greenstorm | Entries tagged with loneliness

Solstice has gone unremarked. The fire kept itself and I have been keeping it poorly, as a chore and not a ceremony. I have not been building my life. I have not been keeping myself kindled. I have been waiting.

My words have fallen silent and they still feel silent. When I speak it needs to matter to someone, at least to myself. I haven't been choosing the words that matter. I've been choosing the words that are easier, or letting someone else choose my words.

The things that matter I keep to myself. I don't think there's a lot that matters but it does. I don't have the kind of sustained talking relationship with anyone right now where I can discuss these things in context.

***

My brother is going to have a kid, the first in our immediate family in that generation

I'm beginning to have doubts about my competency to manage some of my own care

I've stopped taking a proactive approach to my own life and that's impacted a lot by unpredictable disability paperwork requirements that I can't get around

I've been sidelined yet again in a poly relationship situation without an honest "hey, I'm changing my priorities" talk -- the "yet again" is the damaging part

Animals may be the casualty of my financial/disability situation, since I can't figure out what or how else to cut things

I have complex feelings and logistics about staying at Threshold if I can't keep the animals

It takes about as long to recover from pottery as it does to forget the shapes of clay under my fingers

***

Writing a poem a day until Imbolc would be the equivalent of keeping the solstice fire through the dark. I barely managed that. Should I try this?

Not with the rod

But the way a bird builds a nest
Secure
Creatively brilliant
So that everyone
Wants to come live there

This is how I aspire

Not with the rod

But with duck confit wrapped around the pill
With time, and tasty-smelling treats in the trailer
With slow movements, a step and a breath at a time
With more toys and friends inside the fence than out
With a heated pillow in my favoured spot

I care for them
As I wish to care for myself
My own animal

Not with the rod

With my own nest
Coating my own pills with sugar
Trying for time, and tempting myself with treats
Scattering places to breathe at every turn
Full of friends and toys
And a heating pad in bed

Not with the rod

I husband myself with softness
With a beautiful and creative nest
And with as much security as anyone can offer themselves

Writing poetry is a tide. It sweeps me up in my own lens onto the world, slightly blue tinted and distorted by the thick curvature of my experience. When I write I have the voice that human communication denies me: shade, nuance, tilt, perspective. My whole life I've lived in the minds of those around me. Every moment is, how are they thinking about this, what motivates them, what do they want, how do they see this? That's how I'm allowed to approach.

Sometimes people have approached me, but rarely. Poetry is where I take my own hands, my own voice, and exist outside of what people want to hear from me. My double vision, always looking at this thing and that thing or rather the relationship between-- always arcing, like a wire that's worn through but not quite enough to go dark.

That is to say I'm sitting here listening to lightning, with fires all around. The lightning isn't showing up on the website in front of me even though sometimes it flashes through the window: its truth is unanchored in the human-made world. It's real and I'm real, but perhaps no one else in the world is. Wind that used to be cool against the heat is a precursor to smoke now, carrying the scent of campfires and evacuation as it fans these literal flames around me.

How am I supposed to put that nuance into human language? It used to be relief. Before that, before my fat protected my core, it was frustrating and made me shiver. Even two weeks ago I was saying how grateful I was there was wind. I'm in metaphor again because how do you talk about that relationship without it? So many things in life are like that, beauty and lightness tinted and then obliterated by new context. Which way the wind is blowing matters now: towards the highway, to shut it down? Towards my house? Or back onto the already-burnt area of the fire so that it may starve and dwindle and lose its power? How do I know which it's doing, to know whether to relax and enjoy the wind?

I felt more like myself the month I wrote poems everyday than at any other time. It faded as I stopped. I enjoy things now: walking the dog in the back field and learning her love language of snuggles and holding, baby ducklings diving into the water as I pour it into their bowl, the weight of my body against the acupuncture mat that lets me relax into it. I wouldn't say I enjoyed poetry. But I thrived on it nonetheless.

