Greenstorm's Journal

In past years they talked about fire on the landscape. This year the landscape is fire. Small fires that started during the lightning in June and July and didn't have enough people to put them completely out flared up in August and even the beginning of September and their outlines are creeping across the https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map map. No doubt if I circle back to this post in future years that link will be defunct, but right now it's very lively. All the international firefighters have gone home; most are in the southern hemisphere where their skills will be needed, and where our folks will soon go to help. But. Our fires aren't out, we're only getting a sprinkle of rain, and Canadian firefighters are burnt out and demoralized, in part because of the high number of deaths this year. Most years no one dies.

At this point it's likely that both the drought will continue in stage 4 or 5 for a third year (when in fact most of BC hasn't hit level 4 or 5 in the history of the system previously), and that the fires will go underground into the duff, the forest floor which decomposes so slowly up here and the peat in all the wetlands that dot the landscape, and they'll pop up as soon as the snow is gone.

That used to matter to me. The Waste Land still reverberates in my head moment to moment:

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Not that we have cicadas here. But the thing is.

Last week I was hooked up to electrodes for 19 hours. I slept, and then I napped four times, two hours apart. After each nap, after half an hour, someone would rap lightly and then open the door a crack, letting the light in, and say "good morning". I don't think that's happened since I was a child? Then she would ask, "did you sleep? Did you dream?"

I don't know if I slept. I think I did. Isn't the point of sleep that you're unconscious, so you're not aware of it? In November I'll talk to the doctor who will interpret the results, and he'll let me know whether my assessment of whether I slept lines up with whether I actually slept. I'm curious. There were a potential 5 naps, and if I fell asleep in less than 8 minutes in at least two of them, and entered REM sleep within a short time after falling asleep, that's a narcolepsy diagnosis. They sent me home after 4 naps, which I believe to mean they got clear information one way or another, so one more nap would not make a difference to the findings. So either at least two, or zero, met the criteria.

I'm genuinely curious. The whole experience also basically flooded my PDA coping mechanisms for the week: I had to prep the farm, drive in for a certain time, bring a day's worth of food, be confined in a place and kinda forcibly relax myself, then live life in 1.5 hour chunks with those half hour naps in between. I had trouble doing anything else.

The idea of it being or not being narcolepsy isn't stressful. What was stressful was that day there were anti-LGBTQ+ protests across my country, and counter-protestors. Someone I know ended up in the hospital, and it kind of threw off my last nap. Someone threw a rock at her head.

Over the last several days I've learned that two more of my people were injured: one just bruised, from having a full waterbottle thrown at them, and one punched in the face.

There were protestors in my town. I don't know if there were counter-protestors. I was in this room, you see, with electrodes attached.

I might be able to shrug that off, but tomorrow and the next day I've signed up to help present to some high schoolers about the non-stereotypical parts of forestry: how ecosystems are connected, how figurative shit flows downhill and ends up in riparian areas so they're a good litmus test for how the system is doing, how it's important to always monitor so we can make decisions from a place of knowledge. I have a couple fun stories to back it up: how beavers were airdropped into a valley to successfully fireproof it ( https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/environment/2015-01-14/parachuting-beavers-into-idahos-wilderness-yes-it-really-happened ), how willow evolved in waterways to be broken off by floods and then the pieces float down the river and root, colonizing raw soil and turning an environmental liability into a strength. We were going to wade around in a creek, look at the fish, and count insects and talk about abundance vs diversity.

The protests were about keeping talk of people like me out of schools. Letting kids know that folks like me, genderweird and with love for folks outside whatever normative bullshit, that's called pedophelic grooming, child abuse, all that. You probably know the drill by now.

Yeah, if I wore a rainbow shirt to the thing I could maybe help out a kid. But.

I'm partly angry. You don't want me in your schools? Don't expect volunteer labour from me. Don't expect me to support you in maintaining your normal of having kids stay in your community supporting your economic bullshit.

And I'm partly scared. But when I'm scared and angry my power move is to come out loudly and basically say "yeah, are you all talk, or are you going to try and enact consequences"

Which. A coworker just came by and asked how I was, and I explained the above to her, and the organizer of the event walked by, and I said I was basically at the point of wearing a rainbow shirt and introducing myself as "they/them" and coming out at work properly and she was very supportive of both. So. But it's not something that can be taken back.

Anyhow. Last week was a mess, this week is a mess, we're getting overcast skies but bits of drizzling rain.

There were two club meetings this week, simultaneous, the clay and the garden clubs. One was shorter than the other so I flitted back and forth. At the garden club someone who is deeply respected in the community for being from an old family and making paintings went on a multi-minute tirade about how awful my house and yard look, full of "geese and ducks and garbage", and that she was thinking of calling the district on me. It went on long enough that everyone else there was very uncomfortable for quite some time while she was talking, then there was a long silence.. Like, this wasn't a short outburst, it was ignoring very loud "shut up" social cues from everyone else there for those long stretched-out seconds.

