Greenstorm's Journal

Equinox has passed. Fittingly, this is the week where snow is warming into liquid water. Geese group up and each group guards its puddle, splashing and spraying water and posturing and calling to each other. Everything is dripping. The driveway ice has dropped two inches, leaving a tarp and my truck and any other obstructions to the sun sitting on pillars while streamlets run down and back to disappear under the snow. The fences have grown a foot as the snow slowly subsides: on my one window that was covered I can see it consolidate from fluffy white into shimmering blue ice underneath. This is how glaciers are formed.

I celebrated this equinox by loving things, gently and carefully: my animals, which I've been practicing with, and people just a little around the edges. Maybe I'm waiting to love my garden because it's such a huge project, such a huge part of my heart, but it's beginning to seem possible. It feels like learning to walk: one step at a time, sometimes I try and find that I'm back on the ground, and sometimes I cross a distance without noticing until afterwards.

I went out and shoveled the sundeck without any clothes on at solar noon and my skin couldn't remember what to do: do we sunburn with the sun still so low in the sky? How do we deal with this kind of radiant heat? It was lovely. It's reached 8 or 10 degrees out even.

I'm getting a little less sleepy. I'm not functional, but I do have moments when I'm beginning to feel close to fully awake. I still can't think well. I've never had good working memory, but for a long time I've been able to repurpose the part of my mind that forms words right before I speak them for that use. Now that is gone too. I can't perform data manipulations in my head at all: I can't do 10 + 12 unless I write down the 10 and the 12, for example, because I can't remember the original numbers plus do the operation in my head at the same time, but if I'm looking at them I can easily perform the operation.

Doctor's appointments continue, slowly.

Hazard has been roaming outside again, and his coat is soft instead of heavy. I watched him jump atop a pallet the other day, and when it fell over he shook himself off and complained to me. It's good to see. I was worried about him and now I'm not, though I suspect I'll need to prepare for next winter to keep him sufficiently entertained.

Whiskey continues to snuggle me relentlessly and Demon bestows the favour of his lounging, purring attention twice a day or so. Whiskey has definitely won in the last several years: he gets to sit on me more or less when he wants now, laptop or not, though he respects mealtimes.

Avallu comes in for snuggling most evenings, waiting outside the dog door and distressing the cats by blocking it with his back, and Thea comes in many mornings. This weather makes Thea ecstatic: she runs in joyous circles around the house and poor Avallu has more invitations to play than he can handle. He'll come put his side against my leg and lean, looking at me for help as she rockets around. She's dug a bed beside a large square haybale, the 3' x 8' ones, and has set up most of her housekeeping there. As livestock guardian dogs they have such a stable temperament and they are usually very low-energy unless there's a threat. I rarely get to see them act like playful puppydogs, and it's fun. As the season heats up they'll seek shade and slow down again.

I sit on the couch with the cats and watch "vocal coach reacts to--" videos and sing along. Last night I made a chocolate cake to go with the can of pork stew I pulled out of the pantry. I've permanently opened the curtains to the patio door and I've even cleaned the porcelain parts of the bathroom. Each day is incrementally healing. It's been so painful; it's just good to not be in pain, and so good to be actively loved by living creatures who accept me absolutely.

The days are getting better maybe but I'm not keeping track. We're all tilting towards the sun together but I'm not thinking about it right now. It's just a day that's actually ok, and then another.

Some things feel too delicate to talk about. There's movement, flow, warmth like a slight stirring but words are too heavy to sit on the current and they fall to the ground, dead, missing the actual point.

But this is a journal and I want the thing to be here. So. I'll approach this a little bit sideways.

I've been wading into the small-scale plant breeding community a tiny bit. I've been hanging out on the OSSI forum and that sort of thing.

I did some variety trials last year, mainly tomato but also wheat, corn, barley, squash.

I'm planning to be on this land awhile and build genetics that suit it. Also Northern BC and the North in general needs this work. Short-season plants are useful everywhere anyhow since they can often successfully pull off a crop before (insert your natural disaster here). So it makes sense to do this both in community and personally.

I've been looking for community generally.

Several months ago an online course about landrace breeding by the face of the movement floated by. It was free at the time, he and the person who put together the course were looking for folks to give feedback. I ignored it since I didn't have time to take a course and didn't really want to do feedback anyhow.