Today it's started coming to me again, especially at times when I can't write it down. My mind is waving near-invisible tendrils through my experiences, grasping them and connecting them insistently. Watching firefighters out the back window. The feeling of being rooted so deeply in this land and the way roots tear when you pull them out of the ground and the whole plant is got and it dies, or conversely when the top pops off and the roots are left to grow. Which am I? Offers of help that-- you know, sometimes it's just stage-managing an experience for other people so they feel like they helped, so they won't feel bad and they'll go away. Actual help, well, when the anesthesiologist was putting me under he was gentle, he was taking care of both my body and through his kind explanations of my mind, and I cried and felt like crying was ok in front of someone. I don't cry about the offers of help I've got lately, except maybe one.

Writing this the wind comes up sharply and blows the tin off a roof. It can only be fanning the fire and I don't know what direction it's coming from, I'm inside and it can only spill in through the window. Is it pushing the fire away or bringing it towards me? How can I not write in this? Everything that happens is a sign, is a portent, is an explanation of my own life's map.

Writing. Just writing. To myself?

Of course. There's no one else here.

I've been watching Elementary with Tucker. I feel similarly about it in some ways to Gentleman Jack-- a straight friend of mine said she didn't like the Gentleman Jack character because she did some bad things, and I said representation was so, so important: to see ourselves, not pedestalized, but as people.

I've never seen myself from the outside before, not really. Not anything I haven't invented in my mind. People don't pay enough attention or communicate clearly enough to really express their experience of me, except that it's frequently different from their experience with other people. Holmes, in Elementary... I see a lot of myself there. So much.

I see the way he switches modes, from work to interpersonal, from brusque to vulnerable, and how it looks manipulative from the outside. When I do that I'm just... switching modes, doing people when a moment ago my midn was probably doing plants. I see how he learns, how he loves, how he creates safety, how he gropes in the dark for guides on how to do humans and then when he finds them he holds on tight and fierce and proud. I see how the feeling of connection can mislead him into believing people are similar to him, and in some ways they are, but really they never are.

I see how he analyzes his mistakes and decides what to do next. I see him trying, and trying, and trying.

And I feel seen.

I really want to never meet whoever wrote this because if I never do, I can still hope that there's someone like me out there.

Today was another day in the bush. I went to a sample site I for sure had to do, fairly close to a quite disused logging road called the Kuzkwa South. This was south of where I'd been working before by about 20km. I had my suspicions halfway up the road and then recognised it very suddenly when an unmistakable cliff loomed through the trees.

Inzana is a wide bowl with lumpy soil-and-tree crusted lumps those 20km north.

The Kuzkwa South road snakes up and down and up and down with astonishing potholes and quick corners though abrupt topography until grey-streaked peach cliffs suddenly loom up on one side and a little lake sparkles downslope through the trees on the other. The cliff is fringed with rubust, healthy-looking douglas fir and the lake is ringed wit birch. Everything looks so inviting to play on: the rock cliffs look like they're easily climbable, fractured like ladders, though the long talus slope leading up to them suggests keeping to the edges and to the anchor-points of clumps of trees. The lake is so sparkly, not distant at all but not close enough to have road dust: it it looks like just ten minutes of climbing through trees to get there.

I'd been there once before, briefly, in 2015, for work as a summer student. That moment of coming around the corner and seeing the cliffs and the little lake, the highly interactive landscape, has never left me. The spot is only just shy of two hours' drive from town and only really 20km off the pavement (the last 10km is very slow!) and I was giving serious thought to going back there camping when a pickup appeared going up as I was going down. He didn't have a radio so we did the truck-negotiation of backing up into a wide spot so we could go past each other and I figured this was not the weekend to go up. Hunting season, also likely not great timing. I wouldn't want to do that road in snow either. It took careful maneuvering to get around some of those potholes without getting stuck even with them dry and with a lot of traction.

I'll still keep that place in my heart. There are so many places in my heart.

The actual spot I was working wasn't bad either: there were clumps of huge aspen trees, 30m or so (well, huge for the area) and a spaghnum wetland that was nearly dried out so I could squelch across it if I didn't stand too still: it opened out into a pond that was still filled with water. This is probably the only month I could have walked that wetland: it had aquatic weeds on one edge.

