Greenstorm's Journal

I'm supposed to be thinking about work. Instead I'm thinking about peace.

Spent time with new person last night. It's the first time we've been in-person since we started talking, which in turn has been less than a week.

It's very good. I'm still wrapping my head around who he is. Most people I experience like a standing wave, a pattern of behaviours. Some people I experience like a puzzle. He's a kaleidoscope so far, or like standing in a swirl of butterflies or a flock of birds: motion and light and nothing still enough to remain in focus. There are significant culture and age differences, but turn the wheel and he's an ex-vegetarian pro-ethical-animal-products minimalist dumpster-diver whose ethical framework feels really solid and familiar, but when I start to settle into that he's an older dude from a world of competitive sports and private schools, but.

He is his own rock at the center of the universe.

How does he hold onto himself in the world he came from, in the world he describes? He maintains integrity but not rigidity; in fact he is so open, watching and learning and situationally aware.

I am already picking up the slightest hint of South African-accented vowels and slang from an era one or two before my own.

And I am so wary. Not of him, but of being gifted so many people, so many opportunities to connect over my life. I've needed a lot of people, a lot of support and close connection. What's the likelihood I could continue to be given it? I know so many lonely people.

What if everything actually is ok?

Before I went to visit him yesterday I picked up my packages from the post office. I received my old old roses from Cornhill, then I went and spent the night rolling around and talking and snuggling and staring out the window with this person; it's a reasonably clear omen if anything is.

Here, then, are the names of the roses:

Cinnamon rose, R cinnamomea plena
Belle Amour
Chloris
Maiden's blush / cuisse de nymphe
Mme Plantier
The Apothecary Rose, gallica officinalis
Fantin Latour
Henri Martin

So many human hands shaped and preserved them. Now they are in my hands. How lucky am I?

Seems like he's interested. Also overwhelmed. I have not lost my (virtual so far) touch.

Also what's wrong with people for whom the safe sex talk kills the mood? Telling someone what you want to do to them, and then telling them how to make that happen, is one of my greater seduction tools.

Also also everyone really does roll over and show me their belly. It's sweet.

I haven't even read the original book, but the title's been ringing in my head for a week now.

This post may be shorter than expected because my counterpart at work is sick with a cold. Not coughing, definitely a weird throat. I'm still learning my position and I already had an avalanche of work coming down before Mar31 fiscal year end. But. I need to talk my way through the last couple days.

Avi came up.

https://greenstorm.dreamwidth.org/2007/03/12/

We'd started our original thing in July 2006. That was the month Kynnin gave me back my dad's necklace. At that point in my life I was travelling around a lot, even just within the local area: music festivals, my Shambhala year, my permaculture course. At one point I write: "Before the permaculture course, I hadn't spent two weeks worth of nights in the same place since... Can it have been three years?" I had three other partners total and a lot of show rats that I was breeding and loving. I had not yet been raped by my friend. I would move in with Bob in fall, then move with him again that winter when our basement suite collapsed. Summer 2007 I moved to Kelowna for the season and that was the start of my outdoor landscaping career. I was learning that my mental health was patterned but I didn't yet have a sense of partnership with and love for my emotions. They happened like the weather: I was beginning to realise there were seasons, but not that I could use them to water gardens and go sledding down the hill for fun.

I broke up with him March 2007. Any efforts to rekindle didn't stick. It has been many, many years since I'd seen him at this point.

I hardly remember so much of it. Reading back, things I thought were spread out over years all happened at once. Reading back, that is the life I have spent the last couple years escaping. Reading back from now, where I am in my power, I'm amazed there was enough of me for anyone to see me or love me.

Avi was always beautiful to look at, always compelling in the way that when I was with him it took such a distinct effort to leave his presence. There's exquisite chemistry there. This journal says I was avoidant despite enjoying him. That was the history.

I understand so much more about everything now, but I'm here to talk about my experience of this extended weekend.

I started out nervous, thinking that perhaps I'd made a mistake. I always -- you know, I go after prey animals, and as both a sadist and as a lover I am conflicted. I want to cherish my people, I want to hurt them, but I don't want them to be hurt. And so often I'll keep my distance from someone because I feel that through caring about me they'll be hurt in exactly the way I don't want to hurt them. I feel I'll let down their faith in their ability to be loved, so of course I avoid them and they feel unloved and unlovable.

Every thread of this leads away back into myself. I don't want to go there into the past. I want to stay in this week.

