Greenstorm's Journal

Well.

Looks like I'm gonna have to muster my emotional resources for the next while. Can't go more no-contact with metamours than this and also anything higher impact on me would allow a restraining order, so there's that.

Maybe tomorrow I'll remember why sexual relationships are worth it.

In the meantime it's new years day and i jumped in the not-iced-over-too-much lake twice with a bunch of local folks. Ice is sharp y'all. Also saunas are nice.

I always feel like I come across as either manic or trite when I write about being happy. There's some tooth to angst; there are things to dissect, it's easy to say 'where else do I want to be' and 'how can I change' and 'why are things this way'. I have much more trouble doing that when I'm happy-- mostly because I have not often given myself permission to feel purely happy.

I now have that permission. I have permission to look into dark spooky corners and to find either something terrible -- and still be happy if I wish -- or to find nothing at all, to find dust and candles and an empty room where I can curl up for awhile in peace if I wish. I have permission to be afraid of anything I wish, even if it's nothing, even if it's getting in my way, even if it's getting in someone else's way. I have permission to exist in the darkness as well as the light-- not to run gibbering through it, not to surf above it on analysis, but simply to go to those dark places and sit awhile.

This time, you see, when I went to be reborn: I wasn't. I was strapped to the wheel, it turned, and when it came back around there I was, still whole. The things I've been carrying: they're still mine. I'm more than sufficient to carry them as long as I wish, and set them down when I will. And, because I am not carrying such a terror over failing, and I am not so afraid of my own fear, these are steadying burdens instead of crippling. The loves and relationships in my life that take work and that I sometimes fuck up on and that make requirements of me are also provision against isolation and abandonment in the future. Carrying some of those weights at any time, and feeling them as weights, is merely part of the process. I have the image here of leaving on a hike and having a backpack full of food for the duration: it's something to carry. It's worthwhile later. It may well be annoying, it may hurt your shoulders a bit and sweat up your back and you may well complain about it sometimes, but it's ok. It's part of the process.

I could not stay on theme right now if I tried-- see me wander! I went into the dark and I felt welcomed. There was a smile there. I can stay there and play. That's all I'm trying to say.

There are many incidental wonderful details too: snuggling, a driving wind that literally pushed me around despite my best efforts, new faces and old ones made into potential friends, old static remade into play, poetry and song (literally!) and light and clarity and the resurrection of Blue Girl. It was, as they say, all good. I even got to talk a very little about agriculture and gut ecology at one point. I got to watch Angus in a makeout/painplay puddle which was totally involved and totally beautiful. I got to commune with a rosebush. I had conversations and I had silent being-togethers. Oh, words, how impossible you are as tools here. The things that happened, the feeling of them, can't be communicated-- they only sit inside me and influence my actions and maybe you'll see hints of them sometime in my actions, or maybe in a little bit of peace around the corners of my eyes.

In home news I lost Mikaela and Princess before I left, and Rocky when I got home. It's a sad thing. We think it was his heart, and perhaps it's good that he didn't get bred, but he was a sweetiepants. My flowers are starting to die down in the deck, just in time to move. I have trouble re-engaging my mind with the list of things I need to do (pay tuition, change address on drivers license, get contact lenses, maybe get a bus pass: all that busywork which takes so much of my space).

Now I have the urge to do some sewing (!!!?) and rest a little more, then go out into the world. My bosses left the day open as to whether I wanted to work or not, and the weather has confirmed that it would be okay for me to take this day to myself.

Really, Greenie? Sewing? How about a shower first? I know those skirts are already cut out, but don't you want to wait till your machine is up and running again?

It makes it easier to say no to things when there are also things to say yes to.

Well. Back to square one.

The poem goes:

Grace

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn't stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn't; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

by Joy Harjo

Italics are pertinent.

I'm wearing the necklace again. It felt right. I saw my second falling star tonight. My Uncle Dave is in town.

Alright. It sucks, but it definitely sucks more the other way.

I am so sorry.

If life were a poem, it would be a circle. If people were a cradle, the world would be no different- when we're talking about social networks we refer to the hammock that supports us, each knot and strand shaped to a different part. It keeps us from lying in the dirt (though what sort of a metaphor is that, you ask, coming from someone so in love with dirt?) What we put into us effects us, it becomes us. Food, speech, emotion, we suck it up and, just like eating a clove of garlic, breathe it out again on our skin. It's hard sometimes to make choices about what comes out, but it becomes easier when we monitor what goes in. This sounds so analytical that it's crazy, because the feelings come up out of you and you just *do* in accordance with them and it works-- better than forcing yourself into too many things you don't like, because then things you don't like have stuck to you. Only, you must try a lot of things with an open heart, to know what you like.

I'm trying to put joy into words but I don't know that it comes clear across to you. Of course, there's very little common frame of reference societally for this feeling, for ringing like a bell with each event and person and feeling. We're great with shared anger and pain, not too bad with desire and the glut that is its fulfillment.

When there's no time to be fully aware of doing a thing while doing it, the unique and lovely character of each thing becomes dulled. There's no fullness to action, no ful-fill-ment. If I remain in Vancouver for the rest of the summer, this is what I've learned from Kelowna. If I live in Kelowna for the rest of the summer, or for my life, this is what I've learned from the last month and a half.

From the last ten years, my years of relationships, I've learned that people are what they are. To distort them by percieving them through more of your own preconceptions and fears and desires is a disservice to them and to yourself. To them, because then you leave them alone and speak to the shadow around them. There's no connection. To you, because then life becomes solitary confinement in a box of funhouse mirrors. If you are so busy attending to the way smeone's actions interact with your expectations, you have no time or attention for their actions themselves-- and a person's actions are a person, really. And a person is a wonderful complex thing that is so often a joy to behold.

This year, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen is people I love smiling. A real smile is like a flame, like sunshine in a dark place, like rain in the desert. These are not idle metaphors, because I've experienced both these things, and they are the same. They don't touch me as humanly as happiness in the face of a loved one, though. I may say this because I have known the land more frequently than I've known people, just lately, and we really do see things better when we have a little space. We may feel them better when they're closer, though? Sometimes at night I remember smiles, networks of lines crinkling big at the corner of the mouth or little around the eyes, and I am soothed.

My next lessons will be lessons of respect. For myself, for others, when there's a tie involved (and there always seems to be, somehow), respect involves behaving in an appropriate way to honour that tie. I will learn about the appropriate. It needs only a little quiet space in my head to come out, and time to come out, and a life to come out in. I will be those things, time and space and life.

Good morning.