The road in had those improbably large moose tracks and an equally large wolf track dried into some of the mud.

It was just pretty. Nice. It felt like home. I listen to podcasts on my phone when I'm out since I've given up my project of memorizing poetry: it's important to make noise constantly when you're out so the bears know you're coming and can make good decisions.

I can see the shape of my loneliness best when I enjoy things. I want to go home, tell people about them, take someone out to see those sudden cliffs and go scrambling up them together. I want that not always -- some spaces are just for me -- but sometimes. I want the option.

Either way, the landscape is doing its best to comfort me these days and I appreciate it.

Crossposts: https://greenstorm.livejournal.com/892714.html

It's stuck around with me all day, and it was pretty sad this morning, so here's my dream:

I was at some sort of big gathering with all the old Vancouver folks, maybe it was a conference, maybe it was someone's big home. I ended up on a couch next to A, who I used to date, and who I suspect it ended somewhat ghostily on both sides with. Anyhow, someone I still care for a lot but our lives are very separate now and we haven't spoken in a long time.

Chemistry started sparking very quickly and a proposition was made and tacitly accepted. We started to get up and head off together. At that moment a group of people including Tucker came by and I gave Tucker a hug before wandering off with A, but during that hug someone came up and informed everyone that Tucker had been exposed to covid shortly before.

Tucker was going to his room to self-isolate so I turned back to A. A was sad, but because I'd hugged Tucker who had been exposed to covid we were beyond his safety threshold. We stood apart looking sad for a moment, then he melted back into the crowd. I knew I probably wouldn't see him or have another chance to be close for a long time.

Then I woke up.

There's a lot of symbolism there: symbolism about intimacy and isolation, about my cometary return period, about what I give up and for who, and about what prevents be from going after things I want.

I also am prone to visitations in my dreams. I have intimacy dreams like other people have sex dreams; my mind supplies what I need when I'm not getting it. The sadness of a person being gone from my life when I wake up, either because they are gone or because they never existed, is so familiar to me.

Between waking up like that and my stitches hurting and doing weird things and being so tired from basically jungle-gymming for a couple hours yesterday bracketed by a hike today isn't the greatest day. I picked raspberries, got eggs, watered the front porch garden, and made myself honey avocado milk though, so it's not too bad.

Let's see how tomorrow goes.

Crossposts: https://greenstorm.livejournal.com/883185.html

Oh no.

I'd just gently turned my focus back on myself.

I'd written about my plans for my home. I'd written about evolutionary breeding, about how the animals fit in here, about fields cropped by time series (winter rye and peas and greens finish; the pigs move into the field and eat what I haven't skimmed off; I plant napa cabbage and daikon on the field they just left since those can't be planted until July). I'd written about the tension between saving the best seed and planting it, and the selection forces of seed that goes through the pigs and volunteers, and how a major task in setting up the maintenance phase of this system is harnessing that.

I'd written about how the pig fields are the best garden this year and so I'll turn the newer south garden into berries but they need to be draught-tolerant berries because the u sask cherries aren't great that way.

I'd written about how meaningful and fulfilling it is for me to be enmeshed in this system.

I'd written about how I'm finally turning some of my patterning attention on my gorgeous-but-useless gothic-arch house which has no storage and no walls for shelves and that has a temperature inversion summer to winter when the 18C basement becomes the 30C wood stove room and how none of that suits my brewing/canning/seed saving. I'd written about begrudging money spent on inside my house instead of on the land but that it's starting to feel good to organize.

I'd written about how, even though I will likely leave this space, I need to think and act as if I'll stay here because I engage both with the presence of any thing and of its long shadow stretching out to the horizon and I can't do one without the other.

I'd written about how I feel more like myself here than I have anywhere since I was quite young, and how like when I was quite young I have especially no one to share it with. I'd written about how that was harder now than it used to be, because I see other people sharing their enthusiasms with other folks, talking about them together and doing them together. I want that but I also don't because my land is a layer of my skin and how do you handle someone else altering your skin?

