But the corn is up

Yesterday was pretty rough until I saw the corn come up.

There were a ton of meetings back to back at work. The last one was a check-in with my supervisor, who now officially has a pattern of saying "if you need help with your workload or anything just ask" and then rejecting my requests for help and explaining that if I want he'll take on the fun parts of my job but he can't help with the particular thing I asked for. Figures, I guess. This workplace really is a case study in pretty much every bad or useless management technique out there. Then at the end of every meeting he asks for feedback and I'm just worn down.

Anyhow, then I had counseling with the work counselor. She doesn't know what to do with me, really, though she's pretty good with LGBTQ+ stuff. It's the first time I've actually had a counseling appointment line up with being in a pretty bad place emotionally (basically getting reduced hours at work is taking a couple hours a day to sort out and means I won't have much for vacation time etc this year and is highlighting the rigidity of the workplace, all of which is Not Great, and I do feel stuck here). She kept, I don't know, poking into the things that hurt but without the compassion I'd expect from a counselor and without answering my questions just ended at "talk to your doctor about this" and "I'm worried about the hopelessness in these stories" and "you've been through bad things before, use those tools".

I get what she was trying to do but it was the wrong way to go about it. Makes sense, I've only had three sessions with her and only one per month so she hasn't had much chance to form a rapport. In any case, I can translate some of what she said into a reminder to check my narratives. And here's one of my narratives: I'm grieving a lot right now. I'm grieving the idea of a workplace where I feel comfortably at home, I'm grieving the loss of Tucker, I'm grieving the brief moment of hope for a physical connection and an understanding support network in town here. I'm also, more overarchingly, grieving that I live in a world where I need to do so much work and use so much finesse to be allowed to live here: where I'm balancing what I can say about myself around gender, relationships, my brain generally, how I live, and the things I love because I can't just be open about all that stuff at once without social ostracism. You know, that's the thing about learning that I'm wired different: there's not just one trick everyone else has learned to make them ok with fitting in and I can just learn it and be fine.

So I have all that grief. Now that the corn is up I can put it into the corn, I cannot tell you how much that helps, but my narrative is that I'm grieving right now. My narrative is that it's actually ok for me to not perfectly compartmentalize that; it's ok for it to spill over and for me to feel unhopeful about the future sometimes now. It's ok for me to feel scared in a system and a society that would rather grind me up in self-justification than really look at me. It's ok for me to take a break from optimism; there will be time enough for me to look at the smashed pieces of whatever I was hopeful about and painstakingly reassemble them into some new and creative form. And you know, I will be feeling creative again sometime, and I'll be able to work to reassemble an idea of the life I want and then pursue it.

That "sometime" does not have to be now. The corn is growing. For a couple months it'll grow with or without me. I'm allowed to rest and lick my wounds and not perform. It's ok for me to just watch. During the summer folks will swing by and care about me and hold me some. In the fall my garden will serve me up a bounty of information and maybe also food. The land will love me in a way people cannot.

("why do you think you'll lose the house if you stop working, why do you keep thinking you'll lose things?" the counselor asks, as if she doesn't understand that we pay money for houses. "Because everything has left, in my life, the only thing I get to keep is my body and my self" was my answer).

I didn't know how to tell her I just need to stop fighting for a little while, fighting for this or that, and just rest and be in grief and be loved by what I trust to stick around, in this case Threshold and old friends. Her prompt got this post going, so that's something, but ugh. I'm so tired of having humans not understand.

Fine then

Speaking of not making things to look forward to, I am looking forward to this course and am very curious about it. Some of my pagan friends have found it's helped them, and I'm curious about the other participants:

Land: Loss and Reconnection

“The Witch has been created by the land to act for it.”
--Peter Grey, Rewilding Witchcraft

Land is how we live. We live on the land, we live because of land, and when we die we go back into the land.

Yet land, in our modern capitalist dystopia, is often the farthest thing from our mind. Few of us even have access to land—everywhere it is fenced off, paved over, gated, polluted, and destroyed.

How did it come to this? How did the notion of private property come about? Why were so many people displaced from the land through enclosures, the transatlantic slave trade, and brutal colonization?

And what has this done to us?

In this six week online course, writer, artist, and Gods&Radicals co-founder Alley Valkyrie will lead you through the history and meaning of land, illuminate the processes and politics that caused our separation from land, and guide you to spiritual reconnection and political reclamation of the land beneath our feet.

Alley Valkyrie’s course will cover the following topics:

Week One: The Importance of Land

Week Two: Lost Land—Enclosures & Property

Week Three: Lost Land—Displacement and Colonialism

Week Four: Land—Its spirits and Peoples

Week Five: Spiritual Reconnection to Land

Week Six: Political Reclamation of Land

Two poems about miracles

No Small Thing

The smell of baking bread, smooth floured hands,
butter waiting to be spread with blackberry jam
and I realize, this is no small thing.
These days spent confined,
I am drawn to life's ordinary details,
the largeness of all we can do
alongside what we cannot.
The list of allowances far outweighs my complaints.
I am fortunate to have flour and yeast, a source of heat
not to mention soft butter, the tartness of blackberries
harvested on a cold back road.
A kitchen, a home, two working
hands to stir and knead,
a clear enough head to gather it all.
Even the big toothy knife feels miraculous
as it grabs hold and cracks the crust.

