Greenstorm's Journal

One of the weirdest experiences I have at this point is watching people be deeply offended by being required to say no. Like, they are asked if they can/will do something, and instead of making a decision based on their priorities and own knowledge of their lives, they do the thing and then are deeply angry, contemptuous, or affronted by the fact that they were asked.

I'm not saying I haven't felt that way in the past -- I certainly have -- but part of adulthood for me has been coming into ownership of my life. I make decisions about it. And the more people ask me, freely and non-coercively, the more info I have on what folks would like and I can then say yes or no.

I get that a lot of folks have damage around saying no if it might inspire an emotion in other people, but that is damage, right?

I get that some people are in coercive situations where they can be physically or financially harmed by saying no, but that isn't the majority of these situations, though I do think some folks autopilot as if the majority of situations are coercive.

I get that different pockets of culture have different ways to negotiate the method of asking, whether it's oblique reference or straight out statement.

I get that different pockets of culture used to have ways of negotiating importance or impact to the people involved, and maybe these methods have decayed with cultural intermixing so folks aren't great at asking if something is kinda nice vs life-changing. I know with Josh he'd originally assumed that my asks were life-changing, so I try to calibrate with him when I do an ask ("this would be nice but if it's a big deal don't worry about it")

I still dislike it very much as a commonplace element of the culture I inhabit and I would like it to go away.

I’ve often asked (and even more often, WANTED to ask) two distinct questions around unexpected behavior, such as we have as an example here.
1. What response did you want to see me give to ?
2. What response did you think you were most likely to get by ?

For what it’s worth, my experience is that most people cannot separate the two questions as distinct from each other. Meaning, they answer the second question the same as the first, even when they have no reason to think that the odds of getting what they want are very high. I don’t know if that points out a problem in the way I’m phrasing the questions, or if it is a by-product of the sort of thinking that creates the weirdness to start with. (Meaning, if people think that what they WANT is also the MOST LIKELY outcome of their action, then of course, they are likely to indulge in it.)

For my own part, I think a lot of people neither think nor care about other people's internality, and their goal is behavioral control and not some sort of consensus on shared well-being because they just don't perceive other people as having legitimate well-being in daily interactions. I love the idea of people exploring situations like this, and I like this pair of questions. I think folks very often are taken aback by my responses to things, and this might help me figure that out.

I've come up with a lot of ways to handle being upset. I write, I talk it out, I distract, I sit and feel it, I dance it out, I connect with new things, I connect with old things, I connect with my garden, I find patterns, all sorts of strategies depending on what's going on.

I do not have great strategies for what to do when I'm happy. I usually have a strong impulse to share joy or to make a plan to hold it. What I don't know how to do is sit with the intensity of it. I also don't know how to share it. I don't do joyful projects with other people in part because I don't do projects with other people (Josh excepted) but if I did I wouldn't know-- if you share the experience of making something, how do you then share the experience of pride and happiness and future-anticipation and whatever with someone? Do you just sit around and assume they feel the same? Josh will sometimes (years later even) comment on how happy he is with the pigshed we made and I'm happy with it existing as a memory of time we spent together doing the project, thinking together and working together, but I don't know how to share that with him.

When I'm happy with someone, say we're sitting in the car singing together or lying next to each other being close or sitting around a fire toasting meat or far away not talking and they do something that makes me feel like the world is perfect and wonderful and the moment rings like good crystal, I'm not sure how to share that. I know how to do things to make people feel loved, to learn their love languages and give them those things, but that's about creating a feeling in them and not in sharing a feeling when I have it. And love is different than happiness anyhow, for most people it implies a set of prescribed actions and thoughts and I'm just talking about happiness, about joy.

And when I'm planting the seeds of tomatoes or peppers I've crossed and they come up and I've created something in partnership with these plants, my mind and the world together, I can turn the energy into plotting out the next steps in the breeding process to distract but I don't know how to just sit and hold that feeling without it being so intense and overwhelming. Same as people, really.

