Greenstorm's Journal

The juxtaposition of pottery, data entry for work that requires mousing in a web entry form for each of thousands of entries, and carrying water in buckets to the animals has wreaked serious havoc on my right elbow. It hurts, but it hurts especially when I'm typing or right after carrying water. In some ways it's nice to have a familiar hurt when my body is doing strange things, but I do worry about losing use more than I have. So far it's just concentration when typing that suffers, functionally.

I haven't sold the pigs. I'd asked some folks to help me write up the ad and none of them did, so I relied on that instead of trying to sidestep PDA and grief and do it myself. That means I'm out of money -- worried about paying basic bills for the first time in maybe decades -- and hauling heavy water. The more important this is to do, the harder it is to bypass my PDA and do it. If I took a week off work I could probably manage but I do not have that week. I haven't been able to bear the thought of just shooting them all.

That said, this Friday and Saturday I am selling pottery for the first time at a little local sale, at the historic site at the original Fort. I have zero idea how it will go and no real expectations of selling a ton of stuff, but it would be nice.

I have thoughts about pottery, a lot of them, but pretty much only when I'm physically engaging with it. I don't have a visual memory. I have no idea what things look like if my eyes aren't on them. I could describe them pretty well if they were in front of me, but when I'm writing that doesn't really happen. I can collect only fragments here:

I use many different clay bodies -- clays -- and they all feel different and finish different. I love them, I love the contrast between the many surfaces that can be created from even just one clay and the quite different surface of glazes. I do not want to cover up the whole of anything with glaze, really.

I'm starting to have skills to create the shapes I want, instead of having them happen and then needing to stop before the piece collapses. Shape and line is fascinating, and when I sit down and do a set of pieces on the wheel each shape relates to the one before it in that set. For instance, I'll do a cylinder, then a classic vase curve, then invert it to a curved hourglass, like that. Those pieces, usually three to five, speak to each other and feel like a set in my mind even if they're different sizes and, obviously, different shapes.

Glazing is awkward and hasn't settled into a rhythm. I don't have a lot of space to store glazed pieces at the studio and every time I get in the glaze room other people come in and ask questions and want to do their own glazing. It's super understandable because glazing is weird and intimidating and we haven't had much instruction on it, and I am kind of positioned as the person who knows what I'm doing. I love answering these questions and helping.

But, I don't have a visual memory, and one doesn't have glaze buckets all open at once, and pieces need to dry between layers of glaze. So I would love to make series of several pieces where the glaze also relates to the other glazes and to the shape, but that requires an intense concentration and uninterruptedness I don't have. Right now everything is haphazard, "I know I like this combo" rather than "what best fits this series of shapes and how do I best show off the raw pottery as a highlight to glazes" let alone "how do I catch my poetry into these forms".

I suspect as people learn they will be able to work on their own and also answer other folks questions and I'll be able to find time to glaze when other people don't flock in.

There's a long time between shape creation and use of a vessel. Because of that long time and the burst nature of finished products -- the glaze kiln runs maybe once a month so I get several objects back at once -- it takes a long time to get feedback on the actual purpose of the item. I'm still creating in that time, with no feedback. I'm still iterating on a couple things I made in the summer without that actual use to direct me. It's an interesting feeling.

It's astonishing the number of things that can be made with clay that are actually useful. Not just cups and plates and knicknack holders but jars and dog dishes and shower caddies and shelves and rings and beads and buttons and so on. And wall sculpture. And signage.

I've made enough beautiful things that it's going to feel sad to part with them, but the ones I use are the flawed ones. Not sure if that's an aesthetic preference or if it's because I feel safe attaching to them or just because my first pieces tended to be flawed and I got into the habit of using them. It will be unusual and extraordinary, though, if people choose objects they like to use and then use them? That's a kind of sharing that doesn't happen with most things I make.

There is a weird and unnecessary chasm between pottery as a craft and pottery as an art in the community that's mostly erased in practice because of course it is, humans don't actually work that way, but exists in the discourse.

As in natural systems (how is our brain interpreting the world not a natural system?) edges are useful and intriguing.

I have always liked playing with the unexpected and will continue to do so.

My kitten, henceforward Bear, not only likes joining me on the wheel but also lounges among the drying pieces. We were joking that he's quality control, but actually two days ago he was lounging among the drying pieces, sniffed them all, and reached out to tip over and break... the ugliest one. He has never broken any others. So, fair enough.