Ellen Rowland


Acts of helplessness

Here are the miracle-signs you want: that
you cry through the night and get up at dawn, asking,
that in the absence of what you ask for your day gets dark,
your neck thin as a spindle, that what you give away
is all you won, that you sacrifice belongings,
sleep, health, your head, that you often
sit down in a fire like aloes wood, and often go out
to meet a blade like a battered helmet.

When acts of helplessness become habitual,
those are the signs.

But you run back and forth listening for unusual events,
peering into faces of travelers.
“Why are you looking at me like a madman?”
I have lost a friend. Please forgive me.

Searching like that does not fail.
There will come a rider who holds you close.
You faint and gibber. The uninitiated say, “He’s faking.”
How could they know?
Water washes over a beached fish, the water
of those signs I just mentioned.

Excuse my wandering.
How can one be orderly with this?
It’s like counting leaves in the garden,
along with the song-notes of partridges,
and crows.

Sometimes organization
and computation become absurd.

Rumi, unknown translation

Stopping to breathe

It's raining gently. It's supposed to continue. It's been so dry lately; I'd worried for my corn, pre-soaked and placed into earth that was dust up to two inches down.

The corn grew anyway. It was ready, swollen with life and roots, and it sent its reach downwards where moisture lingered under it. I'd trodden it in well to reconnect the soil with its capillary motion and it came right up through my footprints. Now the sky provides: this morning is a long gentle song of raindrops pinging on my chimney and new solid roof and sighing silently into the receptive soil. If I were on the lake it would sound like silver.

Rain allows me to rest. The sun is like an engine revving and it wants me to go somewhere, do something, feel every thing at once. In the rain I can go out and gently put my hand into the soil and slide a tomato plant in and it feels like no motion at all, like the world just slightly turned and that was the outcome. I can sit and listen and my mind listens too: ebb and flow.

I went out into the rain just now. It always sounds wetter than it is: drops on the roof inside, tiny kisses of mist on the skin outside. That's one reason I like working outdoors: it reminds me it's not as unmanageable as it seems from inside. I planted a little corn and visited with the ones that are up. I should post more about them really. The favas too are really spreading their wings. There is so much light for them here and they don't mind the cool; really they are an excellent plant for this climate.

After work today I'll go out again in the rain and hopefully the mud by then -- now it's an inch of mud then an inch of dust below and then moist soil below that -- and plant the rest of the tomatoes, and perhaps the squash. It's late to put these things in; well see how they go.

Variation

Corns are all in the ground. It's time to set the second Gaspe corn soaking. It actually took something like 8 days to get it all put in; I stepped on a rusty nail at the beginning of the day off work I'd allocated and that stretched things out considerably.

That said, I put all the flint corn and also the dent corns in to soak at the same time, then the flour corns in later. Flint corn takes longer to get through its hard endosperm than flour corn does; dent is in the middle. So in theory all the flint corn had the same amount of moisture and the same amount of heat. I didn't do a great job planting everything exactly the same depth since I was making furrows with my rake but that's a variation I can see in each type's planting and make allowances for.

Things of note:

No matter how long they were soaked for, the corn that was planted first came up first. The corn that was planted later came up later. I wasn't sure about this; it was pretty dry after I planted and I thought the corn that had absorbed most water (and was thus planted last) might come up first but that was not the case.

Heat makes a difference. We know this, but the corn that had clear plastic over it grew much faster than the corn with row cover or with nothing.

Soil makes a difference. The flint corn field was sandy; the dent corn field is richer and more silty-clay. The flint corn came up first; the dent corn was planted a touch later but it really isn't showing yet. Granted, it's also slightly south-facing and shaded for a touch of the day, which maybe cancels itself out? We will see.

Genetics makes a difference. Some corns popped a root out very quickly while soaking. Some really did not. Painted mountain, which is a very diverse set of genetics, was sourced from four different farms. I'd expect it to be different from each farm, since with so much diversity it's hard not to select and only keep a part of the gene pool. I did not expect something like 4 days' difference between the emergence in the Salt Spring seeds and the Annapolis Seeds (well, there was no root emergence when I planted it and the Salt Spring had 1-2cm roots). Granted, this can be influenced by age of seed, level of seed dryness, etc but it was very noticeable.

Young corn is beautiful. That green coming up through the soil? That's what love is for.

I got good germination. That's good.

The birds have (so far, knock on wood) left these seeds alone. Whether that's because they have access to other tastier foods now (like my ducklings, but I digress) or because it looks more like grass or what, I am unsure. I asked in the landrace gardening group about how folks' plants adapted to bird predation and it seems like planting deep, tamping the soil hard (so the birds can't pull up the corn by pulling on the seedling and are thus not rewarded with food), and then selecting for survivors that can put down roots to anchor against the birds and also regrow the tops after birds pick the tops off is about the best you can do. I need this in my favas; so far (knock on wood) my corn looks ok. Maybe that's a benefit of planting late, too?

I'm still waiting on flour corn emergence; I'm hoping the little rain today helps. I also need to dig out my stash of gaspe seed for the breeding projects.

I ran out of room faster than expected, in part because of some soil/rockiness issues and a bit more slope than I thought I had. It'll be interesting to see what gives me seed, to know how much I'm working with in that space next year.