I'd started writing about buying the property with A&E&T and how we'd looked at a 5 acre lot, flat and grassy, with two homes on it. I'd written that it's not that I need more production than I can get off a 5 acre lot minus the footprint of a driveway and two homes. It's about how a space like that would need compromise.

I was starting to describe how I want to plant standard sized apple trees, trees that will grow big and will feed people a hundred years after I'm gone. I was describing how I'd want to ring the property, not only in a privacy fence but in a hedgerow with hawthorn and saskatoon and sour cherry and wild plum and haskap and thorny gooseberry and fig and mulberry and a chaos of impenetrable habitat for small wild things. Those all demand so much space and their yield is objectively later and less per area than if dwarf trees with a couple-decade lifespan and a neat, tidy berry patch were planted. On 5 acres it's hard to do both, and because there's another gardener involved them some compromise is needed. I want enough space that I can compromise on some, but that we can each decide fully on others.

I'd written most of that and then the computer ate it: my wrist hit a part of the laptop that was interpreted as the keypad (it was not) and selected the whole text and I typed a key and flash! It was gone.

So I summarized but I lost the details of the intricacies of what I do here, and I lost the words that captured it with the enthusiasm and love I feel for it.

I'd realized I share the outputs here but not the process, not so often. That process is love. Thinking my way along the reality of what exists and finding a co-existence that elevates us both, that's love.

And looking at that, now, and what I just wrote about compromising and working with people, and sharing space with another gardener: I need to keep a piece of that love as a relationship just between myself and the land, though I like the thought of maybe also trying to engage in a shared relationship with the land as long as I have my own, to myself.

Anyhow, I've been writing so outwardly lately and I've noticed that. This journal has always been public because I need myself to be seen by the concept of a watcher, of a recorder. Somehow that's become tainted by my general sense that folks can't follow where I go with this very intimate relationship of mine. If any part of me is to be recorded, though, to be watched, to be set down for posterity-- it should be my relationship with the land, it should be the give-and-take steps in that dance. It's the central feature of my life and the rest is just details.

Return focus to what matters, and to enough of the life-scaffold that what matters can continue to matter. So mote it be.

Further to my last post, the friends I do want to keep close are nearly all in some sort of depressive/emotional crisis. Most of them are externalizing it too, which means they're still in the "the world is objectively terrible and so I have to be emotionally destroyed and nothing can be done" which is-- I mean, that's where it's depression and not the much more manageable grief and feelings about change that one honours and uses to inform one's continued *living*. It's mirrored so similarly in so many people. Folks wrote about the covid mental health crisis months ago but right now it's worse than I've seen it.

In a lot of ways it feels like my society has become a death cult that cannot acknowledge the existence of death or change. It sits there staring at the drain it's circling, waiting to be sucked down, throwing the stopper as far away from itself as it can manage. Everyone wants it to be over but not too many people want to build anything after; they hope that if that dies then the next thing will just happen. Systems that are good for humans don't just happen; they take deliberate organization and work and compromise.

And I've always found the best way to make a change is to add something better to replace the thing I want removed. It's a bit of a permaculture concept too: design for the way that people behave naturally, for the way energy naturally flows, and the system will be more robust. Instead of removing caffeinated drinks from the diet, try adding non-caffeinated drinks you love. Instead of yelling at yourself internally to just put the thing away, make a good spot for it to live close to where it's used. Instead of struggling not to call your mean ex, make a standing date with a friend or friends for the particular time of day when your willpower is lowest. Introduce better things and they will displace the bad things. It just takes a but of thought to know what it is you're seeking in the thing to be replaced, and make sure that your alternative has a way for that need to get satisfied. With that thought up front, the rest just ...flows.

Which is maybe why everything feels like it's dying in my little social sphere. There's so much disassembly and so little building. For all that I live very present with death around me in the systems I manage I am a builder, and I like to contribute to building good systems or, maybe better, supporting folks who build.

