Greenstorm's Journal

Oldest son
Responsible one
Peacemaker
You try to mend the world
With a million kindnesses
And every day
A little
It works
The world is on your shoulders
Sometimes in your hands
May its joy
Always outweigh
Its burden

***

Open-heart
Joy-maker
Lover of animals and family
Saviour of silent lives
May you always walk
Supported
In many worlds at once

****

We all have something that brings out our spine. Countercultural. Joe is vegan, Al is antivax, Ben is anti sane, and goodness knows what I am.

****

I drove down to Sherry's with Tucker and left my truck in Vancouver, with pottery and wedding shoes. I didn't want to drive Seattle traffic. I left one key at Sherry's, accidentally. The spare was in Fort: respectively 5 and 12 hours drive away. My community in Fort rallied to get the key flown down Monday (I'm not planning to leave till Friday) and there are a couple options for the other key.

***

I'm reinspired by my work last year that was half-finished at Sherry's. I miss putting poems on my work. I got a bunch of texture tools/stamps. The plan is to spend some time going there.

***

I met my brother's new wife for the first time yesterday, at their western ceremony. She's very nice and she works with animals, which I appreciate. They've bought a condo and want to spawn. I wish them well. The wedding was very sweet.

***

I find myself wondering what it would be like if family and community had ever come together in a celebration to support and approve of something I was doing. Maybe life-changing. Even if I held my wedding to myself people would come but maybe not with such support. They'd come because I asked, not because they believed in the institutions I was supporting.

***

Housesitter messages me that I may have another cat staying in the house. Very curious to see who's there when I come home.

***

My home is full of emotional support. Being around family -- some on my dad's side I hadn't seen in thirty years -- was very strange. People love me here. It's not home though.

***

Point Grey traffic was unreal last night as everyone moved to the darkest area they could think of for the extra strong aurora borealis.

***

I love my family a lot. They're not my home, but I love them.

Solstice/solly nee keesa arrived today. I picked her up a two-hour drive away, she'd already been in a truck an hour and a half to get to me. Her people were very nice, and very grateful I think that they found her a good home. She was carsick but put on a good face.

Thea accepted her somewhat nervously, perhaps because it was Way Too Hot and she didn't want to move much. Thea is such a good girl. Avallu DID NOT accept her on first meeting, unsurprisingly, so now I'm doing some rotation/separation so they can get used to each other's scents and stuff.

She's going to be a big girl, she's a little taller than Thea right now but in the super skinny adolescent stage. She's probably as long as Avallu already. When I'm sitting on the ground she's taller than me.

I was definitely contractually obligated to snuggle everyone -- Thea to reassure her she was being so good, Solly because she was in a new scary space and also is a go-out-and-return-to-snuggle snugglebug, Avallu to help him regulate, Whiskey because he got too close to Solly when she was eating and got snarled at, Hazard because everyone else was getting attention...

All in all, not a bad start. Will need to spend lots of time with Avallu and Solly's intros though.

I just realized I've never had a family member say they were lucky or blessed or happy to have me as part of their family. Mom and my baby brother say they love me, but no one has ever implied they're grateful.

That probably explains a lot.

I was going to be taking a summer student out into the bush, maybe for the first time, today. Instead he's off sick and I can go or not as I please. Before I decide I'm going to steal a couple minutes to actually write.

Last night I was out in the garden. I came in and mom was on the phone in the livingroom, the kind of phone conversation where even though it's theoretically not on the speakerphone I could hear both sides. I puttered in the kitchen a moment, went up to the loft to mess with my door, and I could still hear the conversation. They were talking about me. The guy on the other side kept referring to me as "your daughter" to mom. He was talking about how farming was a lot of work and didn't make a lot of sense to do, something like that, and mom was agreeing: "I don't know where she got it from, we did it a bit when she was a kid and you'd think she'd have learned" and "probably for a few more years before she gives up, it's a lot of work" were fragments I heard.

I said, "I can hear both sides of that conversation, just so you know" and they shifted topics a bit and talked about the pigs and more details some. But.

Two things. That's when I realized just how unknown I am to mom. We do not talk about our feelings - she was the main policer of my feelings as a kid, particularly she tried to shut down my meltdowns when my emotions just got really big, so I know not to take my emotions to her from that experience even though our roles now are so different. Further, and I guess possibly because of that, she doesn't know that I love this. I describe the garden to her but I don't tell her-- you know, I think most of my people understand, when I describe the garden, that I love it; they know the detail and the knowledge and the attention I give it are my way of loving things. I don't think mom knows that I get fulfillment and completion out of what I do here. I don't know why she thinks I do it.

