Death Days: Solstice Countdown
Jun. 20th, 2019 11:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormWhen I was first in this town I got my coworkers celebrating solstice. Stay up all night, wine, meat on a stick over the fire, greet the dawn across the lake. When I was gone they carried on doing it without me.
Last year I didn't attend; I was in my new home I think.
This year my land reminds me that I'm death-aspected, and it's helping me count down the days. There had been so much life here, such a long steady relentless ramp up of increasing living matter from the last snow through the first buds on the aspens and birds nesting and nearly a hundred new birds arriving and the sorrel growing and the grass coming up and everything just exploding into being alive.
Life is built on death. I know this in my bones. The normative world wants to believe that death is only old things but of course it is not. An excess of life and then death at all stages is the engine that drives the world; it drives selection and fitness and speciation. This is the week that counts down to solstice. I expect death in the fall but it's found me here, at the height of the sun's energy, when I had somehow almost forgotten it wasn't all under my control.
First I lost an eggbound hen on Monday. I'd had one previous prolapsed duck I had to cull, this one had the egg break inside her and sepsis set in. Next day my first livestock losses to wildlife today. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and maybe eight very rare breed hatchery chicks to enhance the genetics of my flock were taken by what appears to be a family of ravens teaching its young to hunt. Ravens come in the windstorms and there was the mother of all windstorms that day. Even the super tiny ducklings were all fine; anything with a mother to protect them, or that moved in a close herd like the hatchery ducklings. The hatchery chicks were five weeks old at this point, they tended to scatter rather than flock, and they had neither a mother hen nor a watchful rooster to adopt them. The next day I lost a piglet, my first piglet loss. He'd been doing poorly and had an injury to his face, I think maybe from the ravens when he was sleeping? But he held in there for a couple weeks and then one day he just did not make it. That was Wednesday. Now it's Thursday. I found the neighbours' well-loved cat on the road, hit, in front of their house. The didn't answer the phone so I wrapped him in my coat and took him up the driveway. They had just got him a couple months ago to replace one of their old cats who had died.
Tomorrow is Friday. I will work from home, take breaks, and bury things. I will plant trees and fence the trees clear of the geese.
Then I will go to the fire at my boss' place and bring wine and bloody meat and be among humans.
On the weekend I'll mulch and give the pigs a new field of grass and go for a walk by the lake. I'll talk to Josh and hold and be held by Tucker. I'll give my grief to the ground and see what grows there.
With my land behind me I feel like a conduit for grief now, like the component that lends meaning to these deaths so they don't flow unremarked back into the soil. Grief doesn't make me question my fitness for my role, though it makes me want to improve my systems. It doesn't get tangled up and corrosive. It just... hurts, and it's supposed to, and that's ok.
I'm definitely apprehensive about tomorrow though.
Last year I didn't attend; I was in my new home I think.
This year my land reminds me that I'm death-aspected, and it's helping me count down the days. There had been so much life here, such a long steady relentless ramp up of increasing living matter from the last snow through the first buds on the aspens and birds nesting and nearly a hundred new birds arriving and the sorrel growing and the grass coming up and everything just exploding into being alive.
Life is built on death. I know this in my bones. The normative world wants to believe that death is only old things but of course it is not. An excess of life and then death at all stages is the engine that drives the world; it drives selection and fitness and speciation. This is the week that counts down to solstice. I expect death in the fall but it's found me here, at the height of the sun's energy, when I had somehow almost forgotten it wasn't all under my control.
First I lost an eggbound hen on Monday. I'd had one previous prolapsed duck I had to cull, this one had the egg break inside her and sepsis set in. Next day my first livestock losses to wildlife today. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and maybe eight very rare breed hatchery chicks to enhance the genetics of my flock were taken by what appears to be a family of ravens teaching its young to hunt. Ravens come in the windstorms and there was the mother of all windstorms that day. Even the super tiny ducklings were all fine; anything with a mother to protect them, or that moved in a close herd like the hatchery ducklings. The hatchery chicks were five weeks old at this point, they tended to scatter rather than flock, and they had neither a mother hen nor a watchful rooster to adopt them. The next day I lost a piglet, my first piglet loss. He'd been doing poorly and had an injury to his face, I think maybe from the ravens when he was sleeping? But he held in there for a couple weeks and then one day he just did not make it. That was Wednesday. Now it's Thursday. I found the neighbours' well-loved cat on the road, hit, in front of their house. The didn't answer the phone so I wrapped him in my coat and took him up the driveway. They had just got him a couple months ago to replace one of their old cats who had died.
Tomorrow is Friday. I will work from home, take breaks, and bury things. I will plant trees and fence the trees clear of the geese.
Then I will go to the fire at my boss' place and bring wine and bloody meat and be among humans.
On the weekend I'll mulch and give the pigs a new field of grass and go for a walk by the lake. I'll talk to Josh and hold and be held by Tucker. I'll give my grief to the ground and see what grows there.
With my land behind me I feel like a conduit for grief now, like the component that lends meaning to these deaths so they don't flow unremarked back into the soil. Grief doesn't make me question my fitness for my role, though it makes me want to improve my systems. It doesn't get tangled up and corrosive. It just... hurts, and it's supposed to, and that's ok.
I'm definitely apprehensive about tomorrow though.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-20 06:47 pm (UTC)here's hoping tomorrow is just a day of energetically containing all that the week has brought, and the solstice itself can be a celebration of the long light of the sun and the rise of the night.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-27 05:22 pm (UTC)