Greenstorm's Journal

Time was I could see the future

I still remember fragments as they occur

These days I try not to look into the future

It doesn't serve me

Hope doesn't serve me

If anything is meant to serve us, it is ourselves

The world isn't built for it

Unless we cherry-pick

Blossom-pick

Menu-pick

Even with the biggest plate we can't try everything at the buffet of life

And so much of it will be terrible

So we serve ourselves

Not what we're supposed to like

Not what is supposed to make life worth living

But what we actually love

Olives

Anchovy spread

Mochi

Store-bought potato chips

The stinkiest cheese oozing with orange washed rind

Little hot pickles

Winding through the choices people will say

"Try some of this, it's excellent!"

"Ugh, I could never eat that."

And you will want to take Jane's dip to make her feel better. Don't.


Ignore it all

If someone else wants hope

They can take all the hope

Load their plates

Fill their pockets

Live in the unknown future

And leave the shining pearls of each living moment

Inside the glistening oysters

Raw, briny, unpolished

On the table for me

Connection with Tucker continues to deepen in a way that feels cautiously safe enough for me to mostly own where my attachment issues are - even the ones that were previously caused by his behaviour, there's space to listen and empathize. That's good. There's a lot of baggage, that's hard, but I'm mostly hopeful.

Solly has not yet learned to use the dog door but the dogs have all been in the woodstove room at once, or in various pairs, though she's still getting some counterconditioning around guarding things, and she's poorly mannered about the sofa (but is getting better). Still, we've had nice evenings with all three dogs and a couple cats snuggled up in here. Solly is also re-learning her growl and I'm so proud of her (haha, as someone who spends time with folks who have trouble expressing "negative" emotions I guess) and she's growled several times now instead of going straight to a lunge-and-air-nip. Thea needs daily love and attention for her to not guard Solly away from me in the downstairs. Avallu will not displace cats who are lying in his bed, and so has been sad.

I cleaned the chimney a couple days before new years and relit from the ashes. Chimney was good and clean from burning dry birch. I want to make a better woodshed and get a bunch more birch if possible.

Making a ton of pottery. Downloaded a tracking app and am numbering anything that will be bisqued in 2024 as 24-1 through 24-whatever.

Josh and Tucker both might be visiting in Feb.

It's been ultra warm, not even consistently below freezing though the ground is frozen and we finally got snow a couple weeks ago for insulation. Finally have -20C in the forecast. Very curious to see how the rest of the winter goes.

Last night, on the 1st of the year, I planted 4-6 seeds each of 8 types of tomatoes: two I'd got from a silvery fir micro lineage for testing online, two for crossbreeding (mission mountain sunrise and sweet cheriette), and 4 of my own crosses (unknown whether F1 or F2) sweet baby jade x hardin's mini, F2 zesty green (an offtype of karma miracle I think) x silvery fir, F1 of mission mountain sunrise x (F1 of aerogarden "heirloom" micro x sweet baby jade), and F2 sweet cheriette x karma miracle. This morning I woke up and, knowing those seeds were planted in the next room, I couldn't stop smiling. It's not a lot for growouts but it gives me something to look at, and it's my first manually crossed F2s!!!!!!

Working on a micro tomato workshop for the garden club. The grocery store gave me their poinsettas, so I can use those pots and some scavenged soil and my own micro seeds and people can plant their own. This is the time of year everyone wants to plant things but it's too early to start outdoor veggies. I love being able to help people do plants, especially at low-to-no cost. The garden club is trying to plan one workshop per month and a couple seed swaps at the right time for different plants (early flowers, veggies, and probably plant-straight-outdoors plants).

I am inspired to do some sunreturn pottery as the days get noticably longer (and maybe some wheel pottery at summer solstice?). Tucker requested something firey, and I realized in that moment that good reds usually come from reduction firing-- that is, heating the clay with actual fire instead of electricity, so the fire eats the oxygen and you get different chemical reactions and thus colours than you do with electricity and exygenated air. Relatedly, someone about 3.5 hours away offered for me to fire pots with her. That's relatively close in the scheme of things. I'd like to figure out some sort of wood firing here, not sure if barrel or pit or clay oven style.