I can deflect, distract, pour that energy into trying to drive towards a future with more of the same but I can't, I don't know, inhabit it.

When I'm upset the world comes apart, but when I'm happy the world also comes apart. When I'm upset I can talk through it and get support but when I'm happy? I go into myself, where I'm alone. Maybe I can write and hope someone finds and relates to that message in a bottle flung into the internet. But how do I share that experience? Or, how do I share myself, when I'm happy? How do I remain close?

Sometimes I just cry, and am held, and maybe that's the closest I've got so far.

Sometimes I play, like a dog with zoomies will frolic, but my play is weird and usually focused on wordplay and absurdities and few people can meet me in that space.

Anyhow, I don't know how to do this and it's probably part of why joy tends to come with an edge, I guess the edge of isolation and loneliness.

I often forget that something like a bush partner isn't part of everyone's working life. Doing outdoor work in landscaping or forestry you often end up paired off with a particular person for the duration of a job or a season. The two of you drive to site together, work together, drive home together. There's definitely technical talk and silence. There's also a very specific kind of companionship that comes from achieving shared goals, and lots of time for all kinds of conversation.

There's an art to these relationships. It's unbearable to be with someone who expects immediate constant responses for eight to ten hours every day. It's challenging to be with someone who doesn't talk at all. Low-level landscapers and foresters aren't known for their interpersonal skills but pretty much everyone I've been paired with has some way through what is essentially a very intimate relationship. Some people pour themselves out immediately and then can rest. Others barely dip their toes in with small-talk until they know it's safe and then inch in millimeter by millimeter. On any given day, depending on mood and energy and a million other things, "are you doing anything this weekend?" might lead to a discussion of instant pots, the place of old growth forests in society, hydraulics on mountain bikes, parental trauma, or just a shrug and a comfortable silence.

Your bush partner doesn't owe you much. They need to show up, be pretty well prepared ideally, and have or be able to learn or teach some skills. When you're using your body day after day there will always be slow days and fast days. There will always be days of conversation and days without and whether you read those as brooding or tired or lost in daydreams you may never get an explanation. Over time the two of you will develop your complementary skills, will settle into unspoken and efficient routines. Usually someone will lead some things and someone else will lead others: she usually puts music on, I usually call lunchtime. When we get to the worksite I automatically get these tools ready, you automatically go pee in the bushes then unload the quad.

I've been in the bush a couple days a week over the last little while and I didn't know how much I missed this kind of relationship. This is how I like humans: not rushed, using skills they've honed, working together, taking their time to learn each other, not trying to find a place to fit into each others' lives but just there for awhile and with the knowledge that there is a way out if needed. I like the daily things: tired today, doctor's appointment tomorrow, maybe I'll do this or that tonight. I like the deeper things to have the space of routine and alternate activities around them: you run that tape measure out fifteen meters or dodge those potholes while you think of an answer, there's no hurry at all. I like fitting skill-to-skill, problem solving together: I'll comb through the map and you drive through the dodgy road, I'll do the heavy work if you'll catch the details. I like not having to worry about interrupting heavy thought-work. I like having shared experiences, like rain or bugs or a particularly lovely view. I like it. I'd missed it.

It's letting me have positive regard for humans again. I think a lot of people lost that during covid and have still lost it. It's an important part of me. Being able to just be around someone without a relationship agenda of some kind really helps this (and I mean small-r relationship, that is, any interpersonal interaction of any kind is secondary to getting the work done).

Don't get me wrong, working in the bush is spectacular for so many reasons. It's great to be outside, to see things no one else gets to see, to do force-times-distance type work with my body, to experience ecosystems, to get information other folks don't have. But. It's also a good kind of getting to know someone that isn't fraught.

Things that aren't fraught are important right now.

