Greenstorm's Journal

Well.

My language is shifting to match people here. Speech is slowing down, my accent is altering. I'm such a chameleon that way.

Two notable things have happened this week: I've been let out into the bush to work, and Dave came to visit for the long weekend.

I was/am hired to work out in the woods, but in order to do that I need to be trained; I have more-or-less no idea what I'm doing. The work itself is conceptually pretty easy, mostly measuring, a little bit of tree and fungus ID. I could learn that pretty quick. The catch is, I'm doing this in the bush. I could call it trackless wilderness, but that would be misleading; there are plenty of moose tracks, sometimes bear, occasionally wolf. The tracks aren't useful to me, since I need to move in a straight line from one place to another while navigating from random sample plot to random sample plot. Moving through the forest -- heavy with underbrush and blowdown, since it's territory where the pine beetle came through and left dead standing trees 10-15 years ago and half of them fell over and the other half had no canopy so the underbrush wasn't light-limited and came right up, densely in some places -- that's another thing.

Lots of things have thorns in this forest. Roses, gooseberries, other roses, raspberries all have mild scratchy thorns that leave my thighs looking like I washed a cat with them. Devil's club thorns go in and cause infection, they need to be pulled out but they break off pretty easily. Stubs of branches on dead pines aren't meant to be thorns, but they gouge and bruise pretty good when you need to climb over a pile of a couple trunks or more (this happens often in some areas).There are mosquitoes that get at me when I'm counting hair-width tree rings (I'm pretty well covered otherwise). I'm sleeping lots, getting sun, eating well, and pretty happy, so I'm healing really fast, but I sure do look pretty beat up at the end of it all.

I wear caulk boots in the bush, that's logging boots with spikes on the bottom so I can walk on logs without slipping. They're great, but I need to re-map surfaces in my brain: bare logs or bark are stable surfaces on which I can balance amazingly well but dry rocks are slippery. I suspect it wont take me long to be walking along logs high up from the ground; right now a tree lying 3' up is about as high as I can walk along. Walking along logs is great, though, because it's a quick, smooth path across the bush if you can find a tree going the way you want to go, and don't let me get started about swamps.

So the skill I'm learning is walking quickly and safely through the bush. I have been practicing it two days. By the end of each day I feel like I can barely lift my feet on those boots, let alone lift them to climb over the frequent 3' high tree trunks or tangles of tree trunks that block my path. I am so. Slow. It's been a long time since I had to learn a brand-new skill, and it's frustrating. I want to be past this part and actually able to help contribute rather than slowing everything down.

But... I get to be outside. In the woods. I have figured out how to dress comfortably (3L hydration pack in the vest that holds my many lbs of equipment, headscarf down my back under my hard hat for mosquitoes, long light men's dress shirt for mosquitoes and sun, light gloves, I wonder if they have thorn-proof kevlar I can put on the front of my army pants?). I see moose tracks every day. I eat sitting on a log surrounded by only the sounds of the forest. I get to see the understory proceed into spring one day at a time, leaves unfurling out of the litter, flowers starting up on the stems, the way I understand time passing in my bones. I come home smelling like pine and "balsam". I sleep well. I smile often. Walking around the office after work feels good in my legs and my hips.

I am making friends with this place.

And so I was very happy for Dave to come up and see it, for him to visit and learn what kind of place I'm staying. I wanted him to meet the woman I live with, who's lived here all her life and is friendly and independently interdependent and interesting. I wanted him to se my smile when I got off work. I wanted to show him the woods and the lake.

He came up. We slept a lot, went out and bought beef from the ranch up the hill, used the BBQ every night, had a fire and got too tired waiting for the stars to come out so we went to bed by 11pm, had lots of sex, made s'mores, got slightly but not seriously lost in the woods and bitten by mosquitoes, snuggled, fit into the little shower together, tried to make plans with my supervisor/colleague and never succeeded, walked on the beach in the heavy cold wind, and drank a milkshake. It was pretty close to perfect.

I love him a lot.

Then he went home, and I can feel his absence pretty strongly tonight after even just a few nights sleeping together. It's better for me to be here alone right now, it's what I want, but I miss him. I like how the rhythms of our lives intersect and influence each other.

So it's bedtime here anyway, and I don't feel like writing too much about it, so I'll go down to bed now and curl myself around the warmth that he leaves inside me and read wildcrafting books and smell the smoke left in my hair from last night.

Be well.

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.