Greenstorm's Journal

Lynx got one more goose. Got the lynx.

Beneath that coat it was the skinniest animal I'd touched. It was starving, probably why it was coming by all hours of the day and night.

I am sad for my goose, she was a brave pilgrim girl.

I am sad the lynx had to be killed.

And I'm sad the poor kitten spent is last weeks starving and desperate.

Some times are hard.

I suddenly feel so, so lonely.

This term, PDA, it's like learning the call number in a library where the description. I can find people describing things that look like me. Before I had to sort through a pile of books taken randomly off the shelves and work pretty hard to adapt a small percentage of them to my situation. Now? I sit through a ten minute video and have three whole-body revelatory experiences.

And so in some ways I feel more seen than I ever have. I just go to this call number and I can find things that see me.

But those are not my people. They're not folks I can touch, can go back and forth with, they're not folks who see me, know me, and hold me anyways. They're... kindred but not family.

And I have this feeling that the people who care about me will never know me this well, will never know me as well as someone who's never met me and doesn't particularly care about me at all. You know, I've been writing this journal for years and years and years and I've come to know myself pretty well. That knowing was a labour of years and years and I never expected anyone else to do it, not really. Maybe I had hoped.

And maybe now I feel like there's no point to hoping for that anymore.

Maybe I'm always loneliest when I'm closest to myself.

There are two things I haven't been writing about. One is the lynx. Instead of trying to do a good job I'll just put it down here.

The easier one is: a lynx has been in the neighbourhood. It's been on top of the covered chicken coop but hadn't got in. The chicken coop pre-exists any of my property planning and it is up against the perimeter fence which means dogs can't keep the outside of it safe: they can't keep the lynx off of it. That means the lynx can hang around, be intrigued, and try again and again to get in.

The lynx gave up on the chicken coop, I guess, and saw the free-ranging geese and ducks out in the yard. Normally the dogs would chase it off, but the lure of the chicken coop meant it spent a lot of time observing and was able to come in when the dogs took a break.

I caught it in the Muscovy lean-to on a dead black duck. I honestly didn't know it was in there, the birds were acting weird, so I stuck my head in and there it was. I hissed at it, it took off, I called Thea over and she chased it off.

That night it was on top of the Muscovy shed where the dogs couldn't reach it. I treed it, bear sprayed it, and threw snowballs (all the rocks are covered in snow and I did not have pellets for the pellet gun). I've been doing patrols with Thea a couple times during the night; once she chased it off and I think they tagged each other: they went back and forth a couple times along the inside of the fence and she whimpered once but I couldn't find any blood. It finally got over the fence. Another time we got it before it came over the fence. I've been keeping the housecats in, which is making them unbearably bored. I'm hoping that with enough unpleasant encounters it stops coming back and recalculates the risk-reward, but: it's had a meal here, it knows there's food.

Three geese also were killed. They seemed fine after the one successful attack, if a little dazed, and wandered around with the rest of the geese. Then, one by one during the day, greenish fluid came out of their beaks and they died in my arms. I looked up lynx attacks and they seem to grab the back of the prey's head with their jaws, maybe this was a spinal issue? Either way, these are the first geese I've knowingly lost to a predator and I'm very sad about it. Geese are beautiful.

Haven't seen it back in 36 hours now despite patrols. I think the dogs know it's important and how to look for it now, since I've been patrolling with them in a specific route. I've also locked them outside at night and brought them a bunch of food etc so they don't get indoor breaks. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile I've been leaving the outdoor lights on to help the dogs. I hate outdoor lights overnight, but more importantly, the longer "days" have really catapulted the geese into breeding season. At the beginning of the lynx thing I could tell if something was off outside because the geese called an alarm. Now they're wrestling over the water bowls and yelling in fight circles around the combatants. Not helpful, geese.

And I'm not quite ready to separate them into breeding pens (which the dogs can't access) until I know the lynx is gone.

Today my counselor taught me a technique to hold myself within what she called my window of tolerance-- that is the place where the nervous system is in neither fight, flight, nor collapse. There are a ton of techniques out there to keep us in this place, the place where we can think and play and have compassion and love and engage. I haven't been living in that place.

There are a ton of techniques out there to keep us in this place. Deep belly breathing or even just concentrating on breathing is supposed to do it. Keeping the mind out of rumination is supposed to do it. Etc. None of the techniques I've ever been given has worked for me. I don't even co-regulate well; that is sometime in the last two decades I lost the ability to be calmed and soothed by someone holding me, most of the time.

Today's technique works. And I've discovered that when I'm outside that window of tolerance I can act or react pretty normally but. I can't access my grief in that space.