I'm going to open Threshold to folks who want to celebrate the solstice and eating and planting and telling stories and maybe canning or sausagemaking or making clay things and who knows what for a week around June 17-24 this year. Hopefully I'll have the outdoor shower & maybe an outdoor toilet by then, there's some camping space maybe even fenced off from geese and some room in the house. It's going to be a big lift but it's important. Need to figure out covid protocols etc. Hoping too much of the province is not on fire by then, we're still in hella drought and I know a lot of those fires are burning under the snow. Flying over them some of the fires were very patchy, so there's lots of edge for fuel to be living in.

Little Bear the kitten manages to somehow be adorable enough that I welcome his help in keeping surfaces clean rather than being upset that he knocks things over and tracks mud onto my neck etc. His current hobbies are windowsills and sinks but they change often.

Tucker got me some lights from ikea as a christmas gift and I'm using them to set up shelves to display my unfinished pottery so I can stare at it after bisque and before glazing and let a creative process of some kind happen. Downstairs is getting really nice. The lights and shelves are as much of a game changer as the couch or the storage can.

It's cat brushing season and now Hazard is demanding, not just food in the mornings, but also brushing.

The butcher was supposed to come today and do the biggest set of pigs yet; Josh and I did a ton of prep to set up. Turns out he's sick in the hospital (!) and will try to come in a week, when Josh will not be here, but in the meantime today and the next couple days isn't a huge absorbing rush.

Josh brought me up a sewing machine, a Singer 401 Slant-O-Matic, and I've been slowly getting acquainted with it. I've never used a drop-in bobbin before; I find it surprisingly hard to thread the bobbin. It's a nice machine; it runs smoothly, it has lots of ways to adjust everything and a everything is adjustable in very fine increments. It also smells like a proper sewing machine. It has a very weird pedal, not a lever but instead basically a foot plate with a button it it you press with your heel, that will take some adjusting.

The plan for the next couple days is now to tidy up odds and ends (put in the yard light, deal with the downstairs fridge that makes that awful noise, maybe shell some corn and cook some food) and probably also now to can everything in the freezers so they're empty for the butcher. Not that there's so much left in there, honestly.

I've realized how much of an effect being with Tucker has had on me. When something relating to a relationship is on my mind I don't bring it up anymore; I used to assume that folks I was in a relationship would want to hear about stuff relating to the relationship, and would be open to conversation about it. That has definitely been trained out of me. There are a couple things with Josh where the relationship has changed over the last couple years and I've been thinking about them when he's here but not mentioning them; last night once I knew nothing was happening today I mentioned them. It was hard? That's not normal for me. And now I'm nervous about it, even though it went well. That's... really instructive, and I need to remember this. It's a stupid and counterproductive way to exist and any situation which exerts pressure on me to not mention feelings and changes in interaction is not a situation I should remain in.

So I guess I'm slowly healing here. The cats are getting lots of brushing, the chimney got cleaned, the house is getting gradually put in order. There's space for me to exist here, and exist I will.

Kinda speaking of dating, a PDA friend of mine on the internet uses this as a dating screen question: "if this doesn't work out and I'm not feeling it a couple weeks or months in, how would you prefer I let you know?"

He says it's the magic question for him.

I'm currently incredibly frustrated by the number of close people who seem totally puzzled by the question "what response would you like, or do you expect, from this communication" in my life right now. I bet that magic question would have weeded them out.

Those basic concepts: communication exists to serve a purpose; people have different purposes for different communications; the person you're communicating with can use cues but can't really know what you want out of the experience if you don't tell them; you will probably not be happy with every type of possible response; some sort of mindfulness when interacting with other humans. They're not rocket science, right?

Right?

I was talking to my therapist today and proposed what felt like a super transgressive thought: I could ask people what they wanted from a communication, and if they went all blank-eyed and refused to answer I could just tell them to give me a shout when they figured it out and go do something else with my life. This feels mean and incorrect, right? As if it crosses the line between screening folks out and being mean to them?

