Greenstorm's Journal

And I went to a winter solstice gathering with a coworker who screened for witchy and witchy-tolerant people. Which is like breathing after holding my breath around people up here for years. No ritual or anything, just chatting for awhile but safely. I gave away cleansing soap and extra pottery.

It's been awhile since I did this kind of magic. Then again, I'm getting very used to channeling this kind of magic.

First was the time in the forest and the river. That wasn't magic. It was just me, being myself in a space with humans. It had been a very long time. I didn't have to watch myself, to do anything right. This doesn't only mean I could wear clothes or not as I chose, but also that I could bathe in the river whenever I wanted, even if there was no one else doing it; I could behave as I needed during ritual without the requirement of conformity; I could talk about sciency forest management and being spiritually wedded to the land in the same breath; and when I couldn't stand up during ritual I could participate as I wanted without anyone breaking the space with undesired concern or assistance or excluding me.

I walked around and people fed me. That's how I feel loved.

I could have an intense discussion about the character and connection to my land with someone else similarly bound, learning through contrast and similarity and most importantly never feeling like an alien in that space though other people were behaving very differently at that time.

I could watch Tucker inhabit his space and we could come and go from each other with love and admiration without being bound by emotional responsibility for each other.

I could see friends I haven't seen in too, too long and remember they are friends.
That was one half.

The second half involved going to Sidhehaven and making objects. The first couple were mundane, warm-ups but shortly thereafter it was muse or magic, take your pick. I had gone to learn from Sherry, who's been a professional potter for over a decade now. I had also gone to make use of her tools -- she has the most amazing collection of pottery tools -- and to be in a dedicated space that wasn't limited to a couple hours every week except maybe it wouldn't happen because someone didn't have a key or something. Don't get me wrong, I like Sherry, but I was able to immerse fully in what I was doing.

I continued to sleep outside, more-or-less; instead of camping there was a little shed with one outlet, no heat, and a metal roof that sang when it rained. Benefits of being outside for me in the pacific northwest are that I don't have to handle folks' scents and that my body likes the arc of temperature variation. It's generally within a range I can handle.

Sherry cooked a couple times, made fresh bread, had figs and apples ripe around the property, and had a fridge full of food I could plunder. She showed me some things, was around to chat a little, kept me clued in to her schedule, but otherwise left me to my own devices in the studio. I could wake up and go make things before breakfast, before anyone was up. I could work late if I wanted. I could nap when I wanted, taking runs of 2-4 hours of intense concentration and channeling and then collapsing with some tea or a fig into a nap.

My plan had been to replace my plates and bowls I'd made when I did much the same thing in 2014, and to learn to throw taller cylinders. Those plates had been each imprinted with a single plant, inscribed with the latin name, and I'd thought I'd do something similar. The first day I did a circuit of the property with a notebook writing down which plants had available material and which ones I also felt an affinity for.
An hour or two later I was pushing clay against the deep crags of douglas fir bark and getting it hopelessly stuck instead of taking imprints. Another hour and I was draping clay over abalone shells. Twelve hours later I was layering cast-aside clay trimmings and texture mats and rollers and draping them over all sorts of objects. Twenty four hours later I was carrying a big rock into the studio to use as a form for bowls. Thirty hours later I was imprinting poetry, letter by letter, in incantations into the objects.

Thing about clay is it imposes pacing on the potter. It's generally used wet, in a paste or dough consistency where it can't necessarily support itself. Then it dries and as it does so it becomes more able to hold a form but also more likely to break getting into it. If it dries too quickly it cracks. If it's not try enough it can't be taken off a form, or even really handled in many ways.

It's only once clay is very, very dry that it can be put into a kiln and fired to a fairly low temperature. This sets it up so it will hold its shape and survive moisture instead of melting but leaves it porous. The porosity is important because then it's generallly glazed: covered in ground glass and minerals that are absorbed into it. Then it goes into the kiln again, much hotter this time, hot enough to not only melt the glaze into a layer of glass over the object but also to vitrify the underlying clay and make it non-porous to some functional (if not statistically certain) level.

I was at Sidehaven from Sunday evening to Wednesday evening. Nothing was perfectly dry when I left, let alone dry, fired, glazed, and refired. Sherry was loading the kiln for the first fire when I left. She was going to do a candle, basically running the kiln as a super low heating pad overnight to dry everything out before doing the first fire.

