Crank

You've flipped it. It used to be that you huddled in community against the big bad dark forces of nature. Now you imagine we can huddle in the safe embrace of nurturing simple nature against your forsaken communities.

You are in for a shock.

Since you're human you're probably also in for a pendulum swing, probably to bemoaning the destructive forces of climate. When you come from the city you're used to having humans, usually just one or two, to blame. The landlord did this. The other driver did that. If only he hadn't been elected all would be well. You don't believe humans to be part of the natural order so you don't relate to humans as a natural system.

When you go to the country you bring your sense of blame. If only that storm hadn't taken down the power (or if only those damn humans had built an uninterruptible power grid). If only it hadn't got so hot that day. If only the well hadn't dried up.

When you go to the country we bring your sense of entitlement, the world should be there to serve you. It fails to do so. It rains twice on our picnic and dries up when your garden is thirsty. The trees are in the wrong place and the ants eat your structural beams. Unbidden also it serves you a gorgeous rainbow with your breakfast and a patch of ripe, improbably huge berries in the evening and sends the perfect cool breeze across your skin.

If you leave community because lack of control over humans scares you, because human behaviours feel like a runaway train over which you have no control, I have bad news for you about nature. Nothing there is designed for you; you merely can live within it if you learn to accommodate and band together with other people. If you observe very closely and learn very well you may be able to steer with a tremendous amount of work.

In the city it's easy to forget that food and water are prone both to great abundance and to great scarcity. It's easy to forget that trees both grow fruit and fall-- fall across your driveway and where are you without a chainsaw then? You're used to being able to plug in an air conditioner, flood another valley for electricity, and channel that power into surviving the summer heat with maybe only a second thought.

For all your wailing about climate these days none of that has changed.

Not even aspirational

I keep trying to write something about how people think nature is a metaphor for goodness and humans are a metaphor for evil, how returning to nature is supposed to be returning to happiness by escaping the evil of humans, how they view nature as ease and human systems as work.

I want to write something that alludes to other human cultures and how work must be put in to other humans to live with them in nature, as well as work being put into nature itself.

I want to allude to the hard physical work of the world.

I want to make a very strong statement about how viewing nature as a metaphor for happiness, for goodness, and for ease erases our connection to actual nature and also diminishes our ability to find the happiness, goodness, and ease we're looking for.

I want to mention that human society follows rules just like nature and is probably more amenable to your changing a small part of it to make it comfortable for you, and use that to flip the reader's perception of nature.

I want to shake people a little, to break through their preoccupation with metaphor and give them a taste of the world itself that they idealize so prettily in their mindgames. I want them to catch a glimpse of something alien and beautiful, the thing I see every day.

But I don't care enough today. I've had my morning in the sunshine. After work I'll go home and eat a salad. People can sort themselves out.

Devotions

Cool night air coming in through the window.

The ability to move downstairs to cool my core, and upstairs to warm and de-stiffen my muscles.

Calm that comes with three days in the bush in a row.

Corn! Big corn (cascade ruby gold, open oak party), medium corn (atomic orange, saskatoon white), diverse corn (painted mountain) and gaspe with its ears forming that feels safe, like it has my back no matter what the others do.

Tomatoes that have grown together into a giant mat, as expected, and should now happily cross-pollinate if only I can find tomatoes under all that.

A botanist friend who, when I posted a picture of a flower, replied only with the latin name. I feel less alone.

A world that provides for me even if I don't trust it Joni Mitchell singing "clouds" a couple days ago and bringing more meaning to that song than she ever could before.

Being able to (finally) talk to Tucker about (other) relationships. I like how he treats me now better than I did as a partner.

Sunscreen, sunglasses, headscarf.

Threshold sending dragonflies to replace the bats and swallows. They eat the bugs, which is needed, and also they remind me of the way time turns and turns and turns and always passes. Symbol of ephemeral.

My floors, oh my goodness it's been over a decade since I could wash my floors weekly and I just missed that absolute full-on not-even-a-breath-of-stickiness-ever so much.

Feel good viral memes

Having language and framework to describe the exhausting, reactionary protectiveness of PDA.

Instagram starting to send me videos on neat and easy things to do with long hair. I may even do one of them someday.

Recognising how much I place my notice and gratitude in things I have done for myself, and in nonhuman pieces of the world.
And now, my bed and being able to lie down.