I want to do pottery. I want to make beautiful bowls imprinted with goose feathers that say things like "one girl's flight is another lady's garbage" and "the garbage is always greener". I want to do a series of heart-shaped cups with a rainbow of blues on them that say "I exist. I still exist."

I want to make rock-shaped red bowls that cut you when you pick them up that say "there is no water, there is only rock" with tiny hints of glossy blue glaze deep in the cracks.

I want to do this work with the kitten sitting on the back of my neck as I sit at the wheel, as he is wont to do, drawing blood as he gets older and heavier. I want to do this work with my dog sitting behind me on the dog bed and occasionally sighing. I want to go sit with the silly chickenlings, the silkies and showgirls and my chantecler lines, and turn off my mind and watch them peck around.

Instead tomorrow I go down and tell kids that the world is all connected and that as humans we have a responsibility to be involved, to know the consequences of our actions.

That's all.

That's been less than a week. That's all.

I'm still stuck on the William Meredith poem, About Morning, but don't want to repost it so soon. I went back looking for a quote in my poetry archives the other day and found dozens I'd forgotten I'd collected; on fb I'm going to do a poem a day through June to dust some off.

I'd still like, so much, to collect all these into a physical volume I could leaf through. The serendipity of opening a book to any page and finding just the right thing, I want that with my collection of poems. Every once in awhile I think about hiring someone to wade through the poetry tag, pull out all the poems, and format them similarly for me but it's one more of those money things. Property taxes are due, my deck is sagging seriously this spring, and I've already practically replaced half my house.

I have a lot to write about but I sat down to write because I learned that Josh uses at least close to the right pronouns for me in conversation with at least one of his friends. It felt really good. I've seen my real pronoun out in the wild a couple times now; I thought I might have to wait years or even decades before the kids these days did all their activism work and it could trickle back into my life. I guess by the time it happens it will have been years but maybe not decaades? And I've gone from writing nonbinary to nonbinary/xenogender to just xenogender in write-in gender boxes that aren't associated with work or the doctor's office (those ones just get nonbinary) so I'm getting more comfortable with specificity under that umbrella.

In all cases it's Pride month and I've never really felt included in it before; this year I do. This year I need that celebration of commonality, the push for extended supportive community, the reminders that I am part of something bigger and I'm alright as I am. It's like getting postcards touched by other humans when I've been living alone on the moon. It's hopeful.

Meanwhile I finally got my tiller- well, I need to actually start it, but put together and I have the transmission fluid and one of them is gonna work, dammit. I just hope the big one does. Now I know the routine on a new machine: run 5 hours, change oil, continue. I do not know how long tilling my garden will take, but I know I want to get everything in today. Well, at least all the corn, peas, and greens. Tomorrow can be tilling for tomatoes and squash, Monday can be planting, if need be. I need to step out and get feed a bunch today so hopefully that doesn't eat up the whole day.

Yesterday I spent the day with J, I made breakfast, he fixed the shifters on my bike (I am so grateful I got to skip learning that skill from scratch), we drove up to some cliffs I was curious about in the bush and looked around, we came back to his place and talked a bunch. I mean, we're both talkers, it's what we do, and it's lovely. There's a qualitative difference between talking to someone when they're remote, over the phone or whatnot vs in person, and I just-- I don't know. As is the way of things it makes me miss Josh and poking around and doing projects and talking with him. I'm remembering the camping trip we took where Josh built a little smoker out of fragments of an old homestead and we cooked our salmon for dinner over it and I bathed in the freezing lake white with glacial flour and we slept in the back of the Land Cruiser. I miss those. I wonder what this new thing will be. It won't be that, it will be its own thing, we will see how it settles.

There is one other person in town I could seek out to cook interesting things with, now that I think about it. She is the person who hooked me on Little Sheep hot pot. I guess I'm limited when I don't invite people over here. I guess I should get my house in order, and my fencing in order, so I can get folks here without worrying about the dogs.

But in the meantime my bike is working and I have my garden and it's sunny out, blue skies with no clouds and little birds chirping-- almost too sunny to work in long.

My mind feels quieter. I guess I do just need to talk and talk and talk with people sometimes, just to be in space and talk and talk. This restful feeling is the same as the feeling my body gets when I've done such a hard workday, 10k through the bush over blowdown or hauled several tons of rock. When you lie down to rest at such times gravity is such a comfortable cradle. Right now the tiny familiar noises of my house, hydroponic plant setup and geese, are a cradle for my relaxed and well-worked mind. Going into the sun and wrestling with the tiller will shift me into my body and there will be balance.

Today, then, is a good day. It's been awhile.

The tree of life with humans as the pinnacle of evolution is basically just an iteration of "[humans shall] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Assuming a single instance was the initiation of life, the lineage of every thing now living has made it through the same number of years through a variety of methods. There's no pinnacle. There never has been.

But apparently this worldview runs deep. Even the folks who claim to hold animals equal to humans usually do so only when anthropomorphizing those animals. And.