I think I'm in the prickly part of my pill-muffled cycle.

But also I think I'll put that question beside what do you like about yourself? which is the most heartbreaking thing to ask people on dating apps, as a good screen for people who might be suitable for me. Since do you have self-esteem? and are you capable of day-to-day functional introspection? are unlikely to get useful answers.

Stolen from elsewho: "Access to me is a privilege and you have the VIP all-inclusive, all-access pass."

Caused me to realize that no one has an all-access pass currently, and specifically aren't doing things to maintain access, and I would like someone who considers it a privilege and seeks to maintain it.

Tucker was here for a brief weekend visit.

He's doing really well. And I don't mean that he's happy, necessarily. He's taking up space in the world, including the space that is Tucker-shaped and which he was terrified of before. It's really good to see.

It was really good to have him here too. I haven't been in word space lately, and with him especially (maybe him only, frequently) if I can't do words I can still feel safe and connected. All those little check-ins and feeling-cared-for communications can come through the body and don't have to be laboriously strung into justifications and explanations and grasping for enough precision that someone can figure out what I want, and then there's still interpreting their response.

Then, because I didn't have to talk, I could, and that was nice too.

We watched Sandman. It was.. I can see why a lot of geeky folks imprinted on it in their teenage years, I guess?

We talked a little bit about relationship and future stuff. He doesn't know anything, to let me know. I let him know, as I've done in the past, that I'll keep doing the parts of this which serve me but that I'm not committing time or energy to it without an answering commitment, and he understands that now I think.

He made sure that the visit didn't financially overextend me, which I appreciated a great deal.

It was really good. This is how the best long distance relationships are; a string of jewels that adorn my life rather than being integral to it.

With the "butterflies-in-my-stomach-we-should-get-married-I-guess-this-is-a-relationship" and "don't-touch-me-naked-bodies-will-wreck-this-physical-pleasure-is-right-out-we're-just-friends" buckets out of the running as options to sort all my human interactions into, I'm thinking about other buckets I can break down all my relationships into.

I think the closest one may be "relationships where we build something" vs "relationships where things happen to us". I guess, relationships with mutual intentionality and relationships without.

This is where I would always run aground with Tucker: I wanted to create and steer our future connection, to bend the lines of our lives so they'd remain together in the future, and to deliberately explore and harness compatibilities in the meantime. He did not.

Building something with someone is a delicate dance of demand and generosity, of being shaped and preserving integrity, of communicating and doing. It takes awareness and humility and also the ability to just not take things personally.

Not building something? It takes experiencing a moment and then releasing it, over and over, and trusting fate. It takes being present both during contact and, equally importantly, in all other things when that person isn't around. It takes accepting that any moment of contact might well be the last, and being ok with that.

These buckets don't care what kind of relationship or contact is involved. Sex, conversation, emotional intimacy, it can all be part or not. All that's important is, is there a shared and communicated concept of what comes next?

This is what I'm missing in my life right now. There was a meme floating around with the phrase "I love you on purpose".

I've always had a battle with the way I needed to make myself convenient for someone (some masking, but not only that) for them to keep giving me care. Making life easier for people is a huge love language for me, and it's always been hard to disentangle folks who find me easy and pleasant to have in their life from ones who actually are willing to stay in my life with intention.

Moving up North was such a departure from being convenient. It was amazing to see who stayed, and who left. During the pandemic a lot of contact suddenly became easy or convenient again, everyone was online and Tucker figured he might as well stay up here since there wasn't much to do down there. Now that contact isn't convenient again and things can be let to lapse.

I've always been intentional about my connections. Most folks aren't. Most folks "fall" in love, not to say love isn't its own blessing given but it's sure possible to control the depth. Then because folks are in love they do a bunch of random stuff that feels good but isn't necessarily designed to support the well-being of that love, the longevity of it, the best interests of any of the people involved. So I guess to distinguish between the emotion of love and the action of love, a lot of folks don't sit themselves down and think through what loving someone on purpose -- with purpose -- looks like. It's an emotional accident that dictates actions and there's no volition involved.