Anyhow, in the midst of this I extra appreciate Josh. He's always broken the mold for folks I tend to spend time with and this doesn't seem to be getting to him in the same way it's getting to ...everyone else.

Depression has always been my greatest nemesis: it takes all my friends and loved ones from me year after year after year. They struggle, they resurface, I get them back sometimes but so much is lost. In the past I've promised myself I wouldn't date folks who are prone to depression, or who are prone to depression and who don't have explicit ways of handling it when it comes up other than to numbly wait until it subsides. I hadn't extended that to friends, though, and I guess the above principle still applies: if I'm removing those folks, who am I replacing them with?

But. What I really want, I guess, is folks who can lift their eyes towards something meaningful to them and who find satisfaction? in moving towards it.

As the poem says,

"With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."

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.

Today I got five new first fruits from the tomato trial: those green cherry tomatoes with seed saved from the grocery store, cole from annapolis seeds, the silvery fir tree from annapolis, sweet apertif from Casey's, the wild cherry thing I got from Corrie which is maybe from salt spring seeds, and a Brad which had ripened still in a transplant pot. Gonna save seeds from everything so I didn't eat them out in the garden.

Noticing the differences, collecting the fruit and the data, seeing everything next to each other and its fitness or lack thereof to my situation: this is the best thing. It's fulfillment and bone-deep joy and whatever happiness looks like.

My life still has other stuff in it that's at issue but my core is happy.

I just wish I could spend some hours talking with someone else who understood.

Crossposts: https://greenstorm.livejournal.com/877061.html

I suddenly feel so, so lonely.

This term, PDA, it's like learning the call number in a library where the description. I can find people describing things that look like me. Before I had to sort through a pile of books taken randomly off the shelves and work pretty hard to adapt a small percentage of them to my situation. Now? I sit through a ten minute video and have three whole-body revelatory experiences.

And so in some ways I feel more seen than I ever have. I just go to this call number and I can find things that see me.

But those are not my people. They're not folks I can touch, can go back and forth with, they're not folks who see me, know me, and hold me anyways. They're... kindred but not family.

And I have this feeling that the people who care about me will never know me this well, will never know me as well as someone who's never met me and doesn't particularly care about me at all. You know, I've been writing this journal for years and years and years and I've come to know myself pretty well. That knowing was a labour of years and years and I never expected anyone else to do it, not really. Maybe I had hoped.

And maybe now I feel like there's no point to hoping for that anymore.

Maybe I'm always loneliest when I'm closest to myself.

Crossposts: https://greenstorm.livejournal.com/854872.html

Got another round of straw picked up, though it was raining so it's likely somewhat damp. These things happen. We're going into freeze soon so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Also got sauerkraut into the crock, which always is a nice ritual. I also taught mom to make sauerkraut, including wrapping a leaf over the top of the shreds to hold them down and puncturing it to let gasses through, so she has her own jar to take home.

Now I have a bunch of cabbage, some pears, some apples, and some tomatoes left to do.

The temperature has dropped enough that the woodstove is more comfortable to run, though it still needs to be intermittent. The humidity is dropping down again; normally we get dry summers but this summer it never stopped raining and it never got dry anywhere. It'll be nice to have things dry out.

We've been having a lot of cold drizzle lately, which is not my favourite.

The work line finally called me to schedule a counseling appointment in a couple weeks, so that's good. It feels nice to be remembered and not left.

I've been having intimacy dreams about folks I care about, and thinking a little about dating. My current constellation has involved physical and some domestic/support intimacy with Tucker, but not a lot of back-and-forth discussion about plans or feelings which is a pretty rare thing for me. I'd been talking with Josh a bunch for that aspect, but he's been pretty busy lately and he's also just pretty far away.

I'd been going to meet-ups with some of my former co-workers: we'd get together on the deck for "coffee" (I always bring my own tea) and chat on Saturday mornings. It's been really good, but I missed one for covid self-isolation while waiting my test results and a second for straw pick-up. That helps, I like those people and enjoy the conversations, but I don't fully fully trust them in the way that I could say anything.

