Greenstorm's Journal

I've been leisurely reading my way through the Sand County Almanac. It's one of the foundational American/western texts in anything related to my disciplines: forestry, conservation, and farming will all find it in a curriculum somewhere and a bookshelf somewhere in an office.

You know, I've spent all my life being close to computer folks since I was close to any folks at all (since I guess I was 14 or so). These folks work within a human-created world, most are from the city and like it there, many can be enormously creative within their realm. The ones I get along with often have a humanities lean to them: a philosophy or English degree in their background, interactions with pagan spirituality or philosophy, a strong community construction streak, something or a couple things like that.

For years I've been trying to say: I think people need more exposure to the natural world. People need to be exposed to things they can't control, that aren't built for them, and that they can't blame on other people. They need to learn humility: that there is a larger system which dictates, not just success or failure but also life or death.

I say this and I say this and everyone disagrees: oh, but coding is complicated, sometimes you can't even predict everything. The fact that anyone can argue this proves the point. These are systems we choose dependency on, and that choice is everything. And so it's lovely to come across Aldo Leopold, someone who thinks deeply and lovingly about the natural world, agreeing with me in an offhand comment.

Aldo Leopold writes:

‘Around the bend now came the cause of his alarm: two boys in a canoe. Spying us, they edged in to pass the time of day.

What time is it?’ was their first question. They explained that their watches had run down, and for the first time in their lives there was no clock, whistle, or radio to set watches by. For two days they had lived by ‘sun-time,’ and were getting a thrill out of it. No servant brought them meals: they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they misguessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes; which firewood made clean coals, and which only smoke.

Before our young adventurers pushed off downstream, we learned that both were slated for the Army upon the conclusion of their trip. Now the motif was clear. This trip was their first and last taste of freedom, an interlude between two regimentations: the campus and the barracks. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. These boys were ‘on their own’ in this particular sense.

Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom.

It's old writing. There is so much of me that he can't imagine. Still, this part of me that never has company, the part of me that is so different from most folks I've known that I no longer fully accept the category of human: that part feels seen.



*I wouldn't even disagree that on the whole society is another natural system and so interacting with society is a subset of interacting with nature: it's beyond everyone's individual control but not outside the realm of our influence and learning.

I use the word fat in here. It kinda triggers even me. I do this deliberately to try and break down my unpleasant stereotypes. Tread lovingly with yourself here.

This is the tail-end of the marathon-three-days I spend at work/school. I should be at school this second, half an hour into class, but I dropped my bike off and they're keeping her for a week, which kind of broke my stride, and I'm sitting down and that feels amazing, and since about noon today I've really been wanting to write something.

I've been poly for a long time, and I've learned to erase some cultural norms from my psyche and to set aside others in order to do that. I know I'll likely always feel weird sneaky traces of poly guilt, for instance, which results in my believing that any given person is better off partnered to a monogamous person than to myself. This just sits there deep-down, despite my knowing that I am better off partnered to people who have other things going on in their lives (whether those other things are people or different passions) and despite being genuinely happy for my partner's pleasure when they're in a safe happy situation with another person.

I've also been skinny all my life. I don't feel skinny nowadays, I feel "normal" and sometimes jiggly and weird, but during adolescence and through my early twenties I was this same height, 5'8" or 5'9"ish, and 110 lbs, 120 max. That's really pretty skinny. In the last bunch of years I've gained both buoyancy and muscle to the tune of 20 or 30 lbs, topping out at my maximum weight when I'm in very good shape and literally sheathed in inches of muscle, getting softer and wider and dropping weight when I'm in poorer shape. And till a couple years ago I've always slept with tall skinny computer geeks with ponytails, basically.

This is a tangental way of approaching the idea that I've never had to deconstruct my ideas about fatness, though I have had to pull apart other received information like that about relationships. I've been the butt of hostility in the past ("skinny bitch" and "beanpole") but those days are over too.

Oof. This is hard to write. I'm not proud of this.

So, not thinking of this, and then diving into a really intensely hot sexual relationship with Angus (who has tended to carry 'a couple extra pounds' since I've known him) and then with Michael (who is more than twice my weight) I managed to be a total dickwad.

I have to be brief because this hurts to write. Think about this situation:

I meet Michael. We start sleeping together. I find him very hot, the way he thinks, the way we interact, but also his body itself, just the way his thighs feel and the line from his shoulder to his hip and his hands and the texture of his skin and the everythingness of him. And I keep saying to myself, not mindfully at all but in bemused wonder: I never would have expected to feel this way about you. I would say, in with that same bemusement, you are so fucking hot. And I didn't think about it.

And I would forward all this stuff about overeating and the obesity epidemic and whatnot because I'm pretty involved in food activism. Aaaaaand... finally the incongruity hit me. I poked at this in my head for a couple weeks, like a sore tooth, and realised what was going on. I was saying I never would have expected you to be hot because you're fat.

