Well

What if I did go back to timber cruising? Or managing a group of timber cruisers for a contractor or licensee, doing internal QA etc?

I just saw an ad for $20k more than I currently make cruising in PG. Granted, I don't think I could ever do production, but I do think I can do QA.

It would mean divorcing myself from the making-decisions thinking-about-things part of forestry, but also the politics part, and re-immersing in fieldwork. That... is probably more appealing than I think it is on the surface of it.

(no subject)

 First two painted mountain corns tasselling. I brought them some gaspe and saskatoon white pollen. They're from the glorious organics seed but also on a south-er slope so no way of telling if that's seed-based or location-based.

Relationship buckets

With the "butterflies-in-my-stomach-we-should-get-married-I-guess-this-is-a-relationship" and "don't-touch-me-naked-bodies-will-wreck-this-physical-pleasure-is-right-out-we're-just-friends" buckets out of the running as options to sort all my human interactions into, I'm thinking about other buckets I can break down all my relationships into.

I think the closest one may be "relationships where we build something" vs "relationships where things happen to us". I guess, relationships with mutual intentionality and relationships without.

This is where I would always run aground with Tucker: I wanted to create and steer our future connection, to bend the lines of our lives so they'd remain together in the future, and to deliberately explore and harness compatibilities in the meantime. He did not.

Building something with someone is a delicate dance of demand and generosity, of being shaped and preserving integrity, of communicating and doing. It takes awareness and humility and also the ability to just not take things personally.

Not building something? It takes experiencing a moment and then releasing it, over and over, and trusting fate. It takes being present both during contact and, equally importantly, in all other things when that person isn't around. It takes accepting that any moment of contact might well be the last, and being ok with that.

These buckets don't care what kind of relationship or contact is involved. Sex, conversation, emotional intimacy, it can all be part or not. All that's important is, is there a shared and communicated concept of what comes next?

Devotions

 First silks of painted mountain corn

A good pair of field days

Rain

A chicken mother who does her job

The ability to make a massage appointment for tomorrow after this several weeks of hard bush work

Past self who made me lovely coppa

Warm sweet milky tea after a hard day

Gardens

A nice dream where I hung out with a coworker

A window of autonomy within my journal, where I can end this where I want to