Yesterday I said something to mom about clearing along a particular stretch of fence, close to the pigpen, and I pointed and gestured. When I came around later that day she'd cleared the bottoms of the spruce trees that blocked sightlines from the long straight stretch of road by my driveway into my front yard. I was upset, I told her not to touch the trees in my main yard, just the ones past the side fence along the road. I took her and pointed out more than once which areas were ok.

Today I just got home from work and she's cleared the evergreens that give three sets of neighbours a straight sightline to my back door, which is completely on the opposite side of the property from where I said it was ok to clear. I've been trying to brush up and block those sightlines for five years now. Those trees won't grow their bottom branches back, so they will never block those sightlines until they maybe get very very old and the branches sag, but they also are still alive so their roots are soaking up water and nutrients to block anything I might try to plant there.

One of my strong pushes on this property, especially lately with so many new neighbours moving into the area, has been to block off my neighbours' view so I don't have to dress up to monogamous sidewalk standards to leave my house and go out into my yard. Now, in 24 hours, I've lost a lot of that hoarded privacy to both my front and back doors.

I am livid. Angry, violated, and for some reason I've come up to my bedroom to type it out rather than kick this person off my property.

Honestly I do not know what the fuck is up with my mom. She's always been like this: last time she was here she took up my toilet to put in flooring late at night the day before she left, when I had to work the next day, so we were up late putting in flooring and then she yanked on the filler hose to the toilet and it leaked and I had to handle that on a low-sleep workday; she always breaks something or wrecks something or decides something is wrong and just enforces her will on my space and then is like "I was just helping" and doesn't seem sorry at all. This goes back even before she threw all my artwork into the garbage along with my passport when I was seventeen, "oops, wrong box" and I thought I had it handled. I thought if I gave her a long enough list of things to do she would stay distracted and not wreck anything but here we are. Dammit. Goddammit. And now I'm going away for a couple days and she'll be housesitting, what else is she going to destroy? I don't have the money to replace *things* she wrecks, and I don't have the fortitude to emotionally handle irreplacable things like my garden or my artwork or gods know what else.

I've explicitly told her not to bring goose eggs or eggs from under nesting ducks in, and she definitely brought in goose eggs the other day. The likelihood that one of them will be rotten and actively explode in the house and be impossible to clean is really high. But honestly her sheer creativity in making my stuff unusable is so impressive, I can't even guess what will have happened when I get home this time.

Plus the "please take this stuff to the thrift store, but bring back the bin, it's important, please bring me back the bin" and she, surprise, forgot the bin that she primed me with. I usually have to budget $50-$200 to replace and fix stuff when she's gone. Is this normal?

I am not ok right now. This is not ok.

It's also the epitome of kind of guilt-tripping me not to be angry, because she's done so much work and worked so hard, and- ugh. I hate this. I hate it.

I guess tomorrow I'll set her up to replace the decking on my front deck and, hm, muck out the goose shed? I need several days' worth of stuff to keep her busy. Maybe stain the side of the house, but that actually sounds super perilous, she'll probably paint over the windows or pull the new roof off to get it done. Honestly is there anything here that doesn't require supervision if someone doesn't have common sense?

Now I just want to cry again. My few safe spots on the property where I felt ok going out and not being watched, gone. I don't know what to do.

I've been really shattered at the idea of leaving Threshold, my home, the place I love and that loves me. I have been living in that grief and, like all grief, it's hard and it hurts and it's shattering and, oh. It's just hard.

So I pulled out my deck a little last night and talked to her. She said it's ok, that I'll be ok, that grief changes us but that we exist in life to be changed.

I had been thinking I might not be able to do this, but maybe I can.

I don't know. This is hard. I love my land.

I'd like to state, for the record, that any time I'm certain of an event or make a sure declarative about the future that thing will not come to pass. Homes, relationships, jobs, leaving, staying: in my life, if I come to completely expect something, it will not come to pass.

A&E have had a bid accepted on a property in the mid-north Vancouver Island. Everything happens for many reasons each with its own lens:

I. just. Said. That. I. Was. Staying. Here. My heart just believed it and I had less than a day of rest alone in this space after mom left and before they viewed the property.

Also it's spring and people are selling, so this was a reasonable time for this to happen after braking for the winter.

Also A&E have been waiting all winter and are more able to compromise on location, especially since Tucker (without telling anyone, but they got the message at least) removed his requirements from the search. It's pretty remote.

There are a lot of subjects to remove on the offer including sale of A&E's place (they have ten viewings this week), inspection, water test, and ability to get insurance.

