Greenstorm's Journal

I haven't been entirely pleased with the way the last year has gone.

I have felt pulled in too many directions, I've felt like my focus is lost, I haven't been paying attention to the things I love, I haven't felt a goal or sense of progress. Those are all valuable to me. I haven't felt like I'm contributing properly to my communities, or like I'm properly in contact with them. I have felt poorly towards the folks I normally feel well-disposed towards and my sense of empathy has suffered.

I've been overwhelmed, alienated, and dissociative.

Not only have I not felt present in my body, or when present in my body I have felt uncomfortable; I have also not felt present in my own mind. Everything I touch has broken, including the tools I need to live and to play.

But.

I've had over a week off work now, more-or-less. I've driven geese to the abattoir and gone back with Tucker to pick them up. My freezers are full of things I've raised or grown; my laundry room still has a couple buckets of potatoes in it, and my pickles and other canned things are lined up beautifully on my shelves. The house is warm right now, I may have sorted a temporary solution for the wood stove, and I'll in all likelihood have wood left over at the end of the year to go into next. I'm nine months in to documenting the property's progress with at-least-weekly videos.

Yesterday Tucker spent all day here. We gave the pigs lots of expired milk given by the grocery store and a couple cheesecakes; they were super happy. Baby, the boar, always rolls in cake when I give them some. The birds all have layer pellets now in addition to their grain. Depression has rolled back, but this weekend anxiety also feels like it left me freer: free to enjoy sex and snuggling and eating delicious things, free to inhabit my own mind and for my body to feel a little less rigid from inside of it.

Dinner last night was a goose breast, fat side scored and seared until 2/3 cup (!) of fat rendered out of it and it was lovely and crispy, brown-fried all over in the fat, and cooked to the rare side of medium rare. That was sliced thin over my purple potatoes mashed with goose fat and a little milk -- the potatoes miraculously held their purple instead of turning grey -- and a bunch of turnip pickles on the side. Everything was grown here, raised here, except for salt, pepper, and a little milk. It was delicious and it also meant a lot to me to be able to do that, and a lot to be able to share it with someone I love. I haven't been feeling proud of myself much lately but I am proud of that.

It was also a relief to assure myself that I like that goose processor, and that I love goose breast cooked that way. The wild goose I've had hasn't been as good; really this was as satisfying as a good steak, with the skin crunch that made it truly amazing. I'd be very sad if I didn't enjoy eating geese; it would mean I'd have to raise fewer of them.

The rest of the goose (breasts removed) is currently confit-ing. The edible part of the goose seems to be about 60% meat and 40% fat; I'm looking forward to exploring what else to do with the fat. Someone suggested making cookies out of them! Apparently her family used to do it that way.

My growing/creating 75% of my own calories project is really fulfilling.

It's also been lovely working with Tucker, sharing the projects of cooking and driving. We're even talking about the relationship well, which is something I always appreciate. I like the sense of always moving forward, of deepening trust and communication and caring ability. It's also really enjoyable to have enough familiarity with someone to work as a team. I like familiarity and domesticity, really.

I've been missing the rabbits a bunch - June and Mella both. I've also missed bathtub goose, the little gosling I rescued who imprinted on me and who didn't make it through the spring. And I've been missing, I don't know, someone to talk about farm setup with, someone with similar drives to me.

So it isn't all bad.

I have a pretty good sense of what I need to do going forward: slow down more, make time to wander around outside and be with the animals (easier as the light returns), reach out and connect with people more directly sometimes and lock my proverbial door sometimes too so I'm not ambiently drenched in the worst parts of humanity by hanging out on the internet generally.

I also need to find a way to start volunteering or donating, maybe both. That was part of my life for so long and it's wrong for it to be missing.

Once again I've been putting off writing. The day after I wrote my previous post, Dec 7th, my rabbit Juniper had a seizure and died. I had expected her to be around several more years; she and Mella were one of my only throughlines to the Before Times in Vancouver that was left.

Tomorrow I take many geese and some ducks and a couple piglets to get slaughtered.

Lately I've been feeling desolate and lonely and sad a lot.

Solstice is so close.

It has been a very hard week, and now I'm happy again.

This post would be so different had I written it this morning; I'd thought to do so. This journal has never sought to be a dispassionate recounting of external facts, not even close, and any story I tell here would be told differently a week later, and then different again a year later, or five years. I'm glad to be telling the story now and not earlier.

I haven't been sleeping well, and I have just started bleeding. These are maybe the root of everything, especially the former. Josh hasn't lived with a partner before; I didn't really come up here with the energy or intention of settling into permanent patterns nor really thought about making patterns with him. Our sleep logistics have not worked themselves out well, and I have been spending time on James as well, and work has been running longer than I expected many days. Sleep, food, and time to think to myself are the three things I should never be without. I've been without too much sleep, and it has felt terrible. A little more of it and soon everything would feel like the end of the world.