We spent five days together. Even from the airport he was more present in himself than I ever remembered. His self had developed enough boundaries and enough mass that I could feel its gravity. It was not quite like being with a new person because I already trusted him, and every word out of his mouth confirmed that I should. He didn't feel like his past self to my eyes, but he still felt extraordinarily familiar. It was like the best parts of being with a stranger and exploring, and being with a longterm lover and feeling comfortable.

But. But. Then he opened his mouth.

I was his first poly relationship and he'd been poly since then. Each relationship he'd had, considered, learned from and can speak fluently about his lessons both good and bad. He knows his boundaries. He knows what his emotional capacity is, what his emotional skill level is, and he can speak about that fluently. He knows himself, his emotions both "negative" and "positive", and he can analyze them and integrate them and accept them and make room for them in his life.

He has Done The Work. For what, thirteen years, he has been Doing The Work. And in doing so he has self-created, has become such a presence, has both rooted into stability and integrated into the world.

What a joy to see someone I care about doing well. What a joy to -- what's the line? -- reconnect, for the first time, and find an equal there. This is what I always needed him to be so I could be unafraid of hurting him, of trampling him, and here we are.

And he's happy to see me doing well, and he wants to see me again, which to me feels extraordinary.

So he'll come up again. It works out well for me, I'd been wanting another comet partner and wading into dating strangers wasn't working for me. I have absolutely and completely no idea what it will look like for frequency, for enmeshment in-between, for anything. Probably we'll talk about that at some point instead of just catching up on our mutual histories. We did more or less talk nonstop most of the time.

I already have a sense of where some of the challenges will lie but the field is wide open. I will report back.

But that's what I wanted to tell you. I'm very, very good. And I get to come home to Tucker, to drop back into that familiar love with new eyes. It's good.

It would be better if Tucker's trips back east and all plans to see his other partners and friends hadn't been cancelled, but I have the skills now to support and love him and not feel threatened by my inability to fix everything for him.

And I am home, in Threshold, which is exactly where I want to be.

Remember when I said things were starting to move again?

Well, they're howling along.

Josh is moving away. Tucker moved up here. Someone I was seeing last summer has, I think, gone no-contact without a heads-up not too many days after saying "hey, let's be friends, you know you can talk to me about things if they're rough".

My neighbours a couple down, from I think 2 houses, came over drunk at 10pm and yelled that they would shoot my dog if he was on their property again.

I taught a soap workshop to some friends and it was fun. My ossabaw pigs have arrived from 1000km and 2 ferries away. I'm starting to separate birds into breeding pens. The hard cold broke (for now) and instead of -20 and -30 last night was a balmy -10. The new pigs barely had to snuggle into the straw to keep warm except for the tiny 8-week-old boar.

Between the dogs and the pigs I expect I'll have some intellectual challenges; "no fence-breaking ever" is a much tougher bar than "occasional fence-breaking" and it means I have to be smarter, and have contingencies, for everything. Complicating things, electric fence has a tendency to make my type of dogs aggressive (their mind is wired to make them try to drive away threats and harms, so if they get hurt when they go up to the fence, and they go up to the fence when there are people/pigs/cars, then they associate people/pigs/cars with harm. That can be deadly).

I had a really hard weekend for mental health this weekend. I was basically paralyzed for a day except for the stuff I really needed to do to get the pigs' stuff ready. There were a couple triggers going on - yelling and threats of violence are definitely difficult for me to handle, and this is the first time that's happened on my property. I want to navigate the no-contact thing with respect for this person's consent, and I'd also like to know what's going on; if I try every avenue to contact him when he clearly doesn't want to be contacted I'm definitely violating his indicated wishes, but at the same time I kind of expect him to pop up in the future and say "you didn't try hard enough to contact me, I guess you didn't really care". That, of course, hits the "if you really loved me you would perform it in X way [usually by having no other partners]" button. And then I fucked up my shoulder and I was getting pigs and I had to rely on Tucker to help assemble the pig barn, which is hard. I hate relying on other people for a project that is honestly mine, it makes me feel inadequate. Animals are a lot of work and other people shouldn't need to do stuff for me just because I want to keep them.