This is something I'd lose doing remote-only work. I'm too slow in the bush to do production work -- that is, to do the basic and most common types of work out there. That leaves checking on the production folks or doing weird fringe things. Hm.

Well, it's still early evening but I'm very tired. Time to sleep. Be well.

I wish I weren't so irritated by the people pouring ashes over their heads and wailing now that the heat waves have convinced them that climate change might affect their lifestyle.

I suspect they still won't turn their attention to anything that doesn't have an actual disaster porn movie aesthetic.

Still so bitter and fragile over here.

Doing a daily writing practice for a bit on whatever.

I don't do my relationships with landscape any differently than I do my relationships with people. They don't feel different to me, and they have a similar enormous range that my relationships to people do. Within them I commit similarly, compromise similarly, and love similarly.

What makes land easier for me than people is that it cycles. It gives the underlying security of structure, which I need: it will be there for me when I come back, and any given season will leave and then will certainly, inviolably come back around. It will come back to be a little different; like people land evolves and grows. Like many people, it changes and remains recognizable and linked to its past by both form and chains of causality and so remains captivating.

As I said, it comes back around. Mostly unlike people.

Like people land has certain requirements, and if the requirements aren't met the relationship can shift. Working together with the land to achieve goals brings a sense of partnership. I wrestle with either abandoning any particular land or watching it be harmed by another, though like people I don't generally feel like it's my place to intervene: landscapes are no shrinking defenseless archetypes. They're less quick to act than we are, and more enduring: in the end they will always prevail.

Every piece of land has its own character. Our society leans towards seeing the land as one single piece rather than individual pieces; contrariwise we see people as discrete individuals rather than the network of flowing feelings and actions and responses that knit us into a society (I think it's Christakis and Fowler whose work counters the rugged individualism belief). Of course the truth of all of us is in the middle, and our relationship to land is as much of an influence as our relationship to people. All relationship is shaped around true seeing, constructing, or ignoring; scarcity and abundance; a synergistic match of what each party has to give and has to take; and of course love.

I love the character of a new landscape land like I love strangers in the normal times when I love people: pre-emptively, hopefully, expectantly, undemandingly.

Like most strangers the land loves me back, but unlike most strangers it keeps loving me back once it gets to know me and it accepts when I must move on.

Talked to the trauma counselor I got through the work line today. Every counseling thing through the work line is very goal-focused. We're supposed to set our goals. There's the usual stuff about how to ground out of distress.

Thing is, I think there's a more intellectual/philosophical issue going on. I think I'm bumping up against "lacks understanding". Somewhere in the big pause and deep breath of the pandemic I changed. I've always valued kindness. It was one of my favourite things about Kynnin, way back in the beginning of me being able to see and value things in other people. Kindness can be short-term, like softness or gentleness or support in the moment, or it can be long-term like building a secure structure or tearing down a harmful one. In all cases its driven by a feeling of well-wishing, of warmth, of caring, or of love.

I don't always practice kindness. Like everyone, I have wounds and fears that drive me away from it in self-protection sometimes. Like everyone, I thought, it's still an aspiration.

And so for my life I've viewed people as an enormous patterned chaos of striving. If everyone felt safe and supported, I thought, they'd be kind to others; it's their wounds and to some degree the lack of kindness shown to them that drive folks to harm others as they claw their way towards their own security. Through their clawing they may harm others and perpetuate the cycle but it's incidental and thy are all trying to do better. Generally if I can lend folks a real sense of being safe and accepted they will relax into kindness.

I like that worldview, I think it's largely accurate, and... I miss it. I'm not yet sure what's taken its place.

I don't really believe in personal exceptionalism. I don't believe that I am uniquely positioned to see things that others can't; I don't believe I have feelings that others don't.

And between those things I really struggle to see where folks are turning their energy, where they are able to know and understand that beings outside their singular individual selves exist, where they are able to connect with generosity and empathy and understanding the experiences of another. I need to see people doing that in order to believe that humans are ok.

