Greenstorm's Journal

During the eclipse I watched 8-10 ravens move a sheet of roofing tin by jumping in various coordinated ways on it to bounce it and skew it to one side little by little. I replaced it and they moved it again.

The next day I cancelled my participation in the program that picks up expired food from the grocery store. It is great for the animals - protein for the pigs, fresh greens for the geese in winter, yoghurt for the chickens, fresh meat for the dogs. Unfortunately it requires removing a tremendous amount of garbage/wrapping from the food before I can give it to the animals. That garbage, and the food before I remove stuff from it, needs to be stored somewhere. I can keep it safe from bears, from my dogs, but not from the ravens.

Over the years we've been escalating, which in animal training terms means I've given them progressively difficult challenges to solve and thus brought them up to this level. At this point they can open my garbage cans, push garbage cans over, move roofing tin and boards, go through any plastic or cardboard, and move boxes. I don't have a dedicated indoor space, so I give up.

Joke's on them, I guess: between stopping the grocery store food and getting rid of the pigs I'll be able to feed all my animals inside, either inside the goose house or the house-house. As a result of pursuing resources too greedily they will now have none, and the colony that's built up over time will starve. Likely they'll make my life very difficult as they do so, probably attacking the chickens and ducks and wrecking the newly-seeded garden when I get there. In a couple years it should subside though.

I'm still planting seeds to go in the garden this summer. I'm also throwing things out, de-hoarding canned goods etc.

I'm streamlining things and cleaning up loose ends. Hopefully that serves me well.

Tucker is gone. Airports are done, driving is done, watering plants that had gone dry is done. I'm here, home.

I'm alone in this space: unconnected. I'd predicted imperfectly what that meant. Now I remember. I'm back in my own world.

It's like being underwater: not drowning, but like slipping into a warm lake on a warm evening as the sun sets. The laws of physics are different. My body is supported. Everything is a different colour, more golden, more green. Everything seems more possible but slower. The evidence of humans is distant and distorted.

Already I barely remember what people are or why I would care.

Instead my peppers are ripening and I should make a vinegar or vodka sauce with them, there aren't enough to ferment. Tomatoes are blooming and I should make crosses. There are peppers to pot up inside and the ground is moslty snow-free outside; I should fence off the berry patch and seed clover into it. I need to sort out the geese. My home is become my mind once again.

While I was gone the ravens broke open boxes of ziploc bags the grocery store gave me along with their spent produce and they scattered the bags across my entire yard, thousands of them. The store had also discarded some foil baking pans and they brought those into the far back and punctured them. I'd thought the non-edibles would be safe but they were not. Also there are hundreds of styrofoam ramen bowls and the little plastic packets from inside them, and milk cartons everywhere.

The pigs need to be moved to drier land.

More shelves need to be set up for plants.

And I need to exist here for a little while, just exist.

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.

The night before last I slept very late, I was exhausted, and I had a ton of people come visit me in my dreams. It's far enough along that I don't remember most of who, but definitely G, Kelsey, and Heather from work along with a couple others. In many but not all cases there was a definite "Greenie, we like you but we aren't going to spend much time with you anymore" vibe. Which. These are not folks I spend much time with? But I guess my brain was just wrapping that up.

Then last night, same deal. Tired, hard to wake up, and I had a pretty extended dream about hanging out with Adrian E.

I don't normally remember my dreams. I don't normally have visitations by people who actually exist. Normally I slip into alternate worlds, alternate lifetimes, and live them out until I wake up.

I guess "people" are alternative worlds and lifetimes nowadays. Threshold is the real world, from which I semi-grudgingly leave to go to work briefly.

Staying home so much is clarifying for me that, well, I like being here. Travelling to the coast a couple times a year was a holdover from my move: I felt like I could leave the city and keep those relationships intact. Now I know I'd rather host the folks who are willing and able to come up.

The thing is, because Threshold is such an extension of me, I can't be in any other place as my full self. I'm always leaving a huge chunk of myself elsewhere. Up here, when I see someone, they can see me instead of just a shadow, instead of the portable parts only.

So. Maybe for a lot of people that realization is a bit of a parting.

It's breakup season. The lake fills with meltwater, it rises, the ice floats and is jarred by the wind until it breaks and gathers and eventually melts and flows downstream.

The other day my hourglass broke. Piotr gave me that hourglass to remind me that all things pass, and that all things come again. I'm trying not to read it as an omen that I'm stuck here.

Josh has started saying, "I'm not sure if that narrative serves you". He picked it up from me.

Tucker is very happy to be quarantined with me, but when this simmers down a little bit he will go see his people back east, and then he will move away. Everyone is happy for my land in an emergency. Everyone is happy for me when they need things.

His fingerprints are all over Threshold.

I'm grieving the end of that relationship. I don't expect we'll go to zero relationship: he's a good friend, a valued lover, and we've done a lot of work together over the last few years. We may even emerge as anchors still, who knows? But it won't be the same.

And like all relationship grieving I want everyone vaguely relationship-shaped to go away and leave me in peace. I want to return to the things I can rely on to be there, things that feel familiar: fruit trees, tomato plants. Even the pigs are more new, more novel, than I really want.

I feel abandoned now; Tucker will feel abandoned if I take space now; I will feel like I wasted my last time to be with him in this way, afterwards; neither of us will have had the discussion we need, together, to mindfully develop the next step of the relationship.

So I grieve in the tiny spaces. When I do yoga there is grief in my body. When I see the green grass coming up I feel pain. When I look into the empty greenhouse and know it will be full in summer it feels like loss.

I'd always thought of myself as more aligned with Demeter than Persephone but this is a spring where sunreturn signals the grief of separation and the work of getting down to growing things.

It's a time when I want to push on things to see the whole structure topple. I want everything around me gone so I have the peace of dust and inevitability. I want to thrash around until I have no energy left, finally, resignation comes for me.

Someday, maybe, I'll write about what I'm losing. Hopefully I'll write about it from the stable platform of what it evolves into.

And now I'm trying to schedule Avi's next visit and all I'm thinking is: I don't want humans anymore.