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greenstormTwo years, seven months and a scattering of days ago my house became mine. My journaling was so sparse then I didn't record the day. Work had ground down the part of me that writes, and the part of me that observes myself and self-regulates.
Now, well. My home. Threshold. I wrote on someone's post that my farm is the partner I live with. Then I looked out the window and smiled and felt how I imagine someone who's been married for years and made an exceptionally good partner choice must feel: happy, pleased, lucky, and with the deep warmth that lingers when beginning-excitement fades. The statement was almost true. Threshold is the partner I live with.
So many humans identify themselves as half of a partnership, incomplete without a loving relationship. Others say they're whole on their own, as an individual. Yet others consider themselves part of a human network, one piece in a complete social context.
My land is my other half. In it I am complete. Its body and my body are interwoven, shared over the years. My thoughts are never far from it; my mind shapes it and it shapes my thoughts and my understanding of the world. It gives me such varied and beautiful challenges and I live up to potential I never thought I'd have. I give it my sweat, my time, my love, my thought, my occasional spilled blood, and the work I am able to do with my body as it slowly ages.
This is why I speak of being nonhuman sometimes. I am so deeply partnered in a way that no human speaks of, and my other half isn't even a describable object but is instead a set of processes that will exist long after my ashes are scattered on it. There are mythological worlds in which dryads are half-tree half-person and those don't feel mythological to me: they are the only narrative I know that acknowledges my reality.
My farm is on my land, it is part of Threshold but it isn't the land itself. It's a system I use to interact with the land. It's a game we play with each other and a way we support each other: Threshold feeds me with plants and animals and something to plan, I feed it with organic matter and biodiversity and a little bit of fossil fuel-driven machinery. The farm could move with me should I leave this marriage and seek another parcel of land: it would change to reflect the nuances of that new space. The land can never move with me, nor would I want it to.
Threshold will remain here, as itself, until the sun swallows the earth. I can't tell you how reassuring it is that my beloved is nigh-immortal.
And I can't tell you how happy I am to be part of it.
Now, well. My home. Threshold. I wrote on someone's post that my farm is the partner I live with. Then I looked out the window and smiled and felt how I imagine someone who's been married for years and made an exceptionally good partner choice must feel: happy, pleased, lucky, and with the deep warmth that lingers when beginning-excitement fades. The statement was almost true. Threshold is the partner I live with.
So many humans identify themselves as half of a partnership, incomplete without a loving relationship. Others say they're whole on their own, as an individual. Yet others consider themselves part of a human network, one piece in a complete social context.
My land is my other half. In it I am complete. Its body and my body are interwoven, shared over the years. My thoughts are never far from it; my mind shapes it and it shapes my thoughts and my understanding of the world. It gives me such varied and beautiful challenges and I live up to potential I never thought I'd have. I give it my sweat, my time, my love, my thought, my occasional spilled blood, and the work I am able to do with my body as it slowly ages.
This is why I speak of being nonhuman sometimes. I am so deeply partnered in a way that no human speaks of, and my other half isn't even a describable object but is instead a set of processes that will exist long after my ashes are scattered on it. There are mythological worlds in which dryads are half-tree half-person and those don't feel mythological to me: they are the only narrative I know that acknowledges my reality.
My farm is on my land, it is part of Threshold but it isn't the land itself. It's a system I use to interact with the land. It's a game we play with each other and a way we support each other: Threshold feeds me with plants and animals and something to plan, I feed it with organic matter and biodiversity and a little bit of fossil fuel-driven machinery. The farm could move with me should I leave this marriage and seek another parcel of land: it would change to reflect the nuances of that new space. The land can never move with me, nor would I want it to.
Threshold will remain here, as itself, until the sun swallows the earth. I can't tell you how reassuring it is that my beloved is nigh-immortal.
And I can't tell you how happy I am to be part of it.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-04 10:26 pm (UTC)have you read the poetry of Wendell Berry? I think his work might resonate with you. that deep sense of interconnectivity.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-05 12:30 am (UTC)And of course, as with Aldo Leopold... wouldn't it be nice to have someone who wrote about these things who wasn't Christian and monogamous and male and white?
That said, thank you for the reminder, I'll be spiralling back to him a couple times I'm sure.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-05 03:55 am (UTC)Annie Dillard, maybe? i can pull up some more white women, probably, if that helps, engaged in the business of writing about human ecology, or whatever you want to call it. our social contract with nature and relationship to it. Marge Piercy (a Jewish woman) has a lot of brilliant richly enthusiastic nature poems but also a lot of loud kinda second-wave gender-political stuff that's tiresome. oh! Linda Hogan! i bet you'd love her work. Navajo essayist & poet.
anyway, this is all beside the point. in the poem about the horses, he's talking in such expressive physical terms about his relationship with these animals and their relationship with the land and that's what you reminded me of.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-05 11:28 pm (UTC)I like... anyone who acknowledges the complexity of the work, and the uniqueness of place.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-11 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-18 04:08 pm (UTC)