I have not been there to walk it. After A&E's place has an accepted bid (if?) I'll fly down for a day or two to look it over, mark trees for clearing, mark fencelines, and then come back up here and live with Threshold for awhile longer. There's no way to go down before it's ready for the animals, after all.

Not having walked it I can't tell you about it. I can tell you about North Vancouver Island, though. It's intensely pacific northwest, west coast. It freezes in the winter intermittently, and not for many days at a time. It's heavy overcast to drizzly well over half the time; almost no one would recognise the rain as rain because not a lot of water tends to come down at once but it is always damp. It's a little dryer and sunnier in summer but less than you might think. Everything is green and smells like leaf mould and conifer and water. Summers are also cool; I'm not sure exactly how cool yet but I may not get much warmer than here. Thing is, it would be the same temperature as here but frost free for maybe twice as long. That introduces possibilities like yuzu and very hardy kumquats.

I don't really want to talk about it though? I'm here with Threshold, and I want to be here, and enjoy here. I don't want to spend my thoughts on places far away, though I do love the planning exercise. I want to be in the present moment because I love it here.

There's lots before this is completely sure: interpersonal, financial, legal. It may never happen, who knows? But it's looking likely at this moment. A&E will look over offers Thursday and until then I am so far outside my mind and my body I'm finding myself just standing places, staring, and it's hard to move.

There's a lot more to say about this. I wanted to put it down here though. Ahead of me may be this place without (yet) a name. I once again don't know what happens next.

Oh goodness, that's always so good.

My counselor is so affirming. She illuminates all the things I like in my life, the things that stabilize me, all the carrots dangling around that I could pursue. It's such good work. Clarifying.

I made a bunch of connections between the way Tucker punishes himself for having feelings and for not being how other people want him to be, the way my mind works more to restorative justice/accept differences and sometimes find humour, the way Tucker and I don't feel like we can comfortably and openly share emotionally (because he's always fighting feeling like he shouldn't have those emotions, and that if I have negative emotions about something he's done that he shouldn't have done the thing, rather than knowing that two different people will sometimes just have situations that lead to friction and that's ok), why talking with Kelsey is such a relief, and the fact that I am one of very few people in the world who genuinely likes myself and approves of myself.

Kelsey has been on my mind so much lately and I got to talk about that.

Gosh the world would be easier if everyone could start from "this is who I am and this is who you are, how shall we proceed from that" rather than "maybe if I hurt myself and you enough things will be fixed"

We don't get that world, though, without making it first.

I have this small well of security and comfort inside from finally feeling like myself again for the first time maybe since the breakup. I like myself, and I'd missed being this person.

Ok. Time to play in the kitchen. I need to put up some pickles too.

Tonight I'm thinking about the end of my relationship with Michael.

We had written to each other, back and forth. We had spiral-bound notebooks and I'd write in one and give it to him, then he'd write and give it to me. I don't remember how many notebooks it was. Over time he wrote less and less.

When it was over I wrote so much. What I wrote then feels so resonant now, eleven years later, that I don't have anything left to add to it. I'm hurt tonight but my past self wrote this to me more than a decade ago, wrote this to my self, and it sets up some sort of harmonic ringing that is vibrating my bones. Time collapses. Space collapses and I can't feel my body. I just read what before I wrote:

( two entries worth of past writing )

Over and over I've posted this quote I received from Ryan, which he attributes to Hitherby Dragons:

“So what is Hell?”

“A place where there’s something you can’t let go of,” I said.

Now I try to climb back into my body, finish dinner, brush my teeth, set things out so I remember them for tomorrow at work. I want to sit here like a stone monument to myself all night, staring into space, reading old journal entries, reading old poetry. It's eleven years later, though. Somewhere in that time I've picked up the strength to shut the lid of the laptop just a little bit sooner.

This post is heavy. It's even heavy on my hands as I type.

When I moved to Vancouver I slowly networked into a wonderful, vibrant, unconventional, supportive community of folks. For a little while each I was particularly close to two community hub-type people and by bringing them together the community grew. We took care of each other in various ways and though the connections between individuals waxed and waned there was a general sense that someone would have my back and that I could contribute by having someone else's back. It was large enough that there were generally people I didn't know around, but small enough that the regulars could enforce some of the social norms. I was able to act freely in that group with regards to speech, clothing, interests-- I didn't share the main tech-type interests of folks, but I didn't feel policed and I felt that folks were interested in what I had to say.