Trying to write this out, it doesn't make sense and I'm exhausted.

Today I started picking sweet cicily seeds, which I candy in sugar syrup and then dehydrate and they are my favourite candy. I need to also pick chive flowers to go in vinegar.

It's supposed to get up to 32C this weekend, I'm not sure what the record high is for this area but I haven't seen that temperature in quite awhile. That used to be the lower end of my comfort zone, it's amazing how northernized I've become. Maye I'll put some more green beans in the ground and see what comes of them. Maybe I'll drive to a beach on one of the lakes and put my feet in the water.

I just took a long weekend and I was so happy. I'm so happy here, on the property, in the garden and with the animals. I'm so happy without people.

Something in me is resisting going back so hard. I can hear the gears grinding and shearing. I need to break this self down and rebuild in order to go back but I'm not sure I can break down a self in whom I am so happy.

If I were talking to a friend who explained this whole thing to me I'd tell them to disconnect fully. I'd say, don't go back.

I'm pretty sure not going back isn't an achievable trauma goal.

One of the hardest thing about the pandemic has been how folks who'd previously been in the "bad social structures lead to bad outcomes for individuals" folks have turned into "these individuals are evil people choosing to hurt us all and should be hurt in turn" and "I did the thing, so everyone else should be able to".

I get that folks are scared and hurt and lashing out.

I also find it disheartening. It feels like more folks were following dogma rather than actually believing principles of social organization.

An Assignment for Student Playwrights

I told them to go listen to people talking,
To write exactly how some people really
Talked to each other, and one young man
Came to the next workshop, looking bewildered,
Holding his notes by thumbtip and fingertip
To avoid contamination. He said, "This
Is how they talked. They weren't actually
Having a conversation, just interrupting
Each other and saying whatever it was
They wanted to keep on saying. They had to decide
Today, here and now, like whether to go on
With this, this whatever-it-was they couldn't
Think of a name for. They kept looking
This way and that way, even at me (I wasn't
Anybody, just some student scribbling),
But never at each other. You could tell
They felt bad. They were making up their minds
About something important enough to change
Their lives maybe forever. But what was coming
Out of their mouths wouldn't have passed even
Junior high school English. They were both trying
To say what hurt, what was disappointing, what wasn't
Even common courtesy, let alone love.
If they'd been actors, good ones, they'd have been making
Contact. They'd have been improvising something
More interesting than shoving their chairs back
And standing up and trying to split the bill
But dividing it wrong, dropping it, picking it up,
And arguing all the way out. Now what the hell
Am I supposed to make out of this crap?"

David Wagoner

Awhile back I invited my mom up for Christmas, and Christmas turned to new year, and then she has a trip out sailing planned for several months starting next Wednesday. But it turns out she has time to come up tomorrow, and to then go back down Wednesday and catch her trip to, um, I honestly don't remember if it was back from Tahiti or something about Japan or something up the west coast or anything about it really. I got a text from her today saying she could come up tomorrow, and did that work. So.

I had Avi scheduled to come up on Wednesday: he's post-breakup and having a rough time, I threw out the offer, and he's taken me up on it. So then he'll show up when Mom leaves until the weekend.

Then I have until the middle of the following weekend with Tucker and Tucker disappears for, well, two to three months give or take a couple weeks. Gonna be a big bucket of people all at once, and after that I suspect I'll enjoy some quiet. If I'm honest, probably somewhat before that.

Then I likely have another visitor in April or May, and in June Josh comes up for maybe a bear hunt.

July and August are for breathing, I guess - I'd like to go down to the coast and visit Adrian and Ellen if I can swing it, maybe once the baby pigs are on the ground - and then I have a Dionysian revel and an Orphic thing and I'd like to host my Threshold international pig-killin' and cannin' thanksgiving.

I guess the year is shaping up.

Gonna hold my breath and get swept under a deluge of people first, though.