Clay changes colour when it fires. The physicality of it changes completely. I left heavy, damp objects. Because I was somehow working with porcelain I will return to smaller, bright white, light objects with much less heft. I won't make it back for months but when I do it'll be to apply the colours and textures of glaze to these objects: objects I haven't even handled yet. And if you think clay changes a lot when it's fired you should see glazes! They're usually a dull grey or red thick liquid when they go onto the piece. When fired they completely alchemize into colours: bright or dark, shiny or dull, speckled or swirled or depthlessly clear. Depending on how many layers are put on the piece, how porous it was after the first fire, what temperature it gets to, how quickly it gets to temperature and how long it stays there and how slowly it cools, it can look very different.

I have ideas right now, developed as the objects formed under my hands, but when I go back I won't even remember what they look like. I took pictures, but still. I was carried by my interaction with the clay so completely in the past couple days. I can only hope it comes back when I return. I made a lot of objects: ridiculous serving platters, big plates, small plates, nearly a dozen cups, some large bowls and some larger bowls and a couple sauce dishes. Enough to populate a kitchen with, really. It's hard to leave; it's good to know I can go back.

I write this on the train that connects Sidhehaven to the city, to Vancouver. The train is cheap, civilized, it runs every day, it doesn't get delayed forever like airplanes. I'm grateful, and a repeat feels achievable. Things want to be finished.

That is to say it's been an excellent vacation so far. The highway home is closed and rerouted due to a fire that's been burning on it for days. I'm not heading up for another couple days but I'm hoping the highway is open by then; if not we go around. Then home, to hopefully collapse into a pile of dogs and cats and just absorb for a little while. That or run around the garden to see how it is: my neighbours got a frost on the 20th but mom says my garden is fine.

Note: train was delayed by a police incident and ran a couple hours late. Apparently this is "not normal" and I am just cursed with transportation.

Speaking of not making things to look forward to, I am looking forward to this course and am very curious about it. Some of my pagan friends have found it's helped them, and I'm curious about the other participants:

Land: Loss and Reconnection

“The Witch has been created by the land to act for it.”
--Peter Grey, Rewilding Witchcraft

Land is how we live. We live on the land, we live because of land, and when we die we go back into the land.

Yet land, in our modern capitalist dystopia, is often the farthest thing from our mind. Few of us even have access to land—everywhere it is fenced off, paved over, gated, polluted, and destroyed.

How did it come to this? How did the notion of private property come about? Why were so many people displaced from the land through enclosures, the transatlantic slave trade, and brutal colonization?

And what has this done to us?

In this six week online course, writer, artist, and Gods&Radicals co-founder Alley Valkyrie will lead you through the history and meaning of land, illuminate the processes and politics that caused our separation from land, and guide you to spiritual reconnection and political reclamation of the land beneath our feet.

Alley Valkyrie’s course will cover the following topics:

Week One: The Importance of Land

Week Two: Lost Land—Enclosures & Property

Week Three: Lost Land—Displacement and Colonialism

Week Four: Land—Its spirits and Peoples

Week Five: Spiritual Reconnection to Land

Week Six: Political Reclamation of Land

Harvested the first of the grain.

Hordeum nigrinudum barley from PR seeds was ripest and I couldn't dent it at all and which the voles left alone, but all 5 were well into the hard dough stage: faust from Ellen, previously via Salt Spring Seeds and which voles liked; Excelsior from Salt Spring Seeds and which the voles absolutely devastated and which also tasted pretty good during the ripeness test; Arabian Blue also from salt spring seeds; and purple dolma barley from the experimental farm network and which the voles really left alone.

Prelude wheat from PR seeds was undentable hard and nice and tall, the heads were beginning to bend. Ethiopian Blue Tinge wheat from salt spring was surprise ripe, at least it was in the very firm dough stage and difficult to dent. It grew closer to knee high, like barley, while the other wheats grew more like shoulder high.

I also harvested most of the bouchard soup peas since the pods were yellow and various levels of deeply wilted and dry/papery. They were in the ground exactly 3 months.

Ceres might be ready soon.

I'm pretty sure there's ergot growing on my triticale! That's... something to think about.

They're in my house drying, all of them, some in brown paper bags and the three bigger harvests (purple dolma and the wheats) in cardboard boxes.

I went out originally because someone on the forums was asking something about uniformity or what they looked like and I wanted to take pictures for her. Then I realized the voles were making serious inroads on my barley and the wheat was ripe, so... I cut it and brought it in.