And so here I am, and I can come back to my body for little bits, and be propelled into this huge grief. Like everything human it's multipart and interwoven with the world. I came up here to escape the world, to be in life partnership with a place. Now I'm considering ending that life partnership, replacing that partner: that is surely a grief so huge I can't begin to think of it yet.

But also: I've never felt entirely part of the world of people and that's why I came away. And one piece of that feeling separate has definitely been the way my world has done gender. There's this concept that a trans person is born in the wrong body, that they feel their body doesn't match their gender, and they can fix it by making their body into the other gender. That's a binary model, a world where there are two genders and both body and social perception are aligned into an expression of one of two genders.

I'm not binary-gendered. I'm pretty good with my body, it doesn't trigger me to feel my gender is wrong. I am not good with the social perception of me, and I cannot fix folks having the wrong social perception of me by changing my body or my presentation. I can't fix folks because they only have these two binary ideas in their heads, man or woman, and I don't fit that. Androgyny doesn't make anything better for me: folks still, when perceiving me, are settling me into a girl or boy category, or are moving back and forth between those categories.

This isn't a privilege thing or a sex thing. I reject a male binary role as much as a female, which is to say: some pieces of me are in alignment with both roles but anyone like me has to have practice taking what bits we have in common from other folks' representation because we can't experience archetypes or stories without that. And I could care less the gender of folks I want to fuck except to be careful where different things are threatening for folks with different experiences.

This isn't a pronoun thing. You know when people talk about cars, or the planet, or a boat, and they call it "he" or "she"? I would be so happy to accept pronouns on those grounds where it's accepted that its a convenience for the viewer, that it's compensation for the limitations of the viewer in experiencing a thing a little outside their realm, that it's anthropomorphized.

So yeah, if everyone called me "it" I'd be more comfortable, but. What I want is so far outside my society's comfort zone. What I want is a social category that my society doesn't have. I can't transition into a space that doesn't exist.

There's grief there and a very particular type of loneliness that I remember from being thirteen and looking out my window at the moon and knowing that no human would see me and understand who I was. Now, there's more to it than gender but gender is definitely part of the package.

So is Threshold, this home of mine, this piece of ground and how I feel about it. That connection-- you know, I really like people, and I love them, but this feeling towards the land is much bigger and more all-encompassing of my soul.

It helps to write the grief out, and so I have done. I wish myself a more peaceful evening, and peace also to you.

For the last couple weeks I've felt crying well up around the edges of things. It never comes when it really should: when there's time and space for me to be sad, when there's something for it to attach to. It would come with a throwaway line in a movie but not at the intense lines. It would come when I'm busy doing something else.

I remember this. My grief has hidden from me this way before. It would wait on the bus, until I was in public and on display, and show itself when I couldn't give it proper space and respect. It would wait in the grocery store.

And then, when I'm alone and home safe, there would be nothing. Hours before bed, I'd had dinner, and when I looked for it, it was nowhere to be found. It's a game of hide and seek until whatever is in me that needs to process this is ready.

I can almost never grieve when I can't write. I can feel my sadness without words, I can hold it and endure it, but I can't make meaning out of it and then move past it. Humans are meaning-makers. In this, it seems, I'm human.

This morning the mud was frozen again, thank goodness, and the pigs could walk on top of it. I fed them pumpkins chopped up with an axe and I fed them grain. I gave the geese and chickens grain and water, and I broke the film of ice on the pig water. While I did this all I thought about trust and the imperfect nature of the world -- which maybe I don't believe in? -- and what we owe each other as humans. I turned up the wood stove a little. I second-guessed myself a lot.

I wrote.

I was made by the world to only allow myself to have emotions when my position was unassailable. If I was hurt I needed a reason that could be argued and won against all comers. If I was happy I hid it so it couldn't be taken from me by someone with a good reason. Spoiler alert, it's never possible to justify feelings in that way. To borrow someone's metaphor it's like trying to justify the weather. Feelings exist. Needs exist, even. We can choose to ignore them or acknowledge them, they exist all the same. We can work a long time at their roots and help them grow in one direction or another but when we cut them down and pour concrete over them they will eventually come up through.

The world still asks me to justify my emotions, every time.

What a tangle of metaphors that is.

They say the way to handle feelings is to hold them, to sit with them, to give them room to live out their whole cycle of germination, growth, flowering. Give them space; when they give you space back is enough time to make decisions. It's such a skill. Skills are gained by grinding low-level encounters for experience and then applying that experience to survive larger encounters.