Someone recently started a queer BC outdoorspeople group. It has potential. I am super uncomfortable with the term queer, but that's not really the issue with the group. The issue is that northern BC is really, really big with few people in it so getting enough folks in the group to have nearby co-campers or whatever seems difficult. On the other hand, I bet it's the kind of group that could have some camping meetups and those are easier to travel to than day trips.

I've been enjoying a podcast called "Gender Reveal" which is basically a series of one-hour interviews with mostly non-cis folks about their experiences.

So, yeah, I guess I'm lonely? I miss the kind of conversation where it's an extended amount of deep, intimate rubbing your thoughts against someone else's, and where they answer with their own thoughts, and it spirals around for hours. I seem to be fine for casual or passive conversation stuff, and there are folks who will listen to me. It just sometimes feels like talking into the void.

Crossposts: https://greenstorm.livejournal.com/843215.html

We're far enough from the solstice now that light begins to come golden and sideways again. The aspens are gold. There is a feeling that sometime it may be dark. The darkness actually caught me last night; everyone was making noise out and I went to check on the pigs and the dogs and the birds. Turned out it was a whole bunch of people on ATVs coming along the road, maybe to or from Canada Day celebrations, but I stopped to pick grass for the rabbits and hang out with the dogs in the back field and it was late gloaming by the time I got back in.

The summer barely feels started. It is barely started, I suppose, and maybe 3 months left till snowfall.

Tucker is back in the city. It's been awhile since he's been away for the full week and it was hard to let go, but now that he's gone I find myself expanding into myself so completely that there's no room for anything else. I was going to build the quail aviary this weekend; a wasp stung my lip and I didn't get anything other than the wood stained for it. I buried bodies and planted berry shrubs and brushed Avallu for hours and sold helicopter goose and watered the garden and stacked 202 pieces of lumber and talked on the phone a little and mostly just... wandered, observed, and thought about things.

Should the aviary go in front to screen the nascent seating area from the road or in back by the chicken coop to consolidate the birds?
If in the back, should I do a woven screen around the seating area and if I did that would it motivate me to keep on top of the aspen suckers?
Should I mulch and exclude the seating area now or later?
Should I disrupt nests for the year and take out the old mulch? How many rotten eggs are in that mulch anyhow?
Should I spread the mulch on the haskap exclosure, the apples by the pig fence, or the front yard?
When should I change out the mulch under the front deck?
What colour stain do I want on the front deck, and which of my boards should I use to floor it?
Where are all those wasps living?
Are all the ducklings still here? Chicks?
Should the pigs go in the far field or the back pig paddock next? If the back field, how shall I run water?
How much do I want another greenhouse as compared to a storage shed?
If I put the aviary in back it won't match the single-pitch roof of the greenhouse back there, but if I put it in front I won't come closer to completing the compound; which is more important to me?
Should I solarize the smaller back paddock by the neighbours' house in prep to plant more apples next spring?
Which geese should I keep out of this year's crop, and what is my m/f breakdown?
Can I remember the email of that guy in town who wanted a boar from this litter of pigs?
What should I do with the leftovers from rendering tallow, it'll probably make the dogs sick and I don't want to freeze it for the chickens for winter. Should I bury it?
Am I sure I don't want to make a maggot/gut bucket for the chickens? It would make them so happy.
No, really, where are those wasps coming from and why did it sting me in the face?
Is that a wasp's nest in the duck nest and are those ducks eating the wasps?
When should I let the little chickens out to free range?
Can I even catch these geese?
Should I make slightly raised beds and if so should I make them in a fancy pattern so I can appreciate the pattern from my deck?
Should I move those roses from the holding bed to the front seating area?
Do I want to try and keep only feather-sexable quail?
Are all the ducklings ok?
Should I lock up the new baby chicks or is their mother going to do a good enough job taking care of them?
When should I cull my roosters, if I do it too soon will I loose aerial protection for the hens?
Should I do a run of meat birds and sell them at the farmer's market?
How long will this feed last, and when do I need to get more to avoid having to buy feed-store feed?
Are those aspen roots in my septic tank? The suckers look so green right there.
Which branches should I keep on this plum tree and which should I prune out?
Should I thin my apples this year? Those trees are ridiculously heavy with fruit.
What is that dog still barking at?

