Greenstorm's Journal

My poem-a-day on fb ended on Imbolc. We're at equinox now, the time of balance.

A lot of things have been happening in the world that, according to the way I and my peers were educated, were only supposed to happen in countries that (insert scientific racism here).

I'm alive and supported. Mom came up for almost two weeks, the longest I've visited with her since before I lef-- was kicked out of home. We're on the same page about the current state of the US, and we're both from here. We both don't know what to do about my anti-vax pro-musk anti-civilization brother. I'm honestly very curious about how my other brother and his wife, who are currently pregnant, will deal with the whole thing.

My body and my mind still are low capacity. The gardening club did a seedy saturday last weekend, and I've been going in to the studio on sundays to work to encourage the new folks; I'm still recovering from that three days later, and not as fast as I'd like. Part of the issue is that having emotions is an activity and I've run out of shows that don't eliminate people, kill people, use long-term threats to people as the main meat of the show etc to watch to avoid spending time on current events.

While due process is evaporating in the US, my left-leaning friends are also slowly letting go of the idea of laws that apply equally and of due process in Canada. It's been a long journey and it showed up first awhile ago, first of course with the concept that the right/wrong people shouldn't have the right not to be physically assaulted (nazis, rapists) and has been trailing on from there. When a system isn't working there doesn't seem to be a lot of effort to envision an equitable system that works, just calls to tear the system down, but only for the parts of the system they don't like. No energy is spared for thinking something might ever be better, or what consequences might be.

Which is how, I guess, we get to the slow death of the concept of universal rights that seems to be happening. Enough polarization, I guess, that folks can't hold onto the idea of everyone as humans. Or maybe they consider that the experiment of the concept of rights has failed. I'm still chewing on this one.

And meanwhile a very great number of people are about to die earlier than they expected. Between Palestine, AIDS and malaria programs, vaccinate-able diseases funding & related medical collapse, and various flavours of famine, well.

There's no fixing it from here. Only amelioration, our seedy saturday gave away thousands of packets of seeds, we had over fifty people come (the municipality is something like 1500 people, the area something like 3000). I gave away lots of micro tomato plants. There was a feeling of abundance. People walked away with arms spilling packets of seeds. We raised many of them and many seed companies contrubuted. For a second we were supported, and maybe people will grow a connection to the soil.

But because I was out in public during the weekend I ran into and talked to more people than normal and I just--

Maybe conversations with myself, here in this space or in the realm of poetry, are the way I need to make meaning before I can interact socially about anything other than pottery.

One of the pottery students is from the soviet union. Then she lived in New York during 9-11. She prefers not to talk about it, as do I, honestly. She's found a way to believe that people are mostly good.

I'm trying to find a way to believe, not that people are good, but to reconcile how I myself, plus baby chicks that eat each other and plagues and humans that genocide pretty regularly as a matter of archaeological fact and lynx populations that starve periodically and the way it's easier to eat a prey animal alive by going in through the intestines but also each new spring and adult crows feeding other apparently adult crows and the way a plant makes more seeds than I'll ever need, how to reconcile how all these things coexist *with me inside it all*. Do I have a role? What is it?

This is the time when I'm starting tomato seeds.

The talking point is that immigrants are important because they fill roles, like doctors and nurses, that our society can't fill from within itself. These humans are important because of their utility.

I would think that a stronger argument could be made that, for instance, palestinians who watched so many people be killed around them, trans people who are institutionally raped, dunno, take your pick from the so many groups, that they should be given a place where they can rest and heal without being bothered to serve folks and be grateful. An argument that humans care for each other because we're human.

But it's not a stronger argument I guess. How do I reconcile that?

It snowed today, it'll snow again tomorrow and the day after. Disability wants more paperwork. Folks want to schedule things. My ability to think is overloaded and I am nonetheless stealing it selfishly to write here, to think about meaning and context. Doing so leaves other people waiting until my capacity recovers, it leaves the possibility that I might lose disability funding and rely more on other people. It keeps me myself.

I'm used to making meaning with such a quick, bright, flexible instrument. Now what I use is unfamiliar, erratic and slow and landscape-shifting as a glacier. I think, not in moments but in months, and as I think the beginning and ends of the thoughts fade into murk.

It's new, but it's also me, a person I love and trust. I want to see where this takes me.

I want more people to be safe.

I want to understand how I can be a human, and other people are somehow humans too.