Greenstorm's Journal

they talk about shared joy as if--

you know, when I was young I believed that everyone was similar inside. I thought we shared the same feelings, maybe in different proportions. Through writing and intensity I could evoke feelings I'd experienced in other people.

as I got older I got confused. People would look at me and say, I wish I could live that way. At first I said, why can't you? and they would cite responsibilities. Within a couple years their lives would change, they'd take a few more risks, go after that thing they really wanted, and lose touch.

later I learned to say, you know there are consequences for me too.

People always felt understood but I never did. I was always doing the understanding.

there's a new test for theory of mind. You look at pictures of just people's eyes and choose one of four emotion words. The score is on speed and accuracy.

maybe that's the problem. somehow humans believe you can understand someone from their eyes. the score is based on speed and accuracy. there's no value on listening slowly, misunderstanding, listening again, and having the worldview seep in with all its sorrow and alien joy.

every choice is a knife, slicing off a set of possibilities as it hones and shapes another. do you know every choice is a knife? how many choices do you have left before there's nothing? i think you have more than me, but I think too you feel a scarcity there. they call it a crisis when you realize you can't be anything you thought about, that the knife has shaved away things you might someday want.

maybe it's just that your life is a crisis when you bother to think about it. i know often you don't. it's something that happens, pulling you along blindfolded.

i also don't hone my life as much any more, don't shape it as much, don't carve off slivers of choice. maybe now i'm trying to glue fallen pieces back on. but for me that, too, is a choice. i live in the fog of the present now, no longer perched on a hill with the past and future spread out around me. it takes too much of me to guide the knife and so i let it fall where it would. six trips upstairs to get things i forgot before work this morning, one after another, how can i remember the consequences of something a year in the past, a year in the future?

funny how now that there's no shadow of forgetting across part of my past my story can feel whole. i used to have a line before which i couldn't remember. now i can't remember at all and i can't predict, i can just be. somehow in the be-ing i have both gained and lost my entire self at once.

and so i am enlightened. but.

how many million people pilgrimaged to see the sun go out? to see it come back again? but in the dust under the spruce trees, in the dry stems of dead pines along the highways, in the brown leaves of all the salal and in the shedding branches of cedars, in each drop of water not fallen, in the air currents buckling and breaking that are even reported and drawn in your human news, in the loam under your feet if you ever walk on soil that is made of things dead and gone that knew a world you never knew, in the pictures of fish from a century ago, in the falter of frogsong, in the slow failing of dykes and the people twitching into stillness on sidewalks unobserved, in the shower stations on the sidewalks and the bubbles of methane from boreal lakes, in the retreat of the glaciers and in the words we write online the sun is always going out. it is always going out and it is going out fast and spectacular in an enormous spectacle and omen.

and every time a green leaf opens through frost damage, every time an egg improbably cracks as the tiny creature within wriggles into being, every time someone opens their door to a stranger, every time the lake ice shatters in spring and re-ices in fall, every time a tree pushes through a sidewalk and every time the vast machinery of humanity organizes to fill a pothole, in the way a touch can calm a heartbeat and draw a smile, in the way every baby and seedling and work of art made by our hands and piece of advice on gardening is different, in the way ravens clothe the cities where once passenger pigeons flew over fields, in the way burns flight bright green the next spring and spill over with mushrooms, how cottonwood and birch seeds flood through the air and rats and pigeons turn garbage into life and diversity and green plants on the rooftops the sun is always coming out again. it is always coming out, quietly, with a clangour impossible to miss when you touch the ground, hugely, vibrantly, creatively. the sun is always coming out again.

and the sun doesn't care if we're here to see it when it comes and goes. we care. we travel-- you travel in huge numbers to be reminded. you care, for a second, somehow, and then it is once again subsumed in your daily life which is, nevertheless, made of the whole clatter and symphony and chaos of the sun always going dark and always coming back again. your whole life! the salmon are the sun. the desert flowers are the sun. an ear of corn is the sun. mud in the cracks of the sidewalk is the sun.

when i was young i believed everyone was similar inside. i believed in shared sorrow. i worked to learn people's sorrows so they wouldn't be alone in them. i was still alone.

and there is so much shared pleasure in the world - touch, taste, the sound and rhythm of music and conversations, even looking together at something beautiful. that's pleasure and it can be shared.

but the sun is always going dark and always coming back out, not a parlour trick but drums and cymbals and the whole ground shaking and also the smallest whisper and motion of light striking a chromophore. i don't know how there can't be shared joy in that but somehow i am always standing alone.

when i was young i believed everyone was similar inside. if i could just reach them--

they test for theory of mind with a picture of eyes and a four-answer multiple choice question about emotion.

when i was young--

but maybe now I no longer believe anyone has an inside.

Fragments from a counseling session as I work through this:

This is how I love the world.

Some of my friends are starting to make really a lot of money, and the more money they make the more worried about it they become.

You do not escape the game of capitalism by winning it. You will not feel better when you have enough toys.

It's not even that people deserve food. It's that food falls out of the ground. That's how it's given to me. That's how the world gives it to me.

A system causes harm when it inflicts scarcity that doesn't exist.

When you get a group of people at a table and they're sharing, say, a chicken and there's not much to go around and everyone takes a little less so everyone else can have some, that feels very different than the price of chicken going up so most people can afford less. It's a giving feeling instead of a taken-away-from feeling.