I think it would be good for her to know? Reassuring? But she might not be able to understand it. If I got married to a person, or-- I don't even know, what are the typical markers of success that are supposed to be happiness? Maybe she'd understand that. I think she was glad of the possible A&E thing, even though I don't think she understood it. I don't know.

So there's that. And there's also Tucker, who I'm honestly too tired to write about I guess. Mostly, when I'm done dating someone in an intense, full-time way, I end to take a break for a year or two to reset. This doesn't mean no communication but it does mean not much, nothing that can pull me back into the old patterns of behaviour. It lets me get free to reshape my life without them; then they can be added back in when those habits are broken and replaced by something else.

He's-- you know, always right after a breakup you think things might change, someone might use that as a wake-up call and start doing what you needed from them. Sometimes they even do it a little, around the edges, for awhile. But my way of relating to him is the same as it's always been, which is definitely no surprise but also definitely not great for me. He's not going to plan the shape of his future to make this easier for me or more likely to continue, he is going to do short term things to make it easier, and at some point he'll get frustrated and burnt out on those short term things and become resentful. Long-term planning would make those higher-effort short term things easier but that's not his way.

We're still talking sometimes, on the phone, in the evening. A couple nights like that in a row and it feels like before: it feels like the kind of connection I'd be expecting someone to make time and space for me, and where I make time and space for it. That can't stand, it just kicks this ball down the road some. I can probably skip across it like a stone over a lake: when I feel that connection I can pull back, stay away a few days, then dip back in. I can set some structure to ensure it doesn't happen, like maybe I'll only talk to him on weekends, or on weeknights, or on Tuesdays, and only if we're both free.

I go and see him this weekend and I honestly don't know what it'll be like. My expectation is we'll argue a bunch at the end, like we did at the end of the last visit, because I'm shit at sticking my fingers in my ears and pretending everything is the same, and he is hurt by overt acknowledgement of relationship change. It's also possible it will be fine. I really do not know, but I will most certainly see. It'll probably be good information to decide if how soon we'll do something like this again.

Warm again. We're supposed to have a stretch of warm + rain, which of course is on top of what was 3' of snow and is maybe a little closer to 2.5 now. The dogsled race happened on the weekend: I normally love it but last week's forestry conference kept me busy through the start of the long races, and I was in a pretty bad place mental-health-wise on Saturday, and then on Sunday I just wanted to stay in controlled environments and not jeopardize feeling ok. That said, Tucker's apartment was across from the lake where the event was held, so I could peek out and see the dogs in the sunshine.

Warm again and the new piglets got castrated, pushing the edge of the 10 day/2 week window when I'm comfortable doing it at home. Well, comfortable is a tremendous overstatement but it had to be done: they get castrated or they get eaten very young unless I can source that immunocastration drug. They seem to be doing alright this morning; because my anxiety is running so high it's fixating on everything, and one of them having adverse reactions to castration and bleeding out or something is one of them. That hasn't happened to me. I did castrate one with a scrotal hernia once and had to put him down immediately, which was very traumatic, but they all went cleanly here so far. I'll go out later today and watch them all pee but they're sleeping now with Mama Black Chunk, who's been let out of isolation with her babies. Actually it's pretty cute: when I went out the boar was spooning her, and she was spooning the babies.

I sold the 4runner to mom, which is basically the best news. I love that truck and didn't want to see it go to someone who wouldn't care for it. Mom lent her car to someone who had an accident and didn't know to leave insurance out of everything so they decided to scrap it because it got a dent; she was in the market for something new and I had this 4runner which I need to get rid of because I can't keep two vehicles. I'm so glad it's staying in the family. I need to get the windshield redone (they put sand/gravel on the roads up here in winter for traction, since it's too cold for salt, and it's pretty normal to replace your windshield every year or two since rocks fly up and crack them) and replace the battery and pull the farm junk out of it. First I need to shovel it out the rest of the way from under a snowdrift.

The peppers I planted back in January are up and the other peppers are ordered. I've also ordered some black plastic flats, which-- these are supposed to be extra heavy duty so they don't break every year. I keep wanting to get enough of a carpentry shop together to make myself some wooden ones but that hasn't happened yet so hopefully these last a couple years. I need to get the rest of my peppers into soil. I've also put artichoke seeds in. We'll see how they go. I'm starting to rattle what goes where around in my head.