There were complications in the group, of course. There was a bit of a fresh meat dynamic with pretty manic pixie dream girl types. People moved from center to fringe and back again as they moved to harder-to-reach parts of the city or went head-down into new relationships. Regular group interactions, movie nights a lot of the time, got handed around but there would be fallow periods as folks burnt out on hosting or as Vancouver housing prices precluded big enough spaces to gather. Relationship drama happens in all groups and this group was no different. Consent got bumped around sometimes, as it does; my experience was that these bumps tended to be handled ok but sometimes they were just ignored.

This group was essentially my home for eight or twelve years. It was part of why I believed the world was generally good, that people were generally accepting, that if I was matter-of-fact and open about who I was that it could be normalized. When new people came into the group they got told that when I was topless it wasn't about sex and to be cool with it. That meant a lot. My kind of playfulness was allowed to exist. Did I mention I didn't feel policed?

In hindsight I think the group was pretty full of neurodiverse types, but that isn't so relevant.

Anyhow, I went to school and it took up a ton of my time so I spent less with the group. For awhile I remember we used twitter to make spontaneous meetups happen. Folks began to bleed away from the group, to have kids, to spend more time with other folks. Regular events weren't hosted as often except for big holiday parties and those often felt more like catching up with folks than being inside a living network. Some of the big personalities left or veiled themselves. I went to school again, to university, and had no energy to engage; my world was also starting to diverge.

Eventually I kept connections primarily through social media, even before I left. For years now that's been the main form of contact I have with these folks. I've been thinking of them as a loose group still, as a bunch of folks who share values and who have each other's back. I've been clinging to that.

But it's just not true. When I left Vancouver kept changing at the pace it always had. Of my dozen favourite restaurants maybe one still exists. I could no longer find a transit route or even a bike route from place to place without significant help from maps because the streets and busses just aren't there. And that social group I was part of dissolved, scattered across the country and skirled into little whirlpools of people who no longer interacted much.

Some of those folks went mostly offline and I don't know them anymore really. Some of those folks drifted away in their interests or shut me out. And some of those folks I retained and kept interacting with on social media. And.

My social media stuff has become increasingly... I hate to use this word, but toxic. It's regular for folks there to express glee in the pain of the folks they consider their opponents. One of the values I shared with these folks was concern for inequality, was the desire to help lift and support those who were at the fringes. With that in mind I ignored this shift in social media, I told myself that it was just how these folks presented with the specific incentives of online. It was social media that was the problem, there were still plenty of folks who had my back.

But now I need to admit that the change is bigger than that. Compassion and support have calcified into rigidity and exclusion. The pain of bad groups is celebrated; progress and breakthroughs are not. Deviations from or questions of the received wisdom of the group are not alright. The world is divided into them and us.

I've tolerated all this believing that I had to in order to keep connections with these folks but if this is what the connection looks like it's nothing worth keeping. Maybe it's true that in person, able to read each others' faces, conversation could flow freely and there would be room for diversity and variation. I'm not currently in that position though. It's time to reassess everyone on their own, recent, merits rather than leaning on a decade-or-two old ghost of their behaviour.

I've known it was time to find or build a new community for a couple years now. Before covid I was planning to start harvest festivals on this space; hosting is a marvelous tool for both curation of folks and influencing the tone of the gathering. My pagan community has been excellent when I'm in contact with them, they've been online a fair bit during covid, but most of those people live on the other side of the US border. It's great to visit but it can't be the heart of the community I need.

I need... barter, being able to know who needs help and contribute what I have to help. I need many-hands-make-light-work days where a goal is achieved. I need folks to have joy in their lives, and to be able to talk about that. I need folks who are kind. I need folks who can verbalize their boundaries. I need folks who are capable of celebration of good and action towards grave issues simultaneously. I need a place where there's room for different neurotypes, for different interests, for different skills and philosophical approaches to problems. I need a place where folks know each other well enough to notice and celebrate personal growth. I need to feed people. I need to be able to go somewhere when I'm upset and have someone listen to me. I need a space that accepts nuance.

I thought I had these things.

It's heavy, heavy, heavy to realize I don't.

But.

It's a relief too. I've been feeling lonely and unsupported. That's not just me. It's that-- I am lonely and unsupported in a bunch of ways.

Time to pick out some of the truly lovely people I do know and curate a space. Somehow. What even is a space when we're scattered across a continent?