Recently the course floated by again for $15. I'd just renewed my mortgage and so I knew I'd be gardening here this year and I'm feeling increasingly like I may actually be here the long time I'd hoped. I'd been enjoying my involvement with the Canadian seed swap group and gardeners online generally. It's starting to be time to think about seed starting and I've been acquiring seeds and cataloguing my saved and leftovers from last year and starting to think about garden design. And, now and always, I love talking about my garden and the lessons it's taught me and my plans for the future; the space I'd been missing in those gardening groups was talking about the scope of my project and the way grexes and landraces don't live in the same descriptive space as cultivars.

So I bought the course and did it in two days. It was largely structured around videos, with some readings. The first readings were known information to me: descriptions of what a landrace is, why genetic variability and hyperlocal selection in populations is useful, descriptions of some of the Lofthouse projects. I can't tell how well they did on that because I knew this stuff already, it was just comfy reading of stuff I'd been putting together slowly over the last many years and decades of growing.

Then they got into practicals: how to evaluate, how to field-record, sample video of assessing tomatoes and squash etc and determine what and how much seed to save. They talked about goals for the landrace. There was some discussion of how to handle small spaces (not my issue!) and in all cases emphasis on local community involvement.

And THEN I got an email saying that the first monthly zoom call for folks who took the course would be last weekend. Its designed for folks who are doing this work to ask questions and solve problems together. I hopped on it and it was just--

I don't know how to say any of this. Joseph Lofthouse, the guy who heads up this thing, wears dirty skirts made from ripping open jeans and sewing them back together, and he has visible nipples through his shirt and bare feet in some of the videos. I think he's taken a vow of poverty as well? The call had folks from Poland, Finland, PNW, Australia, southern US, Scotland, more Canadian folks, just a really mixed bag of ethnicities and plenty of older folks as well as younger ones.

It's a space where I feel ok. I feel ok to be there I feel ok to be my physical self and not like I might slip up. I feel ok to talk about the things that are on my mind, which are 70% gardening. I feel like I can offer useful things, advice and seeds and wonderment at what people are thinking about and achieving, and like folks have useful things to offer me whether it's advice or just puzzlement over weird bits or seeds or just camaraderie. Some folks have tried a hundred more kinds of squash than I have! Some have tried none! And I feel perfectly ok leaving (she/it) on my zoom name there. It's just... ok.

I don't have to be performing hipsterism or gender or lifestyle in any particular way. I can express my enthusiasm and folks share it. We have similar background contextual information, so we can talk about details instead of filling in the scaffolding.

Someone showed the seed library she set up in her local actual library for folks to take. I'd been thinking of dropping off some seeds at my library for folks, since it doesn't look like there'll be a seedy Saturday seed exchange this year! That's awesome.

Oh, but anyhow, after the call and the course I realized there was access to a forum as part of the course. A bunch of the folks in the forum were on the call, but not all. It's a very young forum but pretty responsive. So that's hopeful.

And the course was maybe six hours of providing background so that I can maybe give it to folks and then be able to talk about what I'm doing with them afterwards, and have them understand.

The part of my heart that led me to get that first cactus on my 5th birthday, that made friends with the violets and cherry tree and lunaria in my little garden when I was 7, that planted shrubs and trees in houses that would never be my own and put a mutabilis rose in the community garden since there everyone could enjoy it and I could never have it, that built a greenhouse in the backyard of a rental house with every scrap of money that didn't go into food, that left the valley for my first solo vacation to go to a permaculture course-- that part of my heart has always been very solitary but especially lately.

Bits of my heart were fluttering with feeling kinship around some of the Indigenous seedkeepers for whom the plants are relatives; who have a kinship and personal emotional bond with their plants. I recognised myself in that but I am not Indigenous to this place nor do I come to my seeds based on bloodline or lineage; they come to me and we form our partnership over time. My life, like Indigenous seedkeepers, is about helping the seeds along. Unlike them, this separates me from my community and I don't have history to draw on around it.

Now, though, I feel like I have a place to stand with my love for these plants unveiled. Many of these folks also relate to plants as creatures, as living things to relate with. They're not mere background; they're not just means to the end. They are a joy and a meaning in themselves.

