Greenstorm's Journal

It begins.

The first trickle of running water down my driveway showed up yesterday. Four feet of snow has sunk to three. Somehow, I never know how, the earth under the snow is warming: my house is staying much warmer in the basement even when the thermometer temperature is low, and streamlets are running down the sides of roads and puddles and small floods are gathering in the inner elbows of the highway.

It's not yet slippery, there's still enough snow for grip.

At solar noon the sun is finally reaching a height within the bottom range of what scientists argue may allow skin to produce vitamin D, though it needs to be a little higher to reach the consensus level.

Geese are squabbling and pairing off and there are eggs starting. The dogs are working hard at night over the whole perimeter.

It's almost time to put seeds in pots.

Against this backdrop I'm sleeping a lot. When I'm not working, and sometimes when I am, I'm lying on the couch with 2 - 3 cats and sometimes a dog or two right there in front. The woodstove is on, light comes in through one window and the other is entirely buried under snow. I'm still wanting to sleep a long night and 3 - 4 naps during the day so I think the medication I'm on needs to be adjusted. With all this sleep and quiet animal companionship I feel like I'm slowly healing in some ways. For most of the winter I was on birth control drugs that put me in the worst part of my cycle. For some time before that my natural hormone response was drifting more and more towards that state. I had no skin. Every thing that happened, every tiny interaction with living things or with the environment, raised crescendos of usually negative, corrosive, painful sensations in my head.

Sitting there quietly, kept loving and concerned watch over by the five house animals, occasionally venturing out and responding to the geese with old instinctive goose chatter: it's giving me practice at the world not hurting me. Cats acting like cats, dogs acting like dogs, geese acting like geese, ravens acting like ravens, and pigs acting like pigs: it's ok. It's becoming ok for the world to exist. It's a small world and it's going from a refuge to a womb. After a couple weeks I started experiencing love again in little flickers while looking at a sleeping animal that has been seeking me out and caring about me this whole time.

It's healing, yes, but my capacity is almost zero. I am incredibly tired all the time, I think from the sertraline. I barely manage to stay awake on my office days; on work-from-home days I nap at lunch, on breaks, before work, and after work. On weekends I sleep. My home is suffering since I can barely drag out the trash, let alone tidy things. I'm eating sandwiches and freezer meals.

And... I still don't have my passions, my enthusiasms, back. I feel indifferent towards my hobbies: cooking, butchery, pottery, even gardening just hold no interest for me. I'd be fine watching shows with the animals and going to work and coming home and watching shows and going to work and coming home for the rest of my life. Talking to Josh or Tucker is nice in the moment but not something to seek out. People aren't something to seek out. I just don't really care. Things are fine. I'm going to do my best to start seeds because I think future me will appreciate it, but it seems unnecessary.

Of course, that's not fine. I'm reasonably sure it's the medication, and obviously that needs to be tweaked. Luckily I set up doctor's appointments for next week before I started on the meds, because between sleeping all the time and not caring I wouldn't have done it while on them.

These are significant issues, of course, but I am at least safe and healing and the first whispers of spring are here.