bit shaded by other trees; rhododendrons and pawpaws (which also won't produce much in the shade) and loquats (which would love the shelter) can live at their feet. My plan, at least on the slope, is to make a relatively dense chestnut forest.

Pawpaws are super hardy here but are marginal in their ability to ripen fruit in our cool climate. I need super early ones for this, and I'm approaching this in two ways: I've acquired seed through a Canadian charity drive for the Ukraine, and I'm going to order grafted known cultivars like Pennsylvania Golden and KSU Chappell.

In all cases where I'm planting seed or seedlings I'm anticipating a long wait for a lesser individual return; that is, many of the trees will not do well in the climate, will not fruit appropriately, or will not taste good. 15 trees might be 3 or 5 good ones; likewise 40 pawpaw seeds may give me one or ten or twenty individuals who will grow here by the time they're seven years old and producing fruit. On my fiftieth birthday I can cut a bunch of them down and plant seed from the ones that did well, beginning another ten year cycle.

I'd really like to run some grapes and kiwis of various kinds up these trees -- one of my favourite plant memories is a nice regular fuzzy kiwi climbing fifty feet into a cedar tree at UBC Botanical Gardens in Vancouver -- and also keep some kiwis down where I can monitor and actually harvest them (hey, I wonder if squirrels will be distracted by kiwis and leave me some chestnuts?). I plan on nailing down some grapes soon, but maybe waiting on the kiwis unless I find something really unusual. Or maybe not? There's going to be such a big nursery full of pots for awhile as the property is prepped. Even the back hill I'm planning here may or may not get a retaining wall put up, and that needs to be done before the bottom part gets planted.

I do know that I need to grab muscat-type grapes while I can; it's pretty hard to import grapes into the province from the rest of the country, for disease prevention reasons, and nothing can get in from the US. So, if it's rare I snag it. If it's less rare I can pick it up locally and not have it go through the trauma of mail. Tonight it will be Jupiter and Osceola muscat/Es 8-2-43.

And maybe some kiwis.

And maybe also some plums.

(no subject)

Re-found this poem. I've been finding so many for other people lately, but this one is for me:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mark Strand

And here's everyone else's:

April Morning

You are living the life
you wanted as if you'd known
what that was but of course
you didn't so you'd groped
toward it feeling for what
you couldn't imagine, what
your hands couldn't tell you,
for what that shape could be.

This Sunday the rain turns cold
again and steady but the window
is slightly open and there is the vaguest
sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps
between the buildings because it's spring
the calendar says and the room where
you are reading is empty yet full
of what loves you and this is the day
that you were born.

Jonathan Wells