I've needed this place so much. I'm hopeful. I'm not certain, and I know nothing endures, but I am hopeful.

And hope wants to move quietly and cautiously in me so as not to be disappointed, but it also wants to shout and run and share.

So anyhow: if you're at all interested maybe take the Growing Modern Landraces at https://growingmodernlandraces.thinkific.com/

While I hear rumours that some folks go out of their way to be terrible to other people, sometimes for a long time, I don't meet many folks like that. Even my dad -- who objectively spent nearly seventeen years after the divorce making mom's life hell as a nearly full-time job, including writing multiple self-published books about her and getting known on a first name basis at the courthouse and police station because of the number of times he took her to court/called her in -- didn't conceive of his behaviour that way.

Folks are usually trying to get the minimum amount they think they can survive on, they're trying to get what they feel to be fairness, they're trying to get what they believe they're owed. They're looking for safety and for security. Some people believe that they can get security and care through kindness and through giving security and care; some people believe they're safer when they're open and known. I'm generally in this group by nature but not by early reflex (dad trained us pretty well) and the more I surround myself with folks who are also in this group the more my reflexes are aligned with my nature. Surrounded by similar people, this strategy works.

Other people believe in zero sum. They believe no one would offer them security and care freely. This shows up in a couple ways but the effect is usually manipulative. Maybe the way to get someone to be kind is to present only the most carefully curated and limited self, aligned with what you think the other person wants, so they will never leave you. Maybe the way to feel secure when you've done something harmful is to shift the discourse to how much hurt or panic you feel at the idea of having harmed someone rather than linger on the consequences of harm and the uncertainty of repair. Maybe its unfathomable to think that someone could offer you affection at the same time as they offer someone else affection and so you can't cope with what could be competition.

The problem with zero sum is-- there's no real way to be with someone else, let your guard down, stop playing the game, and just feel ok with your actual self. It's always so much work, and you always know deep down that it's your manipulative behaviours that are keeping folks there and not your actual self so you are trapped in maintaining those behaviours. It's always teetering on a terrifying edge, it's exhausting, and it's alienating.

You know, child abuse only started to be understood as x rays became widely used. There were all these children with broken bones and at first they couldn't understand why, maybe infants and young kids just had bones that acted weird? But no. They were being badly harmed. Folks who grew up during that time, when that sort of parenting was so normal, are still alive. We're not too many generations of parents removed from that, and certainly not from parents who learned their parenting skills from those folks. Of course x rays never caught folks who did soft-tissue damage, and they never had a hope of catching folks who did damage with words. There were a lot of those. And even if a parent was ok there are an awful lot of potentially harmful adults in a child's world.

So of course there will be lots of folks in the world who don't feel safe, who don't feel that kindness and love will be freely given, that showing their selves will be ok. Of course there will be. And of course they fight so hard for the only security they know to exist. Their marvellously crafted brains harness millennia of survival strategies to protect them and they fight, and they fight, and they fight for love, for security, for a place in what they understand society to be. They fight for a place in the kind of society that formed them.

And through that fighting, through that manipulation and withholding, those folks recreate the conditions that formed them. It's a cycle that continues not just intergenerationally but laterally into friends and romantic relationships and colleagues. Good ol' DARVO can spread.

When it's not ok to say "this isn't for me" and step away without someone having done something wrong -- that's entitlement. It requires the world to be cut into team bad, which it's ok to leave, and team good, which is allowed to leave. It denies the diversity of desires and needs in the world. It's reductionist and creates antagonism. That's the cycle winning.

I was going to list more but thinking about it makes me tired, I'm tired, and I have a 5 gallon bucket of lard in my kitchen I can make into soap, I have a pork loin to make into jerky, I have a couple other primals to break down, I have a smoker (gloriously loaded by Josh, it's full to groaning) to start, I have leaf lard to strain into molds for baking, I have biscuits to make. I go down these old dark paths when my mind takes them, but I won't force myself to stay on them right now.

Instead I'll go into the light of my daily life and cradle my heart through the process of making and nourishing. No amount of beautiful food can help someone believe that they are worthy of love and joy as they are, that they are allowed to ask for it and seek it, and that if they're not finding it in some folks there will be other folks who will be happy to give it.