I've also got start dates for most things on my garden spreadsheet; I do need to go through and winnow out what I'm starting this year and what I'm not. Especially, when I have multiple accessions of something from last year I probably want to grow saved seed rather than bought seed, etc.

I really do need to shovel my way out to the greenhouse and A-frame and start grouping out the geese.

I'm kind of tucking this here at the end but Saturday was pretty rough. I think my brother is going to manage to do what nothing else has, and drive me substantially off the social internet. I need to decide what to do about that: block him? Some other workaround? Gracefully let go of those parts of the internet? Hopefully my counselor can help me come up with some ideas this week. He's definitely infuriating and deep into DARVO right now. He spams the family chat with links about the "freedom convoy" and the constitution, ignores any facts he finds inconvenient, does the two-step "you can't trust media to report the science correctly/reading academic papers too closely to decipher them is some kind of trick or gotcha" and most recently "people are too specialized" (I it's think code for scientists are wrong) followed by "are you familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect" which is basically like being trapped in some sort of horror sitcom where someone who doesn't believe in science tries to use a science idea that explains how non-experts think they know a lot to explain why he, a non-expert, knows more than other people.

Horror sitcom is not my favourite genre. Maybe a laugh track would help?

Anyhow, being almost totally offline for the latter half of the weekend meant I watched Leverage with Tucker and had some time to think about a particular scene that had been picking at the back of my mind. In it a dude is flirting with a woman across a counter, and she is flirting back. At one point her hands are lying on the counter between them, he puts his hands on hers, she looks slightly uncomfortable, he lifts his hands away and says "the hands, it's too much, right?" and she nods and says yes and they keep flirting but he doesn't reach out to touch her again.

This little snippet of interaction has stayed in my mind, and I've finally dug out why. A lot of the male-assigned folks I've engaged with sexually would have had trouble getting all the way to the end of the four parts of this: 1) try something 2) collect feedback based on body language 3) ask for clarity if they detected something amiss and 4) course-correct and continue to enjoy the interaction. If they were actually willing to try doing a thing they'd be unable to assess for feedback, if they assessed for feedback and detected something slightly amiss they'd spiral into self-loathing and be unable to clarify and course-correct. Obviously this prevents meaningful feedback; anything other than positive feedback drags the whole experience to a screeching halt. I wonder if this is linked to protect women from even a hint of bad feelings/women are delicate flowers who should never have a moment's dissonance in their lives? I wonder if it's linked to a model of masculinity that's about prowess and always being right the first time? Or what's going on? Anyhow, that bit in the show made me happy.

Hey, brother. COVID is a sensitive subject for me, as it is for many people. I have the assumption that you know it's sensitive, so when you don't treat things around it with sensitivity I further assume you're not taking care around folks' emotions about it, and you won't take care around my emotions.

It's sensitive for me because it's harmed a bunch of people I know in various ways. One of my friends lost the use of his arm, permanently, because his rotator cuff surgery had to be postponed with the hospitals too full to take him. When we had the height of our outbreak here and lost so many of our First Nations elders, the helicopters and ambulances taking people to Vancouver or Prince George hospitals because our hospital was full went past my house. I have a friend who's only now able to walk across the room, a year after their positive covid test. I have several friends in various kinds of healthcare who have been working nonstop and who have some pretty intense experiences to share. These are strong personal and emotional experiences. They have all had a big impact on me, and they're all raised when folks talk about covid.

Furthermore, I work with plants and animals that are prone to get contagious issues. I've seen what happens when those issues go uncontrolled: it's a lot of death and destruction. I've also seen what kind of strong control measures are required to actually control these contagious issues. Vaccines are part of these control measures.

Sometimes mass killing is part of the measures. If a vaccine mandate can prevent significant death, I am wholly in favour of it, much as I am in favour of vaccinating animals to prevent the spread of their diseases. I am not in favour of a "herd immunity" response since that involves enough people dying or being prevented from passing on their genes that the frequency of genes in the population shifts. That is a lot of people dying. I don't believe a lot of people being left to die is an ok policy response; not if they're poor, not if they have illnesses or are disabled, not if they're rich, not if they have a particular skin colour, not if they have a particular political belief. That is not an ok way to solve any problem. This is an intrinsic moral belief of mine and you will not change it. I really hope it's also a belief of yours.