Do you know those moments when you fit so well and so perfectly into the world that nothing else can possibly have space to feel bad? That feeling of bliss where there is nowhere to go but down, but it doesn't matter because it's just so good in that moment? The feeling of completion where there's no seam between you and the entirety of what is supposed to be? The times when you are given more than you could ever need until it lifts you, like water lifts you, stealing all the weight of everyday? The world-stopping moments when you know you are fully loved, right down to your core and without room even for the shadow of a doubt?

These couple hours of tasting and taking pictures and cutting stalks with my hand-shears and disentangling stalks of different kinds of grain: this is what I was made for. I am so lucky to get to do it.

Edited to add: I somehow forgot to mention just how beautiful these grains are. Hordeum nigrinudum is a two-row awned barley: it looks like a children's drawing of grain but in a dark midnight purple, two short rows of grains in a neat plane on either side of the stalk. Excelsior and purple dolma have marbled green/beige and purple leaves and husks; purple dolma has rather disorganized looking seed-heads like a quick linework sketch while excelsior has rows that wrap around the head and husks that part slightly to reveal very uniform glimpses of shining dark purple-almost-magenta-but-too-dark kernels against the matte husk. They're beautiful. There's nothing better.

Thursdays are pagan happy hour (happy hour is what you call a casual meeting of Dinonysos cultists I guess?). I drop into many of these - I really like the group, they are able to work with nature as it is and not only as a metaphor - and they are usually free-form. Tonight's was specifically about working with ancestors.

I don't consider myself to do any spiritual work around ancestors since my cosmology doesn't really... care ...about individual humans much. People are just not my focus. But when I hold seeds in my hand, or when I see my geese in the barnyard or a new batch of piglets born, I understand myself to be touching something shaped by the decisions and necessities of so many generations of people stretching back and back and back into the mist. I understand that strand to go both back into prehistory and hopefully forward into the people who will need this biodiversity, these genetic resources, these gifts.

And the discussion tonight got me thinking: I don't bargain with ancestors or make deals with them. But I do feel I owe my human ancestors reciprocity: they gave so much to put these in my hands and in turn I owe them the work of ensuring they continue.

I'm in the north. We have cool, short seasons shared with much of Russia. Varieties collected by Vavilov, who was killed for his work, survived the seige of Leningrad guarded by botanists who died of starvation rather than eat the seed grain and the seed potatoes. Those varieties went on to be bred into the plants I grow, or in some cases they are the plants I grow.

When it comes down to it, in every way, growing things is my spiritual work.

It's breakup season. The lake fills with meltwater, it rises, the ice floats and is jarred by the wind until it breaks and gathers and eventually melts and flows downstream.

The other day my hourglass broke. Piotr gave me that hourglass to remind me that all things pass, and that all things come again. I'm trying not to read it as an omen that I'm stuck here.

Josh has started saying, "I'm not sure if that narrative serves you". He picked it up from me.

Tucker is very happy to be quarantined with me, but when this simmers down a little bit he will go see his people back east, and then he will move away. Everyone is happy for my land in an emergency. Everyone is happy for me when they need things.

His fingerprints are all over Threshold.

I'm grieving the end of that relationship. I don't expect we'll go to zero relationship: he's a good friend, a valued lover, and we've done a lot of work together over the last few years. We may even emerge as anchors still, who knows? But it won't be the same.

And like all relationship grieving I want everyone vaguely relationship-shaped to go away and leave me in peace. I want to return to the things I can rely on to be there, things that feel familiar: fruit trees, tomato plants. Even the pigs are more new, more novel, than I really want.

I feel abandoned now; Tucker will feel abandoned if I take space now; I will feel like I wasted my last time to be with him in this way, afterwards; neither of us will have had the discussion we need, together, to mindfully develop the next step of the relationship.

So I grieve in the tiny spaces. When I do yoga there is grief in my body. When I see the green grass coming up I feel pain. When I look into the empty greenhouse and know it will be full in summer it feels like loss.

I'd always thought of myself as more aligned with Demeter than Persephone but this is a spring where sunreturn signals the grief of separation and the work of getting down to growing things.

It's a time when I want to push on things to see the whole structure topple. I want everything around me gone so I have the peace of dust and inevitability. I want to thrash around until I have no energy left, finally, resignation comes for me.

Someday, maybe, I'll write about what I'm losing. Hopefully I'll write about it from the stable platform of what it evolves into.

And now I'm trying to schedule Avi's next visit and all I'm thinking is: I don't want humans anymore.

The hourglass Piotr gave me, the one for the "this too will pass, and something good will come again" meditation, broke today.