I can't fix that about the world. I just want to. I escaped from those places. I wish at least the people I love also could.

The general rule is: spend time and effort on something in proportion to how well it serves you, to how well it nourishes you, to how good it is for you.

It's so easy to forget, and it's so easy to lose sight of what something does for me underneath the layers of what I think I should do for something and under what I'm in the habit of doing.

Relationship is hardest for this.

If I were asked, would I sacrifice my happiness to make someone else completely happy? the answer might be yes some days. But the truth is that being unhappy is not supportive of someone, it's not helpful to them. It just freights more weight onto whatever they're doing. They can't trust you to care for yourself so they have to step back, guess, elide and carry that nebulous burden in addition to whatever they need to sort out for themselves at that time.

That kind of deal - my unhappiness for your happiness - is only good if it's cleanly communicated and truly agreed. Guessing at what makes someone else happy and then doing it for them without ever checking in, especially when the thing makes you unhappy, that's just a way for everyone to waste emotional resources.

I'm writing this because I'm seeking a guide.

Arranging clean trades, and having clean communication in general, is complicated by folks not knowing what they want and also by folks saying what they think you want to hear. In the former situation iteration makes sense and I find it reassuring: let's try this for so long and then check back. Let's collect data and update our plans based on that new data. I love data. In the latter situation there's no way out under your own control. You cannot make yourself know what someone else wants in order to take that into account. You cannot make someone tell you what they actually want instead of what they think you want to hear. I don't know how to be reassured in that scenario.

I'm writing this because I'm not reassured.

I've always believed that more, and more accurate, information on the part of all parties leads to better choices. The more someone tells you about how they feel, how they think, and what they want, the better decisions you can make together. This of course works both ways. When information is restricted a process becomes less collaborative; instead of creatively seeking situations that take all that information into account you're reduced to guessing blindly at what will work and saying no to what doesn't work for you. You're left with tearing down, with vetoing, instead of working together to build. It isolates us all.

I'm writing this because I'm a builder.

I know that not everything needs to be talked about before it happens. I know that structures, even good structures, can be set up through the gentle give-and-take of daily actions instead of through conversation. Conversation needs to have a place in my life though, and a big one.

And-- I like conversation. Conversation and gardening are the two hobbies I actually like. Everything else just follows from those. I like getting to know people. I like seeing what's in there, learning to understand how it goes together. That understanding, and the acceptance of it, is how I express my love.

Love for someone who keeps me out is impersonal, it lives with my love for people generally. It's the one way I know to make my more immediate feelings fade. People are or me, or they are not. If not, well there are plenty of folks who are if I can manage to find them.

I know this about myself. It's not new. It's not debatable. Things can always surprise me but there's no reason to expect things to be different.

Remember this.

This is my personal laptop. The keys feel different than my work laptop, smoother, more intimate. I've had this laptop for almost ten years now. I haven't opened it for a couple weeks or more, things have been busy, and sometimes I'll post updates here from my work computer.

This post requires intimacy and safety. I fed the animals and stacked a full rack of wood downstairs. Two cats are lined up next to me. I've put off writing about some things so long that I don't know where to begin.

When I came to Fort I was going to live in Fort forever. During the first wildfires, when I was evacuated to Josh's, I buried myself in the garden one night here in an internal ritual. There are so many parts of me that can never leave this land.

When I came here I thought of land as a primary relationship, I thought of it as the one that vetos or trumps all others. My human relationships were secondary. In many ways they still are. I was looking for a place to finally be still, to form roots, to sink myself into immobility which I understood to be stability.

Since then Josh moved to Vancouver and may well move to Arizona for a couple years for work. We talk more often than I talk to almost anyone else, sometimes more often than I talk to anyone else. He didn't come into this as poly, but he is willing to hold space for this relationship in anything he engages in going forward. I trust him to hold that space for me, partly because when he was with me he held that space for other people and continues to do so. That is a strong relationship and I lean heavily on it for support. It flexes and fluxes with our lives and I still feel I can rely on it. There may be years I don't see him at all? Those haven't happened yet.