It's so lovely to wander around and have my attention caught by one thing after another, to observe and to mess with bits and pieces in my own good time. I'm starting to get a little lonely but I'll be back to work tomorrow and maybe assembling the aviary tomorrow evening (front or back?!). The internet hasn't been good to me lately; it feels othering and hostile. Well, except for the RED gardens project in Ireland, which makes me want to run away and join their intentional community for the entire two seconds it takes for me to realise it's full of, well, people. Neat to see someone who might be compatible to garden with, though

Community is certainly a theme lately. The world wants me to join it and roll around in people for awhile. Some part of me thinks that would be nice. The rest of me is busy enjoying being right here, with my skin stretched out to the fenceline and my entire world inside it. I'm just starting to catch glimpses of how the work I've done in the last two years is spilling into the future; I'm no longer standing outside the project looking forward at it but am now inside it.

I have manifested parts of this system with my hands. It's beginning to look like the inside of my mind, and will continue to do so more and more with every passing year.

I'm so happy here. So happy, I can't tell you. This was the thing I needed and I have it.

I'm home.

I'm getting stronger at being myself.

I'm getting better at recognising my patterns, at predicting myself, at shaping the container of my life which I create to better fit my self which I suppose I also create but seem to have less control over. There's a core there I will not change. As time goes by I have less and less will to change it.

Change is inevitable. I'm moving into it with as much measured deliberation as I can muster this time. We'll see how those ripples make their way under my skin over time. School starts in a week and a half. My hobbies are turning under my hand: a little less brewing, a little more cooking, a little more travelling, maybe some sailing. I've changed my financial stuff significantly. I'm nosing back into the kink scene, or rather dipping my pinkie toe back into that pool. Change.

I'm comfort-reading again; burning through the Dresden Files a book or a book and a half a day. Reading is private for me. It takes me to the inside place that's totally walled off from the world, where nothing can get at me. I think I get the kind of rest from it that other folks get from vacations. I don't know if I'm hiding something from myself or just very tired of the world sometimes or maybe it's normal to need or want that escape.

I'm not as willing to eat or hold other people's pain as I have been in the past. I find myself acting straightforwardly more often and managing folks' feelings less now. It's colder towards other people, who have to deal with their discomfort, but gentler to myself. My life is feeling generally less intense than it has in the past, and also more solid. Picture the difference between jumping exhilarating stone-to-slippery-stone across a creek and walking across a solid wooden bridge.

So I think I'm in pretty good shape; not the greatest, but good. But tonight I am lonely.

I think the internet brings loneliness with it. I only had it reinstalled today after a summer away, and only reluctantly because I want to have it for school. But. It came today, and now tonight I feel cavernously empty, sad, like I'm all full of echoes of voices with no flesh to them. This is superstitious thinking, equating correlation with causation, and further ignoring complexities such as the way that writing allows me to recognise my emotions when, without this writing, I might just have been restless and gone for a walk before sleep.

Maybe I've been calm and stable because my emotions have needed to knock pretty loudly to get my attention without this focus?

I've missed rituals that give me time and attention and ability to look into myself. I think I can budget for a couple months of daily yoga again, like I did last winter, and use that repetitive ritual to check in with my body and my mind in a leisurely but frequent way (body and mind, two words as if separate, and yet 'self' seems so vague) to see how I am doing over an extended period of time. I'm not especially sure how I'm doing now, and here school is starting and my relationship is slowly turning towards more serious under my (yes, quite deliberate) touch. Change.

Whatever else I'm feeling, I am feeling so strong lately. So capable. So able to go through life in my own shape, on my own feet, creating my own connections and responding to opportunities as I decide to: not perfectly, but well enough to be mostly happy enough most of the time and sometimes very happy indeed. Strong enough to feel unhappy sometimes, or lonely as now, and almost shrug it off.

