Every thing is mine again

Tucker left town this spring. I've been up here on my own for several months now, long enough to begin setting patterns in my mind and behaviour.

My social footprint is spread out. I talk to people, some I know well, some I don't, some over the phone, some in person. I still watch shows with Tucker online, and we talk about those shows and analyze them and relate them to things sometimes, but I don't have much in the way of life conversations with him. He is certainly not in on everything that happens in my life. I talk to Josh a bunch on the phone, as I did before, though more erratically. It'll be good to see him up here. But basically now I don't have one person I talk to about most of the things that happen in my life, and a great number of the things I experience and think never get noted with another human at all.

There is no one who knows me except myself.

Recently my mind took a couple months off thinking. I did things, but I didn't perceive myself doing them or think beyond what was necessary to accomplish the tasks at hand. I was inside my experiences in a way that I consider to be my summer self.

Now I seem be to conceptualizing again. The experience of thoughts in my mind catches my attention and I linger on them for a little while. The patterns around me are perceived intellectually rather than through my behaviours. I consider this to be my winter self, and it's interesting to watch it line up with the seasons again. It's been a number of years, maybe even a decade, since these shifts aligned.

In many ways I'm losing my ability to be purely embodied in favour of being caught up in thinking. I also have a great deal of time and my focus seems to be coming back in little bits.

This is not co-thinking, as in a conversation, and it isn't externally-presented thinking. It's just there, as an inquiry or exploration of my surroundings and linkages. My mind might linger on the extremely weird accretion of policy, rules, and behaviours around our work bathroom post-covid, for example, or grope along the constellation of uses, history, and social impacts of synthetic fabric. It's like looking for the spiderwebs spun between all things, the way you might run into a single strand on a path and step back to see where the rest of the web is.

It's a very private feeling.

There's a luxury to having things foreground themselves, to forsaking the mental discipline required to shift the world into important focus objects and into background that is thought of mostly through logistics. Any conversation with humans needs this shift, since words are such a narrow conduit and connections are too wide to fit through except dismantled, piece by piece.

I do seem to be losing stamina in externally presenting things to other people, and other people aren't much in the business of drawing things out from me right now. Just writing this I feel done, my mind wanting to go back into some physical tasks to rest, perhaps like seeding some tomatoes and setting them to ferment or walking the south edge of the property and imagining where the daffodils will go.

And there isn't much reason not to let it, though perhaps I'll find something work-adjacent to guide it into.

A little at a time

Today I put a dozen asparagus plants and two dozen shallot bulbs into the garden, just above the southernmost slope, in amongst the roses and ribes and cherries and apple trees I planted in the last few months. In general I planted the shallots in close to the trees and cherries, to hopefully discourage voles, and the asparagus in a wider ring mostly on the western part of the garden.

In doing so I tested out my drill auger bulbs planter thing, which I do think is easier than using a trowel but would be way better if my soil wasn't so dust-dry it just flowed back into the hole. Oh well.

Nonhuman

One of the weirdest experiences I have at this point is watching people be deeply offended by being required to say no. Like, they are asked if they can/will do something, and instead of making a decision based on their priorities and own knowledge of their lives, they do the thing and then are deeply angry, contemptuous, or affronted by the fact that they were asked.

I'm not saying I haven't felt that way in the past -- I certainly have -- but part of adulthood for me has been coming into ownership of my life. I make decisions about it. And the more people ask me, freely and non-coercively, the more info I have on what folks would like and I can then say yes or no.

I get that a lot of folks have damage around saying no if it might inspire an emotion in other people, but that is damage, right?

I get that some people are in coercive situations where they can be physically or financially harmed by saying no, but that isn't the majority of these situations, though I do think some folks autopilot as if the majority of situations are coercive.

I get that different pockets of culture have different ways to negotiate the method of asking, whether it's oblique reference or straight out statement.

I get that different pockets of culture used to have ways of negotiating importance or impact to the people involved, and maybe these methods have decayed with cultural intermixing so folks aren't great at asking if something is kinda nice vs life-changing. I know with Josh he'd originally assumed that my asks were life-changing, so I try to calibrate with him when I do an ask ("this would be nice but if it's a big deal don't worry about it")

I still dislike it very much as a commonplace element of the culture I inhabit and I would like it to go away.