My grief came out this morning. After I wrote I cried, I was present in my emotions, and when I was done I felt the urge to stand up, tidy the plant stand, and put the seeds of my microgreens in the ground. I felt like maybe things could grow again. Maybe I'm always poison, maybe I'm not, but I've grown things before.

This has no point. I'm sitting here with the cat touching my leg with one outstretched paw. My fingers are achy with cold. The laptop is balanced on one thigh. I wanted to record, in my mental health log, that today I cried and I felt a little freer afterwards. It is done. Time for my own breakfast and maybe to follow up that freedom by planting some seeds.

Today was a slaughter day. It was harder for me than they've been before, and I suspect the sadness of it will linger: these are the first sows I've slaughtered, that is, the first ones who had babies for me. One of them, Sparky, was one of my original sows. They were both good girls.

The kill was clean, and the bleed out was very good: when I stuck I actually hit Sparky's heart. The shooter/helper today was a friend's husband who'd done a bunch of these in Newfoundland (?) where he's from; in addition to his excellent shot placement he also was very useful at dragging heavy stuff. We went from his arrival to gutted and halved by noon, then he headed home and we spent some time recovering. I am bringing a bunch of bacon to him (from a previous kill) tomorrow.

Then will be a very lot of butchering. Sparky's the heaviest pig I've done, so there's a lot of physical strength needed, but her size is welcome. It means I'll be able to do some good big chunks of cured meat. I didn't cure much if anything from the last couple slaughters, except maybe bacon, so I'm in need of new prosciutto stocks.

I feel better having it done

Yesterday both Josh and Tucker made it a point to call me in the evening and chat, which was nice.

And now I'm tired and wishing I was able to put myself into a good paper book for an hour before sleep. I used to read so much and now I can barely keep my attention on a page at all. It's such a loss, especially on nights like this.

Threshold is a good space to go into the unknown.

I have a heart-friend in Nanaimo, on 5 acres, who's enlarging her garden space substantially. I've put in more seeds to start than I'd originally planned but our season is very far behind. There's still a lot of snow on the ground, and as late as April 3 we had -20. I have lots of time to enlarge my garden if I so choose. I think I will, at least somewhat. I'm already trying to figure out where that will be, and where the birds and pigs will end up.

I'd be a lot happier if I could sink fenceposts right now instead of being on snowshoes in the back yard.

I've also -- like everyone -- been looking into grow bags as a cheap easy way to expand my space without having to build new beds. It does look like building new beds will be cheaper. It seems like everyone is gardening this year, just as everyone is cooking. I'm glad I got my seed orders in early.

It feels peaceful here, though. I have an income - that really helps. And the current employer is trying to keep all staff onboard to try and buffer the effect of all this on the economy, although if we have a provincial election that could change. I have supply lines. I've not really had a chance to settle into routine, but that will come.

And so I don't feel panic. There's going to be a lot of grief, more than enough to go around. I'll be mourning people. I'm also mourning the concept of the USA that I grew up with as an American; we always had this idea that under extreme mishandling and oppression the people would rise up and good for everyone would triumph through democracy and unbreakable spirit. That's what all the guns were for, and all the self-congratulation around the political system.

I guess they didn't.

So I'll enlarge my garden a little and see where it goes.

So I'm death aspected. What this means isn't that I want everything to immediately die, or that I hate living things, or that I wander around wearing black and making nihilistic statements.

What this means is that I know every molecule in my body has been through more organisms than I can ever imagine, all of which have died.

What this means is that death is a balance, the weight on the other side of the scales without which they fall apart. It's the feeling of one hand held in another with life.

Death is the place from which all nourishment comes, and it's the limiter of all pain and disaster. It's the boundary that protects life inside it, even though setting boundaries can feel hard and come with loss and grief.

What this means is that I'm aware of death in a way that most of our society, viewing it as an outrage to be erased and forgotten, doesn't want to be. What this means is I'm aware death needs to be honoured with ritual and with thought and integration into our philosophies.

What this means is that I believe in grief. Death exists, loss exists. They are real, not some temporarily inconvenient aspect of the world that science or God and the right behaviour can erase. And because they are such real forces in our lives we will always be exposed to grief. It's a fertile place full of strong and sometimes unpredictable energy.

I have so many mourning rituals, and so many grief rituals. The normal pagan ones tend not to stand for me. Instead I write, I pour the energy into the land, I cry, I cherish what is lost, I sing loudly and cry in cars and in public.

People die every day. They die in cars, they choose death, their bodies decide to take them back to the earth. We adjust to that.

This particular end times seems like we may get a big dying, a big loss of the society we knew, and a big grief.