I'm afraid of this feeling strong. I'm afraid of having ability and responsibility gathered together in my own hands so completely. I'm afraid of being the one who can steer myself _best_, of not having someone else with the rules book because there are no rules to this game. I always come here to write when I've lost my compass and I'm feeling a little lost tonight.

There's a line from one of my favourite songs of the moment that always destroys me right now:

My first day walking on my own/ Well what if I'd been made that way?

I really am walking so much on my own this year. So much. And it's of my own making: so much effort put into slowly straightening my spine over the years. So much.

I'm rambling now, so I'm going to put the keyboard away. Goodnight.

Sweet dreams.

Oh livejournal, I only come to you when I can't find peace. I've been so quiet, that's been a good sign? I've been busy and it's been mostly good if a little overwhelming. But now...

I'm mourning the death of my normality today. Some things have happened. I need to tell you about them.

I read an article about the game Cards Against Humanity this morning. I learned someone I knew relatively distantly, but who'd knit a scarf I own and smiled a lot, died very recently. And my boyfriend doesn't want me to tell his family I'm poly or to go to pride with them (they're in town from the maritimes).

After I reposted that article someone said, 'me too'. And the only thing I'd heard said about it before? 'No one could feel that way'. Well, I feel that way. When you think something that I am or could be is innately hilarious and laugh about it when I'm in the room you hurt me and you lose my trust. Likewise, when you're ashamed of something that I am, when you're hiding it from people, not for my protection or on my say-so but because you don't want to be tarred with the same brush? You hurt me and you lose my trust. That's not a negotiable sentiment. That's the feeling of it.

I feel like I'll never be in a room where people aren't rejecting something that is me with half of their thoughts. I feel (as always, I suppose) that people love the abstraction of how forthright and open and honest I am about myself but don't want the consequences of being that way themselves and want me to hide myself just for them. I feel like I'm inconvenient to everyone except when I'm a symbol or entertainment. I feel like I can't trust very many people to be ok with my being who I am.

Thing is, I'm too invested in being myself at this point to stop. Thing is, you can't love me without loving those other parts of me; I don't know what you're loving then, but it is not me. I'm at a loss for how you could *like* me without being somewhat in line.

The song I'm listening to says 'what if I was made that way?'. I am made this way. I made myself this way if nothing else.

And I'm tired of it, but I can't put who I am away. I can't put it away and I don't want to, because I can trust myself to stand up for myself when I need, to protect myself when I need, and clearly I cannot trust other folks to do that for me. So this is what I get, tired but one foot in front of the other. Forever.

I've spent parts of my life wishing things were "worse" so I could feel like my emotions were legitimate. Dad was horrifyingly emotionally abusive: he ignored me, he said terrible things, he denied my feelings in all cases. I spent years wishing he'd hit me so my feelings that he was doing something wrong would be justified. Poly, sex, gender, orientation, nudism: I'm invisibled, the butt of the joke that friends laugh at, not mentioned, not on the list of choices given me, nothing that's done is a big deal. So I wish sometimes that people would say something truly awful, hit me, attack me so that it would be justified. Because being denied as a human, because not being included, because recieving defensiveness rather than empathy doesn't seem bad enough to justify my feelings.

Except it is. I feel these things, so it is.

And today I'm tired, but I can do nothing about it but go spend a couple days on the ocean with my mom who at the least does not do these things to me, who believes I'm worthy of love as I am, and hope she stays around for a very long time.

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greenstorm

June 2025

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Page generated Jun. 28th, 2025 12:10 am

Greenstorm's Journal

watching the cycle: leaves to mulch to soil to leaves

Entries tagged with loneliness

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Husbandry

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Elementary

Old acquaintances

Old acquaintances

Dream

Dream

Daily: focus

Notpocalypse

Daily: freewrite

Daily: which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Daily: which is natural which is infinite which is yes

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(no subject)

Tendrils

Tendrils

Emplaced

Wheel Turns

Nails on a chalkboard

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June 2025

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