You don't seem to be careful about the links you share. I haven't read this more recent one; an earlier one that I did take time to read was not only poorly thought out, but used my gender as an example of something ridiculous that shouldn't be taken seriously. Since when you post in family chat you don't use language that expresses curiosity or empathy and you have used links that didn't display curiosity or empathy on the part of the authors, curiosity and empathy is not my first response to you in turn. You certainly do not appear to be trying to invite them.

I know I said this subject was closed for me, and I really do want it to be. I don't have the energy to talk about this stuff much with people who are actively supportive of me, let alone with someone in our family with all the baggage our family has. I was surprised by how snarky your answer to my statement was. I don't want to have hurt you, if I did, and I don't want you to have hurt me, which you did. I still don't have the energy to engage in a confrontational back-and-forth on this with you.

I love you. You've always been the brother I felt closest to, and I'm surprised we're out of alignment now since for so long I felt like we were more in alignment. In another world I'd like to be able to talk to you comfortably about all this. I'd like to be able to believe, unquestioningly, that our morals are in alignment. I'm not in that world right now, and I am sorry for that. I do hope we will be again someday.

Absolutely I want you to know that I wish you personally well. I want you to be happy and thriving, loving your job and being involved in it, loving your marriage and your home and your dog. I want you to have a fulfilling moral and political life; I think those things are important.

I'd like to talk about how your life is going, and how mine is going. I can't do that if you keep bringing up covid-related stuff as your main conversational topic. Can we work together to talk about other things? Can we build some sort of rapport that way, and maybe eventually we can find our way back to this discussion that's obviously important to you, but at a time and in a way that we can both be kind and generous towards each other?

Mom and my brother just pulled away. It's Saturday morning and they were here just over a week. I'm actually sad to see them go, previously I would have been so relieved to have people out of my space that it would have overwhelmed everything else. I am not over-peopled these days. That's nice.

I keep wanting to write about what having mom in my space is like: she wants to clean things and help, but occasionally throws out valuable things and definitely puts things in odd places. I wonder if she could feel loved if she didn't do things to help out, and/or if she enjoys that feeling of cleaning someone else's space because there's no requirement to and it's a nice gift. I'm not annoyed enough right now to write about what got lost or thrown out, though. I'm just here in myself, being a little and and feeling my house be spacious around me.

7kg of soap is on its way to Quesnel in trade for my opal heart ring with a leaf. Shortly I'll go down and eat pancakes, I was flipping them for my family and didn't have time to eat. I'll talk to Tucker on the phone-- we left off our conversation about what if he buys a condo the other day because he had to catch his plane. I'll feed the ducks and geese and pigs and carry water. I'll put pallets into the greenhouse so they're acessible when it snows. I'll go get some grain and shovel it into containers. Maybe I'll work on the pig roof or sit in front of the stove on the floor with dogs and a book. Maybe I'll make a round of sausage.

Tomorrow I'll work on the pig roof, carry straw, and hopefully fix the serpentine belt on the Tundra with help from the toyota geek from work. I'll lie on my bed and feel gravity. I'll take pictures of where the frost first melts on my roof, giving me the map of my trusses that transfer heat faster than the insulated spots.

All that, but: the days will unfold forward from this one moment of quiet. I'm here, breathing. I am alone in the silence of the house humming around me. Moment to moment, I continue to exist.

Edited to add: oh, the veil is thin. That's why it feels like this here. Imminent.

Things are so busy right now.

Mom and my youngest brother are here. I'm working, and they are bush days so I can't do home things around work: instead I need to use extra time at home to prep clothes and lunches, check weather, and charge devices. I'm doing this course, which does not have the two hours of homework stated: it's more like 4 or 5 hours extra per week. I'm engaged in this communication/intimacy course with Tucker. I'm trying to get administrative stuff done, like calling the bank to figure out where my money disappeared to (done) or making a dentist appointment (involves being in front of both my work and personal calendars) or talking to someone about my mortgage which is coming due soon (Canadian mortgages need to be refinanced every 5 years). I'm trying to get soap made in exchange for the ring my friend made me, so I can send it down with mom instead of shipping it. And now my new truck needs a new serpentine belt, part of it tore off and is hanging out in there.

Basically I can kind of keep up with doing things, but not with thinking about them. I'd had a lot of space to think for awhile. I miss it? A lot is getting done but I don't get to be fully inside the activities or inhabiting them. I also don't necessarily get to arrange them how best I'd like.

On the other hand it's making for a much more bearable extended stay with mom, I'm just not home or have the bandwidth to be annoyed when she puts the lemon juicer away in the mixer bowl (?) or whatever. I can start playing "where did she put that object" when she leaves.