On the other hand I had that nice workshop, Tucker is settled in enough that I could go to his place to visit, we had some lovely date time, it's getting warmer, and I'm making progress at work. Tucker and I agreed to wear each others' necklaces for another year, I guess sort of like a handfasting? and we talked a bunch abotu stuff. I also improvised an amazing chicken-rose pasta sauce and my dogs still love me. The baby boar is ultra cute, which will be a challenge since I can't have him getting touchy-feely which means I can't snuggle him. I have some time on my own coming up next week so I can write, sew, and talk to the animals.

But I was definitely nonfunctional on Sunday, and I think it's time to get more serious about dealing with that.

Last night, when I unexpectedly got a call offering me an apartment I never thought would be given me (fer gawdsakes, I answered 'do you have bad credit' with 'yes, MSP' on the application!) and accepted because someone was asking me a question on the phone so I said yes, the next thing I did was call Dave. Sure, there were maybe three minutes of staring into space, but my brain wasn't processing and I wasn't thinking so in that space I just dialed his number.

That's partnerspace.

He didn't answer, he was busy, and when next he looked at his phone he didn't hurry to call me back or keep his phone next to him in case I called again. He did make space at the end of his evening to talk to me, and I was pretty confident that he would do that.

That's him.

I'm poly because it's important to me that no arbitrary restrictions be placed on my connections with folks. Time, energy, desire: these can be shifted and bucked sometimes but in the end they are absolute restrictions. Eating together, fucking, kissing, talking until sunrise, saying good night, reaching out in a time of emotional need, walking around the city in the rain: these are intimacies and I cannot honestly set some above others, call some relationship-fodder and others friendships, and call them poison with one set of people and soulfood with another.

I can wrap my understanding around logistics, even logistics that involve emotions: I can't date everyone because time limits me, no other penises in you while we're trying to conceive a baby because I want to be sure, we don't have time or emotional energy to process extra change while we're moving so let's put off starting anything new for a few months, I'm really into this new person so I'll be a bit scarce and can you lean on your support network a little bit harder?

The logistics of dating Dave involve that he is essentially in a domestic poly relationship with his communal house. They have dinner together most nights; he has to cook dinner at a specific time. He has chores and obligations at home. He catches up on his small-talk and general socialization there. He is committed to this relationship, and often it stresses him out in ways that impact or limit his relationship with me, and often it offers him opportunities and support that, were I his full and only partner, I would probably otherwise be giving. This home-partner of his is less restrictive than dating someone with kids or someone with a sexual partner in some ways; in other ways it is more restrictive, and in still others there are striking similarities. It's a funny balance, and I have trouble keeping it sometimes.

The logistics of dating Dave involve how he swings between a general fuzzy non-focus and tightbeam searching regard unpredictably. He swings between an obliviousness so intense as to be jawdropping and a kind of casual unflinching insight into himself and general relationships that leaves me racing to catch up. He swings between casual disregard and thoughtful, care-full intimacy.

The logistics of dating Dave involve that he has never yet said anything in the heat of anger or pain to me. Instead he will say, "I'm feeling defensive, can we wait a little bit to talk about this" or "I'm frustrated right now, let's bring this up another time". I feel safe from lashing out, from deliberate hurt. In contrast to this, which makes me feel intensely cared-for, I also sometimes feel forgotten or unimportant.

It makes me nervous that he apologizes with the tongue of angels. I don't want to feel better about things; I want them fixed so they aren't a problem again. I worry that being without the sting of unhappiness, I won't fix a thing. On the other hand I also know through both experience and pure logic that things cannot always go perfectly between people, even in the best system, and so maybe I should set that aside and enjoy... peace? Being seen and understood in an apology? Either way I want to learn to do it.

To drop these yoked opposites for a moment, to burrow into my spaces of pure desire, I want to learn from him and with him. I want this self-contained competent exploratory curious caring person right there at my shoulder while we navigate whateverthefuck this life thing is. I want to see how he does the things he's so good at. I want to do things that bring surprise and respect to his face. I want his advice because, whether I accept it or not, it's always worth considering. I want to know there's someone there who'll always say 'we'll make it work' and who I can, however skeptically, still believe somewhere inside.

And I want him, the /him/ of him, biker's thighs and a rug of fur, blue-ringed gold eyes and hands to match my own in size and almost in workman's roughness, careful deliberate easy movement and eyes that crinkle just right with each smile and the smell of home on the side of his neck where it meets his shoulder and something about a voice pitched to hit a spot right behind the centre of my breastbone and the totally unconscious warmth that pours out of his whole self.

This isn't a post with answers. It is merely, as they say, what it is: a shape in my head that I do not want to forget.