Except it wasn't graceful like this. After all this subtext, after accepting all these unspoken and unconscious endings to my sentences and not walking out on me, Michael had to endure a conversation where I basically said, "I don't know how to reconcile your body type with me thinking you're hot, any pointers?" and it hurt him pretty bad because, face it, it was maybe one of the jerkiest things I've done in my long career of being a dick.

So he was hurt and got quiet and I took it away and thought about it some more. And after a bit I stopped using the subtext. It stopped being woah, I'm shocked that you could be hot and started being just, you're hot. That made me happy, but I wasn't really sure what was going on in my head. Then today someone made a post on facebook and I grasped something more consciously.

It's true that carrying a lot of weight is a health risk.

It's true that stressing over things is a health risk.

It's true that working a desk job is a health risk.

Driving in a car is pretty goddamn dangerous, actually.

Smoking, drinking from plastic bottles, all sorts of things: health risks. In fact, cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. Then heart disease, in which weight is definitely implicated. But, you know, people die, and statistics are statistics. No one actually chooses a mate by running a statistical analysis of everyone in the room and taking the person most likely to live a long time or we'd all want to date Japanese schoolgirls... oh, wait.

So the next argument, and one dear to the food movement, is that fat people are socially irresponsible because they do something which makes them unhealthy and thus a burden on health care and the rest of society, etc. The usual rebuttal to this is: we've all got our vices, so if you conflate attractiveness with health with skinniness, then also conflate attractiveness with health with nonsmoking AND not driving on dangerous roads AND not drinking to excess AND to not getting sunburns AND to using only glass containers and organic food AND teflon pans AND etc etc or you're a hypocrite.

But I've realised that it's much simpler than that for me, suddenly.

I find some people, and some bodies, maddeningly earthshatteringly attractive. I find some people and some bodies very much not. I don't control and can't anticipate this attraction; it's a gift when it's put in my hands.

And, separately, I worry about the economics of health: health care; the high cost of good veggies; eating well; desk jobs; yes, high fructose corn syrup and the subsidy pressure from the agroindustrial machine to maintain a steady cheap supply of that rather than fresh fruit and veggies and by the way more veggies would mean more farmers instead of more jobs where people sit down and that's socially unacceptable; and in the same category a lack of biking infrastructure and pesticides and the lack of self-worth driven by our lack of worthwhile projects to break our teeth on and thus teach us how to be effective in the world and how that leads people to do stupid self-harm or self-risk to fit in; a poor definition of health overall; no actual value placed on a culture where people can share knowledge about how to live well or have socially-sanctioned conversations about same; epidemic depression, the list goes on and on and on.

These two things, what we find attractive and what we approve of morally, are rarely connected and in fact often backwards-wired as per the girls-like-bad-boys stereotype. So it's really not cool what we do: we project all the guilt for our broken food culture and food system onto the people who bear the most visually obvious symptoms of it, then we use the threat of sexual and romantic rejection, which really drives to the core of our happiness as humans, to try and get them, any them that's not us, to make it go away. And we dangle romantic acceptance and sexual fulfillment as the carrots gained for successfully putting that societal skeleton back in the closet where we don't have to look at it. But, that's getting a little meta. My real point is merely the separation.

So there's how I was a dickwad with my projected shit and my inability to treat a human like, you know, a person instead of as a social issue. And that's why I try to be mindful about it now. And it's kinda incoherent because I've had a long week, but I really really needed to get this out. And I'd really like people to respond to it if they have something to say, gently if possible, because I need to hear the voices of my friends on this.

 When your first response to a request for your time is, 'I don't have free days.  I make time from blood and stones' you know you need to slow down and take some time.  You also may have just been spending a lot of time with someone who's innately dramatic.  In my case both are definitely true.

I was going to write about my soul.  I was going to write, you know, that it exists.  I was going to write that a friend of mine, known henceforth as Walker because he's come up a dozen times and now needs a moniker, actually flinches internally when I use that word.

I was going to write that I could feel it strongly this morning.  I slept the night at CrazyChris', it's been a long long time and he's been mentally absent for maybe four years now anyhow.  Now he's back, and we cried and talked and ranted and talked and cried and backrubbed and held each other, and I felt safe.  I've realised (I've only now realised it, or only this morning when I was lying there watching the green light come up into the room with morning and he was sleeping beside me and the room was the same, his freckles were the same, as they were when we were lovers) that I am safe.  I've realised that whatever happens, with whoever, whatever breaks or darkens or snaps or halts, whether or not it returns to me as a nourishing connection, I will always have friends who love me.  Any one person may not be present, no one may be available in the second I need them, but they will always be there.

