Greenstorm's Journal

When I was first in this town I got my coworkers celebrating solstice. Stay up all night, wine, meat on a stick over the fire, greet the dawn across the lake. When I was gone they carried on doing it without me.

Last year I didn't attend; I was in my new home I think.

This year my land reminds me that I'm death-aspected, and it's helping me count down the days. There had been so much life here, such a long steady relentless ramp up of increasing living matter from the last snow through the first buds on the aspens and birds nesting and nearly a hundred new birds arriving and the sorrel growing and the grass coming up and everything just exploding into being alive.

Life is built on death. I know this in my bones. The normative world wants to believe that death is only old things but of course it is not. An excess of life and then death at all stages is the engine that drives the world; it drives selection and fitness and speciation. This is the week that counts down to solstice. I expect death in the fall but it's found me here, at the height of the sun's energy, when I had somehow almost forgotten it wasn't all under my control.

First I lost an eggbound hen on Monday. I'd had one previous prolapsed duck I had to cull, this one had the egg break inside her and sepsis set in. Next day my first livestock losses to wildlife today. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and maybe eight very rare breed hatchery chicks to enhance the genetics of my flock were taken by what appears to be a family of ravens teaching its young to hunt. Ravens come in the windstorms and there was the mother of all windstorms that day. Even the super tiny ducklings were all fine; anything with a mother to protect them, or that moved in a close herd like the hatchery ducklings. The hatchery chicks were five weeks old at this point, they tended to scatter rather than flock, and they had neither a mother hen nor a watchful rooster to adopt them. The next day I lost a piglet, my first piglet loss. He'd been doing poorly and had an injury to his face, I think maybe from the ravens when he was sleeping? But he held in there for a couple weeks and then one day he just did not make it. That was Wednesday. Now it's Thursday. I found the neighbours' well-loved cat on the road, hit, in front of their house. The didn't answer the phone so I wrapped him in my coat and took him up the driveway. They had just got him a couple months ago to replace one of their old cats who had died.

Tomorrow is Friday. I will work from home, take breaks, and bury things. I will plant trees and fence the trees clear of the geese.

Then I will go to the fire at my boss' place and bring wine and bloody meat and be among humans.

On the weekend I'll mulch and give the pigs a new field of grass and go for a walk by the lake. I'll talk to Josh and hold and be held by Tucker. I'll give my grief to the ground and see what grows there.

With my land behind me I feel like a conduit for grief now, like the component that lends meaning to these deaths so they don't flow unremarked back into the soil. Grief doesn't make me question my fitness for my role, though it makes me want to improve my systems. It doesn't get tangled up and corrosive. It just... hurts, and it's supposed to, and that's ok.

I'm definitely apprehensive about tomorrow though.

I've been doing a crazy amount of learning lately, and I've been surging forward full speed on a bunch of decisions. Let's see if I can get some of it down.

Sunshine + exercise + food == happy Greenie. This is no news to me or anyone. However, I'd been depending on work for the exercise and sunlight, and work right now is a source of stress and not a source of any of those other things. I had been (have been) having a rough winter; I've got a lot of changes going on, much of the outcomes outside my experience or control, and I can't afford to let this stuff slide. So, I've let my competitive instinct kick in and started doing hot yoga like Dave, just... more often. Every single day I do it I feel better for hours afterwards. I am keeping an eye on overtraining issues and not doing absolutely every single say, but it's good so far. It levels my head so well and is conveniently close. I may keep this up even after I start bike commuting.

Sunshine was really forthcoming this fall until sometime in December, which is when I started to nosedive. Exercise can compensate to some degree for light, especially since I'm being kept too busy at work to get out into the light during the week. Ugh.

I'm getting real good at eating enough, and at asking for help when I'm having trouble. It helps that my neighbour is always up for eating together and I can use her presence to put myself into a better place for food. This all gets difficult when I'm financially stressed, though the meat box and farm stuff really helps.

Sex is a problem in a bunch of different ways. I thought I had this figured out; I thought that by taking back my bodily autonomy so I didn't have to ask folks permission before making choices around sex I would fix everything. Instead I only began a learning curve totally different from the one I've been on most of my life. How do I decide who to have sex with and when? How do I deal with humans when I decide to have or not to have sex with them in general? Per instance? How do I deal with the fact that in people's eyes when I don't have a primary partner I am always on some level available no matter how much I protest to the contrary? How do I let people know the ways in which I am more available than suspected, and how less? How do I deal with not having enough sex, or with feeling subtle coercion around sex? How do I deal with sex that I want beforehand but don't want in the moment? How do I calibrate desire vs complexity and work? How much do I like emotions involved in sex and what kind of sex do I like, anyhow?

I imagine you folks who weren't in serious relationships most of your life are laughing at me about now.

I'm learning that I probably want to have sex with fewer people less often than I thought I did, because the complexities that come with it are just not worth it. I'm also learning how sexual compatibility and emotional intimacy work together for me, and how they don't always go together regardless of how much I might want them to. I think I'm learning that when something works, I should let it work, and when I need to push and work hard on something, I should probably drop the sexual aspect of it.

I don't know that my original interpretation of solo poly will end up being what I choose, after all. Especially with the time and energy I'm putting elsewhere, it may just not be worth it.

Romantic relationships aren't enough. In fact, even non-romantic relationships aren't enough. I've made huge strides lately in learning to have friends, people with whom I'm close in non-romantic, non-partnery long-term and very intimate ways. That enriches my life immensely. I've been treating my home, careful selection and upkeep of my house, with as much attention as I have in the past given major relationships. I really enjoy the result. I have decided to add my career to the mix of important stuff to give that much time and attention to.

This has resulted in my making some information-gathering dates with folks at my old school, formulating a career path, and now doing some more information-gathering from folks in the field I want to head into and (this is scary) applying to, not a technical college, but a formal huge sprawling university-temple of academia. I'm formulating a support team (emotional, physical, logistical, motivational) which I can do really well based on my previous experience with working through my diploma. I actually feel pretty confident about this path of mine, though it's me against huge and arbitrary machines within machines, which is never easy for me to deal with.

I may not be in Vancouver forever. I may stay in the Valley forever or I may not, but a million tiny roots are shaking themselves and working their way loose. I had never thought to leave, before, but in a couple of years I will be able to if I so choose.