I always do better once I know what the work is to do. Now I know. Now to figure out how to get started.

Ok, let's see if I can get back to some freewrites for awhile.

YChang's "The Struggle Continues" is gone from the internet, felled by the end of Adobe's flash player. I don't even remember how many years ago I found that, it was definitely before youtube, definitely before videos were a regular thing.

The struggle continues.

This morning I am unknotting my muscles one by one. I am breathing, in for three, hold for three, out for three, hold for three: like that. Lower my right shoulder a quarter-inch. Relax that side of my trapezius. Breathe again.

The sky is milky grey and dripping. Sometimes there's a single metallic drip sound from my chimney. There is a rooster out there calling the food call and a duck calling, maybe flirtily to a drake?

I am unknotting my mind a piece at a time. It's safe here. Without central heating the fridge is my usual source of background noise and it is blessedly quiet right now. I can hear the spaciousness of this main room, of the cathedral ceiling and out into the empty cluttered kitchen. A car drives by on the road. The highway is, for the moment, also silent.

I am letting my mind fall open like a mouse poking its nose out of a hole: twitching, waiting for cats. I am letting my mind fall open like a flower blooming in a jar: petals opening one-by-one to lie against the walls, a small bud eventually rumpling outwards to pack itself into the space.

It's cold here. My arms and thighs are tight with goosebumps. Yesterday I was too hot, too cold, too hot again, lightheaded, my arms had no strength. The latter is normal for me on and off, the former is not.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Put my shoulders back down a fraction of an inch; they'd risen again. Breathe in. There's resistance in my sternum, a prickling pressure that is only suffocating when I read it as physical. Breathe out. Breathe in.

The sky is dripping. I want to go lie between the rows of my tomatoes on the soil. I want to curl my knees up to my chest and feel warmth coming up into me from the ground, stored from the sun, but the ground is not warm right now and the sky is dripping. Once I've hauled a blanket out there to wrap around me it's just not the same.
( This is a long, stream of consciousness write )
My hands seem too heavy to move on the keys, maybe in part because of the cat on my arms. Maybe in part it's because I'm coming to the space that needs a pause.

It's ok. I'll still be here when I get back.

The first of the mass graves of children was officially excavated in Canada this week.

Everywhere people are talking about the 215 children found in that grave, from age 3 on up. Everywhere they are grieving and honouring.

I've always lived a little in the future. Working in forestry, on the landbase with the Indigenous Nations whose children these are, I've had to learn about our history with these Nations both professionally and personally. I live in a town that's very Indigenous, maybe 30-40% of the folks in town depending on how you look at it?

And so I know that 215 is the tip of a very large iceberg.

Canada's policy of removing children and sending them to these residential schools lasted a very long time. A very high percentage of these children died, the figure I've heard most recently was around 25%. 1 in 4. The abuse in these schools was horrific so it's not just that these kids died. These kids died far from home while enduring the kind of tortures Christians describe in their hell. They were buried by their surviving siblings and friends and other fellow children who then went home and, having experienced only institutional abuse sometimes for a couple generations, tried to parent their children.

Mourning these 215 children, seeing them, is a release. They are loved in death, as they were no doubt loved at a distance by powerless parents in life. But there are so many to come, so many, so many.

I was abused a little as a kid, not enough to really grasp the enormity of this but enough to know that with enough support I could come back from it and find love and connection and trust in the world again. The Nations as a whole are doing this, their people slowly knitting themselves back towards wholeness.

I had that chance so I know what it would have meant to not have it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that no one in the world would save me, that there were people cruel enough to make that happen and no kindness was powerful enough to stop it. I know what it would have meant to die knowing that the balance of the world was against me.

None of this is new. The exact numbers aren't known because when too many kids at these schools started dying Canada stopped keeping count. The Catholics who ran the schools may have numbers but they aren't telling. The official, likely very low numbers, are in the thousands. This has been sitting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission website since 2015, along with some calls to action to try and fix things (this is the "reconciliation" Canada talks about). I had to learn about it in a couple different places in school, and in communities with any reasonable sized First Nation population it's just known; many of these folks went to the schools and basically all their parents did, after all.

But there's something about seeing this exact number going around, 215, that's so hard for me. Maybe it's the press of the rest of them, waiting.

There's nothing about this that was ok. Genocide, knowledge loss, family separation, abuse, death, removing people from their ecosystems: none of it was ok.

This week I am carrying grief for the as-yet-uncounted dead.

It's bigger than I am.