And meanwhile I'm taking Friday off to spend time here before they leave on Saturday.

Meanwhile days are getting shorter, mud is getting colder, there is frost in the mornings but no snow yet. Mom is tidying up a bunch of stuff in the yard, some of which is pretty welcome. The stove is keeping the house lovely warm as long as a couple windows stay cracked open. It feels like brewing and baking time.

So my dad is crazy. I don't have a ton of interest in trying to diagnose him, but his behaviour is well outside anything even near normal in a society. He hasn't really held a job. He has initiated and attempted to initiate a lot of very weird lawsuits. He writes relationship-revenge books and self-publishes them. He didn't mow his lawn for 24 years so now the mouldering house inside is invisible. He knows how things should be done. He's That Guy running in local politics. Etc.

Two of my three brothers are crazy. They have been institutionalized in various ways, they're on psychiatric meds, etc. They've experienced psychosis, breaks with reality, etc.

My third brother isn't crazy.

He didn't live with dad when the other ones did. He had a pretty reasonable but sorta bouncy career trajectory. He hasn't had mental health Incidents, maybe a bit of depression like everyone. He works in trades, he's starting to supervise now. He's married. And.

He's been talking lately about how the news media is a vast conspiracy, I think in connection to wanting to vote for a far-right party in support of free speech.

He dropped it into a family chat and I'm having trouble even reading it because I'm terrified. This is the freeze response. It's an enormous trigger response, I literally do not know what is actually happening. We'd, I mean. If I was close with anyone of us it was him.

Please don't let this happen.

Please don't let him turn into my dad (though to be fair my dad supported the same political party I'm planning to vote for federally, so. But I'm just afraid. My body is afraid. I'm afraid of who dad was. I'm afraid of how much contempt he had for everyone who didn't serve him).

What I should do is listen and clearly state what I think: there are lots of frames in the world, there is always room for interpretation, and folks will always be interpreting in ways that they need to for various reasons. It's your job to parse all that and do your own interpretation. It's your job to be knowledgeable in the things you care about. And people having other frames, or multiple frames existing, doesn't mean there's a conspiracy or that things need to be squashed. It just means that there are people.

Mom is handling it cautiously and with real grace and integrity.

Everyone in the world is people, my brother. They're not objects set to willfully obstruct you. They're people. Inside they are just. Like. You. Don't go down dad's road.

My philosophy around removing things from my life is: replace them with something better first. It's easier to go towards a thing than away from it. It's easier to displace than to carve out an absence.

So I've been reaching out to people.

I reached out to a podcaster about tomatoes. I reached out to my Uncle Dave about how his sending me science books when I was a kid meant a lot to me, and how I'm happy now doing sciencey stuff. They both answered, and I need to answer back. Emails are a demand, even when they're a joy.

I reached back to my mom, who's finally not mid-ocean and who sent me a "happy birthday, I love you, how do you feel about the turning 40 thing?" message. We're texting back and forth a bit. She says her life got significantly happier after 50. This accords with my sense of aging: I get better at doing life, so life gets better.

I reached out to the person I maybe click with best? my friend Kelsey, and we chatted online about a bunch of stuff. It was like the biggest weight possible off. We can talk about important intense things, social trends, suicide, mental health, crafting, the world as a provider. We share values and both really value each other.

I should return the emails; then I can get more back. I should put reaching out to Kelsey in my calendar. I should answer my mom.

This is the web I need and have needed, the one that gives me resilience when the operation to remove a lump on my side is a little more intense than they expected and they have to pump more freezing in midway through while blood runs across my belly (now my tattoo, which is ecclesiastes 3.1-3.13, has strikethrough across "to mourn" which I view as an omen) and then the trailer hubs overheat on the one day I have to get grain and I need to drop it off at the mechanic and find an alternate feed source for a week when all I want to do is sleep.

Just having folks in the background makes it easier.

I've been tapering my pills to one per day and although I'm sleeping a lot a lot more I'm feeling more calm and capable, more like myself.

The weather is bouncing, we're back to warm after a bunch of cold after a bunch of warm after a bunch of cold after a bunch of warm. We've been having rain.

I've been getting a big mixing bowl of raspberries every day and making raspberry shrub.

Tomatoes keep trickling in.

There's a lot more to write about, but the sun came out and I'm tired. This daily write isn't soaring like words sometimes do. Even so it remains here as a monument to my future self: the people I want are there. Make room for them. There's no need to waste mental space on folks who are a poor fit.