greenstorm | Exploration

It's been a couple of days of alone, now. I'm starting to settle in.

The internet is counterproductive.

It's still dusty here. I mean, I imagine that's a permanent state when it's not wintertime, but I notice it. My feet and the bottoms of my pants get paled by it, and it sifts into my shoues so I need to empty them all the time, if I care. If I sweat too much, the dust turns to mud in my shoes.

No one is working today. I am, a little, but it's mostly a housecleaning and cooking day, and a reading day, and a finding myself day. It's funny how easy it is to lose yourself, considering that you haul yourself around with you wherever you go, but it IS easy. I think because I care about what I'm doing I get caught up in that, in thinking and doing and caring about the garden, and not so much about myself. Sounds strange, I suppose, but there it is.

I wanted to do something creative today, it sort of rose up in me, and so I went out with a basket and made a soup with beans and greens. I hadn't considered cooking to be a creative expression before, but there it is, suddenly one of my favourite things to do now that I'm constrained by season and locale instead of liberated by the supermarket. I can't create on a blank slate, I can only piece together and alter and add. Here I do that.

The edible chrysanthemums are up in the untended garden, and they're so addictive. Every time I go by I get stuck eating them, nibbling and nibbling. When the flowers open, I'll make tea, and maybe harvest tea for the restaurant. I need to put tomatoes in that space, and squash, and I'm not sure how to do it without distrubing the wealth of self-seeders there. It also needs some mulch, and I don't know how I'll move that up, or what I'll use.

The city reaches out to me when I allow it the slightest chance, and it tangles me up again. I feel a web of shoulds, of obligations, of half-formed regrets and worries. I'm not a fan. That may be one reason I take excuses (the greyhound strike, Drew's visit) to stay here. I feel the lack of people here pretty acutely-- I may need to really take up biking to go into town just to be around people, to have an ambient crowd of different faces once a week or so. This is why I ask you all to come up instead of coming down as often as I was expecting, sort of a best of both worlds deal.

Meanwhile I'm working on the social imprinting in my brain that I want to get rid of, and trying particularly to appreciate the things that are beautiful and good and true around me rather than wandering around thinking of other things all the time, or finding flaws with the way things don't meet my expectations.

In this same way I appreciate you guys, my friends and lovers, who are such sweetness in my life when I hear from you. Filling the present with ghosts of absent people and mourning over it seems like an unfulfilling way to be, and so I try not to do that, but it is always so wonderful to hear from people nonetheless.

I feel like my hair is a symbol of something, and I struggle with wanting to cut it off, and with simply wanting to keep it cause it's pretty.

I realise that one can never be in posession of too much strength of character or strength of will; the problem comes not with a lot of strength, but with a lack of discretion about where to use it.

Life for me seems to consist of a series of lessons about how to love in different ways.