Since then Tucker moved up here. First he came up here one week per month, then inverted that and got an apartment and went down to the coast one week per month. With covid he's barely been down at all. It was supposed to be information gathering, to see if he could live in Fort. It's been comfortable, which sounds like so little but means so much to me: incremental progress learning boundaries together, shared dinners, supportive touch and conversation. A couple weeks before covid he decided he couldn't live up here, but where else would anyone want to be during this time if not somewhere you can safely move around on the streets and go outside whenever you want without worry? So he slid underwater, we didn't talk about it despite some of my early proddings, and it rested there until he put an offer in on a condo in the city last week.

Understand that in my life I usually change quickly. I move along at such a rapid clip that few people can keep up with me, and one of the things I love in my current set of partners is their ability for personal growth themselves. I like dating people with qualities that impress and inspire me. It makes me feel less like a parent.

So anyhow, the offer on the condo was his way of bringing up that it was time to get those negotiations going again. I figured, after a year or two in this house, that I had another move in me. I've been here longer than I've lived anywhere since I was seventeen and some of the trauma of displacement has healed. I've learned, too, that my relationship to the land is as much a process as my relationship to people: it's not something I obtain and then have, but is instead something I do or else do not do.

Now comes a negotiation stage, except that neither of us know how to negotiate. So, we need to pick up those skills. Then I need to figure out: what do I need from a home? Can I actually share a house with someone or are we looking for multi-house solutions? What are my dealbreakers? What are dream-fulfillment bits? Is there a way to leverage coupleness into cheaper living? If we look at both of our lists of dealbreakers, is there an actual real place we can find to live that's ok with us? How will finances and relationship end work in any such situation, including combined situations? If we look at our lists of joybringers, can we find a situation that contains those for both of us? How many towns in BC have a gaming store and nearby acreage anyhow? Should we move to Scotland and leverage the commonwealth country job opportunities? How important is living closer to Josh, or to my other friends in Nanaimo and Sechelt? Is there somewhere in BC where winter isn't solid mud and also where it isn't -40C? How many towns are left, in a province where pot is legal, that I can walk down the street and not get sick from exposure to it? How do I feel about my job, about doing it somewhere else and/or about doing something different? How do I feel about working for government? Is there a way to make this work or is there not?

And so on.

I've found a way to go back to the counselor that I had at my old job, basically my current insurance doesn't let me pick a counselor and has a max of 4 sessions on a topic so that's not great. Seeing my old counselor sounds great. The gender piece is pushing at me too, and I think this whole kaleidoscope probably needs to be holistically resolved.

I've also been-- remember in spring, when I was planning a fall butchering party/workshop up here because I needed community? I still need community. So that's another piece of the puzzle.

I'm maybe starting to wake up, but I still feel just so tired. Hope usually comes naturally to me but I feel like the near future is a bit of a sticky slog right now. I am usually pretty confident in the further future.

So there we are.

Well. I'm back alive again. One of the weirdest parts of being triggered in that way is that I lose the time. If I try to remember back to last week I get a handful of moments but very little else.

This is how I lost most of my tens, teens, and early-to-mid twenties. I thought PTSD was something that happened to folks who'd had real bad things occur to them as opposed to the merely unpleasant or even normal things that had happened to me. Relating to other humans (especially my family in the tend to teens) left me really frequently in at least a semi-triggered state, or just recovering. I lost a lot of memories.

I'm starting to come to terms with my movement wounds. Moving more-or-less every six months for 15 years for essentially financial reasons (and relationship reasons, but financial reasons underlay those) left some essential part of me shut down. Last week those parts rose up and shut all of me down, but they must have been ambient for a long time because... there's a sense of self, of really existing, that I've had here lately and that I remember from early Vancouver with my first couple homes.

I still need to address the past damage, defuse the triggers, but it's amazing to exist so firmly in the world again. I did some intense physical labour last night, some intense yoga this morning, I'm trying to eat again a couple times a day, and I feel ok again. It's good to feel ok. Some moments I suspect I'm even back to being happy.

I woke up at 4am, read a little, then went back to sleep. My 5:30 alarm to get up for yoga interrupted a dream in which I was snuggling with my Thea-pup. That may be the first warm, loving, secure dream I've had ever where, instead of a feeling of loss when I woke up because that person was gone forever, I could just go and snuggle my pup a little more and then come back to her tonight.

What an amazing feeling.