This grief is-- more than 50% of the pine trees died in the last mountain pine beetle epidemic. White-nose disease took bat populations down unimaginably. Few American chestnuts are left. Once there were so few Canada geese we thought they'd go extinct.

The fact that thriving populations get lowered by natural factors doesn't reduce the grief of it. Even if it's inevitable, even if it needs to happen, the grief is real. Our planet has had a lot of these kinds of grief lately.

And now here we are. Humans, looking something not so extreme in the face. And it's still a big grief.

I'm death aspected. The coming grief feels like weight, like gravity, but not like an outrage. It feels like it will need a container, made by humans, to live with the grief and give it meaning and solace.

I do hope we are up to the task.

You've held me for years now. I came to you in the dark, going into winter, and it's coming out of winter into the chinese new year, the one set during the first real feel of spring, that I'll leave you.

There were days in there where I thought we'd never leave but just go on wearing our comfortable habits each into each until we fit perfectly. I've never been the only person who gets to make that choice, though.

People come and go and come again and go, again. My moods, my goals, my desires: they shift and double down on themselves and fade like cream just poured into coffee, swirling and spinning and blending finally one into the other. You are distinct from those. You've been there when I've wanted you, protective and never startling, a shell to keep the storms and the bright sun off in equal measure when shelter was needed. You've been there when I would have rejected you. When I doubted my own sufficiency you challenged me and, when I met that challenge, gave me something at least I could do well enough in my life for someone or something.

I am never too much for you, nor too little. I never worry that I'll do or say something wrong in regards to you, because you are supremely mine in a way no person can be. We dress up together sometimes, or dress down and have a party, maybe with friends and waffles and cartoons or maybe just with tea and muffins as the rising sun crawls through the room.

I know your secrets, you see. I know how at certain times of year, when the sun is low and there is so much dark in the world, you let light all the way inside just for a few minutes every morning to dance across the furthest recesses of your kitchen. I know how during the summer you hunker down and barely let the high sun in at all, but shoot strong cool breezes at that one courtyard window that will chill down the whole house if I work with you. I know the knocking sound of your fireplace starting up and the ticking of gas feeding the flames and the way pools of warm and cool air collect, each in its own room.

I can walk through you at night with my eyes closed and never miss a step.

But: you have always been another's, and it is to that other you will return. My beer and bookshelves will vanish, replaced by her potpourri scents and framed photos. Your kitchen will fall silent. You will recede into memory, fading finally into part of the person who comes after me as you are part of me now. I in turn will go on and fit my skin into another space, will bless another set of walls with my music and my tears, will expand into another shell that will eventually hold me as you do now.

Thank you for everything. You have been very good to me. May it go as well for us both as it has so far, if not better.

Michael, the second one is the one I spoke of quite some time ago.

Trying to Raise the Dead

Look at me. I'm standing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
friends inside the house. It's not my

house, you don't know them.
They're drinking and singing
and playing guitars.( Read more... )
A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I'm listening.
I'm ready to believe. Even lies, I don't care.

Say burning bush. Say stone. They've
stopped singing now and I really should go.
So tell me, quickly. It's April. I'm

on Spring Street. That's my gray car
in the driveway. They're laughing
and dancing. Someone's bound

to show up soon. I'm waving.
Give me a sign if you can see me.
I'm the only one here on my knees.

Dorianne Laux

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Jack Gilbert

Miniature Bridges, Your Mouth

( Read more... )this should be easy. a two-step to cowboys. you're beautiful
but that's not the point.

x

I know my way back perfectly well. like the back
of my hand, as it were. but look, the labyrinth walls
are high hedge and green. this also could be joy.

xx

I literally don't know your middle name. does that
matter? what systems we arrange for intimacy, small
disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth. not
what I'd anticipated. softer. to begin with,
I should tell the truth more. I could miss you,
and that's a liability.

xxx

I am not often off-kilter. but you're so silent,( Read more... )

Marty McConnell

My Husband Discovers Poetry

Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,
I wrote about my old boyfriend,
( Read more... )
You know how this story ends,
how my husband one day loses something,
goes into the basement,
and rummages through the old trunk,
and he uncovers the hidden poem
and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds
that floated up the stairs that day,
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught
in one of those traps with teeth of steel?
Do you see the wounded creature
at the bottom of the stairs,
his shoulders hunched over and shaking,
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Diane Lockward

We were driving to your funeral
& our father was not crying
because he has a way
of tying ribbons around grief.
( Read more... )
If there were an antonym for suicide
we could all choose when to be born.
I would have been born after that day
so I could not remember you.
So my fingers would stop pointing
at all the things that aren’t there.

Kevin A. González