I had a nap this afternoon, and maybe I can put these things in a way where they are not the end of the world.

Work is the first and biggest thing. The people I worked with last summer, my first forestry job, were first intriguing and then important to me. I'm having a harder time finding my way into this set of people; the summer students are diverse in personality but not so much in age, they are (we are?) very much thrown together without other people's involvement, and although I can get along with everyone ok, more-or-less, I'm having trouble finding my way into really liking or caring about them. You know me, you've been reading what I write for so long, so you know what a strange statement that is for me. I can usually like people I spend time with.

The whole office is a little bit like that, and maybe if I spent a bunch of time with the individuals it would help a bit, but there's this sense of group othering that I'm never very comfortable with. Conversations can centre around "can you believe this group of people did or said this thing?" without seeking to understand the ins and outs of why or how. I don't like those. I miss the folks from last summer. I both hope I find a way to like this place where I am now, and am giving serious thought to going back there next summer even though it is very far away from Vancouver. And from both Josh and James.

I was going to end this post with him, leave you on a beautiful note, and talk about the garden and the rabbits in the middle, but here we are and he's come up in the same way he came into my life in the last little while: abruptly, surprisingly, but at the right time. I've been embracing that.

Here's the story: over a year ago I went to a friend's... birthday party? It was near Dave's apartment, I'd just moved in for a month before moving up to Fort St James, and a handful of us ended up going for drinks and then back to Dave and my place to hang out. The apartment was all boxes halfway between being unpacked and put in storage, it's a wonder we invited people back, but there we were and it was a lovely evening. There was a person I didn't know who ended up back at the apartment with us, no doubt participating in the discussion: eye-catching long tawny-gold hair and compact assurance, quiet but expressive in face and gesture, some combination of elegant movement and solid sensibility, a little well of gravity in the corner of the apartment I spent most of the evening either looking at or looking away from. Honestly I did more of the latter: Dave and I hadn't discussed how we'd handle flirting or dating while we were both living in that one-bedroom apartment or really in small party situations like that, so I kept myself under wraps. The closer you get to a source of gravity, after all, the harder it pulls, and I was leaving the city's orbit.

I went so far as to get him on facebook and that was a month of job-seeking, packing, exams, rough times with Dave, little energy, and then I was out of town. The next year I was mostly absent; away in Fort, and also emotionally absent when I came back to school. The source of gravity was still there, a tiny trickle of awareness across facebook when I looked at it, a little temptation which I had no energy to meet. When my exams were almost done I suddenly came alive again and there he was, as apparently eager for a date as I was, less than a week before I left town. The whole thing moved at... I was going to say 'my speed' but it was remarkably mutual, and so here I am up in Williams Lake living delightedly with Josh and putting in a garden but with, again, a long distance relationship. A joyful, loving, competent-with-the-internet, visiting-soon, who knows what will happen next? long distance relationship.

I am very pleased. I am (when I don't get enough sleep) drowned in poly guilt but sometimes clear-headedly ok. I am putting in work when I can. I am happy. He is wonderful in every way I could want.

So that's James.

Josh and I are putting in the garden still; it's slow and we have less time and energy than expected, but the plastic is going up on the greenhouse today. We haven't had our last frost yet and so many plants get hauled into the garage when the temperature is forecast low; we may finally be able to move just to floating row cover for the tender things until we get the beds in the greenhouse built. We have been enabling each other buying things that grow; lately iris and daylily and roses in addition to the veggies we've started from seed. We have fruit trees to plant. My soul feels good.

Mella has bonded to the baby rabbits, and they don't fight at all. They lie around snuggled all up together sometimes, or groom each other, and when I'm petting Mella, Odin will come up to be petted and Juniper will come up to lick her in the spots my petting has missed. The little ones have un-litter-trained Mella, but that can be dealt with. It's good to have them with me.

Next weekend Josh and I are going camping at Chilko Lake, which is "out west." From Williams Lake everything is "out west," "out east," "down south," or rarely "up north". The coast doesn't really exist in this dry land except as a mythic place. It is sort of its own centre for the surrounding smaller towns; neither Prince George nor Vancouver really has a pull, though Kelowna is perhaps the metropolitan centre it orbits.

It's dinner time now, grilled hamburgers and salad and contemplating the garden-to-be. I'm ok. I will try to sleep more; I will keep switching strategies until I find one that works. I like being happy, and my afternoon nap gave that back to me after a week without.

I can get through this summer.

Talk to you soon.