Sure it's nice to have someone have emotions towards me, but what I need right now is that purpose. It's something I know I have from Josh; he will make the connection happen, and do what it takes to maintain it. I'm not sure how much I have it from anyone else in my life right now; I think not so much.

It is, I suppose, what I am looking for from the folks who I'll be emotionally intimate with: I don't need it from everyone, but I need it from some folks, and until the deficit is made up I need to keep my distance from everyone else because I resent not having it from them.

Today we spent the morning at work learning about pine rusts. I first was really exposed to them in the landscape context at this time last year. I had a little more emotional bandwidth then so I was even more awed by the intricate evolutionary dance that needed to occur for these constellations of organisms to exist.

Imagine, if you will, an organism that spends half its life on a tree and the other half on an herbaceous perennial, a plant that dies back to the roots every year. It goes back and forth, with a different set of spores -- basically a different body -- not just for each of the two host plants but also for a stop to have sex. So far so good, there are plenty of organisms that need to hop back and forth between hosts. Thing is, one of these hosts is parasitic on shrubs, basically. So now we have an organism dependent on another organism that is in turn dependent on (but also very robustly hosted by) yet another organism, which takes long-term vacations where it sometimes goes dormant on yet another organism (that's the tree).

It's a big and intricate chain of dependencies and this area hasn't even been out of the ice age that long to evolve something like that. I'm impressed.

It was good to get out into the field, to hang out in the sunshine with some folks, and to solidify some knowledge I had that was previously pretty shaky. I would never say my ID skills are now 100% but I understand what to look for much better.

As so often happens when I totally shift gears, on the way back I realized: I think one reason I've been reacting so strongly to the situation with J is that it's echoing the situation with A&E. Something appears to be on offer, but every time it gets talked about in a concrete way that offer gets smaller and smaller. With A&E it went from living there without needing to work, to not having my own space, to needing to work, and now it may be not on offer at all. With J it went from sex and connection, to connection and snuggles, to connection limited by a set of arbitrary and shifting monogamous boundaries, and depending on what happens next it'll be connection when there are no kids around, when no one is too busy, when there's energy, when there's not honeymoon feelings towards a new partner, all the normal things that happen when a monogamous person shacks up and disappears for a number of years.

I know I need to redirect my attention into some of my garden groups. Those reliably bring me a sense of connection and joy. I was planting late last night, getting the corn into the ground, and tomorrow I'm off work to do more of the same. Being able to share that with folks working at the same level, even if they're far away, is really good for me. I've never spoken by voice, even, to someone who really gets into that stuff on my level-- or really their own level. Then again, I don't need physical proximity for that kind of connection. Description of goals, procedures, thought processes: that *is* the connection.

But I also still need to find someone to just have dinner with and talk. There may be a window where J can do that with me, but.

So I'm looking into the Pride and Poly groups from the nearest big town; probably they're not what I want but we'll see. I'm importing people this summer. Tucker has mentioned maybe spending a chunk of time up here this winter; who knows, maybe we'll morph into a Persephone/Hades relationship, winters only. But also it may be time to start looking further afield and actually attending permaculture convergences and whatnot. I also -- hah -- seems like a significant portion of the people I really like may be PDAers, but a PDA conference would be the most ridiculous thing ever. Sign up to and commit to a thing in advance? Right.

In the meantime these are my planting days, days where the earth receives me and we build and learn together. 24 corns! New dwarf tomatoes! So many kinds of squash! Melons! Ethiopian kale! A rainbow of potatoes! Beans that are as much jewels as the corn is! A billion kinds of lettuce! Brassicas of every description! Soup peas! Regardless of what's happening on my human side I have a deep comfort and satisfaction I only touched on for the first time last year with my tomato trial.

And I keep telling myself that one of these days, probably tomorrow, I'll have the time to jump onto the bicycle either in early morning or on the line between morning cool and afternoon heat and remember what it feels like to fly.