The other day I got involved in an online comment thread. It's a well-moderated space that makes efforts to be inclusive. The subject was pronouns. Of course someone said, as they always do, "of course you should call people 'they' if they want, as long as [you're not calling them/they aren't asking to be called] 'it'."

For the first time somewhere public, from the cover of deep anonymity, I replied something like, my pronoun is 'it' and while you should never call someone that who doesn't want you to, and while I don't really think I can be out about it, there is a time and a place for that pronoun.

It's a friendly space. There was a little concern trolling and some questions I could answer pretty easily. The concern trolling often looks like this: that's dehumanizing and it'll lead people to think less of you or other, generally, of people who use different pronouns or have different gender presentations.

Even someone I know well once tried to reassure me that I was very human.

I've been chewing on that today I realized: it's because in those people's minds, God put humans at the pinnacle. It's because so many people believe that dehumanizing is the same as demeaning, of falling down off that pedestal of dominion.

It's not.

There's no pedestal.

And that probably begins to get at one of many reasons why that pronoun feels more comfortable for me.

Felt my first actual gender euphoria today, which I had read was a thing but apparently it actually is.

I didn't know it could feel so much like I was supposed to/allowed to exist when even remotely thinking about or being near human spaces.

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.

Well, I've been struggling with some things the last little while.

One of them is gender.

I'd been hoping to kind of... keep this cat in the bag for as long as possible, I guess? Because often the more you get used to being treated well around something, the harder it is to go back to the world where you're treated poorly. So I knew there was stuff there, but I've been leaving it be.

A bunch of things happened last weekend that mean it's much more difficult to let be. Lots of tiny things, mostly coincidental. Or, maybe they're not that tiny.

A was up for a long weekend. His other partner is non-binary and he's respectful of their pronouns. But. There's a dynamic and I'm not sure how to describe it. I dated him a long time ago when there was no other option for me than female. I don't think it's carryover from that. But sex is very specifically absolutely the place where I feel least like a "woman", where I feel like my assigned gender fits me well. I am pretty good with the physical parts that make up my body. That's not the issue. The issue is that if I feel like my partner is having sex with while thinking of me as a woman I feel some combination of turned off, buried in a deep dark hole somewhere, and violated.

Those are some pretty strong words. It can be a pretty strong feeling.

And the thing is, I don't really know what it is that sets off this feeling or this dynamic. Certainly the very traditional woman-as-sex-vending-machine dynamic does it, but there's also more than that.

And I don't have this feeling or this dynamic with Tucker, instead with him I just feel like we're people doing neat things to each other's bodies even if it just looks like super traditional PIV-roll over-snuggle-sleep.

But I pretty much have felt this dynamic with everyone else for the last couple years. And I definitely feel it with A. And I don't know enough about it to really pull it out and know how to deal with it: can I ask him to avoid or do things? Can I avoid or do things myself? Will it pass with time?

So anyhow, he went home yesterday and I was listening to a podcast where some non-binary folks were talking about events that were "no cis-men" or "women, non-binary, femmes, and trans folks only" and one line came through: "they want people they think of as women". That really encapsulated a feeling I've got from the queer folks I know generally, which is basically that you're welcome if you're at least some kind of woman-ish in their secret minds. And that's why I don't go to those. I'm no longer playing that part, no matter how they want to be deniable to themselves.

And then I wandered back to work and there's an email about my large government body doing inclusiveness week. I read through an awful lot of materials, folks, and inclusiveness for women was celebrated, also there was indigenous and disability mention. Nothing for what maybe they'd call "gender diverse" individuals. There are roughly 30k people working for this entity. It'd be nice to have a group, like they have groups for people who do fitness or are racialized in specific ways or who like birdwatching. But, crickets.

And pronouns aren't where all this lives for me. I don't get more validation out of being called "they" than I do "she" or "he". I mean, I'd actually enjoy if folks could randomize their pronouns for me, but that's confusing and not gonna happen. So I don't have that easy band-aid fix. To be perfectly honest "it" would be great, but I am not going to fight that fight with anyone.

And the masculine parts of me definitely respond to every "men are trash" or whatnot that I see, so there's that.

Now that A is gone, I spent the night with Tucker and recalibrated, I'm just me in my space again and I'm feeling much better. But.

You know, I was talking about it being hard on the weekend and A asked if I'd rather this wasn't part of my makeup, if I wished I didn't have this off-norm bit. And of course I don't wish that. All the pieces that make me up work synergistically to create this powerful, harmonious, meaningful-feeling life. I can't imagine that I'd relate to the natural world, to humans, or even to my own culture in as satisfying a way if I were gender-siloed. What I feel like, though, is that sometimes the world fits me poorly, like when you buy the wrong pair of shoes you don't wish your feet were smaller but instead you wish you had shoes that fit. I'd like to see the world made a better, gentler fit for everyone.

So anyhow, that's a bit traumatic right now.