During the hook pull I had my obsidian spheres (dark, one with a green eye for thinking and one with an empty pool for feeling) on long lines from hooks in my chest and back.  I put out my hands and spun around (I was wearing my blue girl skirt) and spun and spun and the dizzier I knew I was going to be when I stopped the more I kept spinning because I didn't want to be in that place yet.  The spheres lifted and sailed along, tugging their own dance, and they were connected to my flesh and they were part of me.  When I stopped (because everything ends) I dropped quickly and put my hand on the ground so I didn't fall.  The weight of the spheres was taken by the ground, and the world was fuzz around me.  In that moment I was free-- I did not soar (one soars on wings, or wind) or float (one floats in something) or fly (one flies in relation to other things).  I was me, not only me (which requires a comparison to another thing) or Me (in which I overshadowed the things around me).  I was just there, and there was nothing else, and there was nothing else.

Those two experiences-- one last weekend, one this --have stretched that continuum of connectedness and distance on both ends now.  My world is always getting bigger.  My self-knowledge is always getting bigger.  My sense of self?  it becomes, not bigger, but more steady and certain and sure and dependable.  I no longer require someone else to be my rock at the centre of the universe; I no longer require it of myself. My soul (yes, there it is) has attained enough mass that it is my rock.

I showed CrazyChris the most beautiful spot in the city.  We were walking-- it was so lovely out-- down the Drive, and he was going to soccer, and I asked him if he'd been there. He said (of course) that the most beautiful spot in the city was a pretty tall order, and I reminded him that I always choose my words deliberately.  When we walked up he looked at me with a cocked eyebrow, all skepticism, but when we sat down he understood.

We watched a robin bathing together there.  That space, that one tiny space, is peace distilled.  It is powerful magic.  It is most beautiful.  It feeds the soul and leads one to freedom.

And I always choose my words deliberately.

I am more free now than I was yesterday morning.  I am also slowly becoming more bound, more enmeshed in the net that holds me up.  I can feel smoke curling up from fresh cauterization and I can feel the lightness of many strands bearing up against my inner gravity.

I wish I could speak more clearly.  I wish I could press the imprint of these times into your mind.  I can't.

I was going to write: This is me without fingernails, typing, intent, leaned over the laptop.  But-- the ring on my device goes off-- Angus has texted me to say he's back across the border and will be home soon.  The real world flies back in.  There was peace at that spot with CrazyChris, there was the incredible joy of realising I didn't have to be anywhere and I could walk back in sunshine so hot that had I been standing only in my black leather boots I would have been sweating -- it's the first time this year -- and there was the dive into language like flying through clean air and sunlight.  Now there's only a girl and clicking keys and a laptop with one song playing over and over again in the background.

It's been quite a weekend.

 Here's back to the real world.

So so so tired.

Oh wait. No sleep. Duh.

Particularly aware of the world going to hell in a handbasket today. I should watch the willie smits talk on ted again.

Then run away and join him.

There are just so many bad things happening to the world that no one knows about, and that so few people care about or understand. Is this what expertise is supposed to be? In my mind tonight is: peat mining, mountaintop mining, percentage of biomass in predators in ocean and by extension (?) land environments, nature 'preserves' vs 'managed' environments, consumerism trumping food security and the whole food-as-%-of-total-expenditure change over time, zero-mile-diet as a trend, complete and total devastation of local and sustainable agricultural knowledge in all areas of the entire world, difficulty of managing viable ecologies in times of scarcity and the whole long-vs-short term sustainability issue, earthbound fucking organics, dilettantes, SLACKTIVISM, the replacement of a connection to nature with pictures of kittens on the internet, people who won't eat food that has been in the dirt vs people studying insects as a viable protein source in a highly efficient permaculture system, SLACKTIVISM, how when I'm upset about anything else Angus can hold me when I cry and tell me it's okay but about this topic I don't believe him, the exclusion of disposable consumer electronics from buy-local save-the-environment mentalities, subsidies and agricultural-cultural warfare, deliberate disinformation, pig farmers, mcdonalds potato fields, ethnic divides limiting urban permacultural knowledge transmission, community gardens, rhododendrons, culture of scarcity in the midst of plenty, the dopamine boost from 50% returns vs 100% returns...

Oh my god. Let's try some good things. That list got very long very fast, and finding explanatory links was quickly discouraging. I can think about good things, right?

Hands in the soil. Warm. February spring smell when the light is yellow. Leaves on the ground under the trees. Bamboo through sidewalks. Neighbors in tall buildings. Farmer's markets. Curly carrots in stores in England. People with small stashes of knowledge. My mom's first garden. Mimi's first potted plant. The Richmond fruit tree project. Kent Mullinix quoting Wendell Berry. Cherry petals. Sedum deserts instead of concrete. Increasing infrastructure. Vaccinium ovatum on the living wall outside whole foods. A land that is so generous it speaks to Gavin even though he has no training. Our human ability to intuit environmental health. The smell of rain on concrete. Cottonwood trees. Winlaw. Farmschool. People who want to be pig farmers. Courage to use the word farmer. Preserved knowledge. John Seymour's books. John Seymour. Wendell Berry. Gregoire. People who live this way. An accepting vacuum of knowledge where it is least expected.

Here is the Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Berry, and I will sleep:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
( Read more... )

PS Slacktivism is getting more offensive every day.