I'm the kind of person who would prefer to drop a present on someone's back porch with no name associated. I don't want the social part of feeding people. I just want them to be fed.

Ideally folks would have the feeling that I do about food: that it can just come out of the ground.

Honestly it's not just food: meat, soap, seeds, everything that comes from the land. It's less weird to give people a packet of seeds free than it is to give them free meat though, and if no one knows I've given away a literal thousand packets of seed then I can even just seem friendly. But it's not about being friendly, or social.

I live in this system where I need to work, and I need to work in a way that harms me to ensure my safety. The system tells me that if I have more money I will feel safer. I've been above poverty line for six years now total? The safety I feel comes not from making a couple more dollars but from having people who are willing to step in and help when I need help.

I live in a system where I accept this constant low-level harm. I do what I love, which is farm stuff. Those two things aren't related. No matter what I loved to do, I'd still work and pay for hobby things.

This hobby can be pretty expensive, the feed portion of it, but that's ok. People are allowed to like expensive stuff.

I neither have to, nor want to, pass on the harm of the system in which I live.

The idea that a couple hundred or even a couple thousand dollars return on the things I love will meaningfully make me feel safer is a lie. I know people making as much in a year as I will make in the rest of my working lifetime and they worry about money. They justify not tending to their own needs in the service of long-term security from money. Charging for what comes from me doesn't get me close to in that league.

Propagating the forced exchange of food for money makes my whole soul wither and fold up.

I am not the only person doing this: Jacob Beaton at Tea Creek has a farm based on a free give-away method.

I'm always going to have to work. I won't escape it for a couple thousand dollars a year. I won't end up in the position that Jacob's in, where he can do this with his whole life.

I am not really doing this as charity or for other people. I'm doing it to maintain my sense of internal morality, in order to maintain my soul and my feeling of reciprocity with the world. With the world, where food falls out of the ground and seeds multiply until they take over the laundry room.

When something happens I do think wistfully of the money that could have been from that stuff. When someone helps me with something financially, I do feel guilty for not selling my stuff instead of accepting help. If I had sold those seeds instead of giving them away?

But I don't resent my past self. I don't think I made the wrong choice.

And yes, I'd love to be able to get more apple trees this year, and a greenhouse. It would bring me joy. But that joy would be countered with a weight.

I never want to think about the relative monetary value of a perfect squash vs a very nice neck roast.

I'm sliding into myself as a 13-year-old. This is the life I lived then.

Aside from sewing, cooking, gardening, being really earnest, being enthusiastically idealistic, and having a mix of bafflement and impatience for most humans I am re-embracing my method for making friends.

It pretty much involves walking up to someone and saying "you look neat because of X. I'd like to do Y."

So far this mostly involves "you look neat on the internet because (you are PDA/you are a woodland creature/you do plants/whatever). I'd like to friend each other and watch from a distance for awhile."

It feels good to do. I learned a long long time ago that life is too short not to be forthright, and much too short to assume other people will do the work for you. Also it feels shitty when they "mysteriously" don't do the work.

TBH this is probably why I've dated too many people who want other people to do the work.

PS Hazard is staring transfixed into the flames of the woodstove, which I highly approve of but seems like a very ...human.. thing to do?

Tucker left town this spring. I've been up here on my own for several months now, long enough to begin setting patterns in my mind and behaviour.

My social footprint is spread out. I talk to people, some I know well, some I don't, some over the phone, some in person. I still watch shows with Tucker online, and we talk about those shows and analyze them and relate them to things sometimes, but I don't have much in the way of life conversations with him. He is certainly not in on everything that happens in my life. I talk to Josh a bunch on the phone, as I did before, though more erratically. It'll be good to see him up here. But basically now I don't have one person I talk to about most of the things that happen in my life, and a great number of the things I experience and think never get noted with another human at all.

There is no one who knows me except myself.

Recently my mind took a couple months off thinking. I did things, but I didn't perceive myself doing them or think beyond what was necessary to accomplish the tasks at hand. I was inside my experiences in a way that I consider to be my summer self.

Now I seem be to conceptualizing again. The experience of thoughts in my mind catches my attention and I linger on them for a little while. The patterns around me are perceived intellectually rather than through my behaviours. I consider this to be my winter self, and it's interesting to watch it line up with the seasons again. It's been a number of years, maybe even a decade, since these shifts aligned.

In many ways I'm losing my ability to be purely embodied in favour of being caught up in thinking. I also have a great deal of time and my focus seems to be coming back in little bits.

This is not co-thinking, as in a conversation, and it isn't externally-presented thinking. It's just there, as an inquiry or exploration of my surroundings and linkages. My mind might linger on the extremely weird accretion of policy, rules, and behaviours around our work bathroom post-covid, for example, or grope along the constellation of uses, history, and social impacts of synthetic fabric. It's like looking for the spiderwebs spun between all things, the way you might run into a single strand on a path and step back to see where the rest of the web is.

It's a very private feeling.

There's a luxury to having things foreground themselves, to forsaking the mental discipline required to shift the world into important focus objects and into background that is thought of mostly through logistics. Any conversation with humans needs this shift, since words are such a narrow conduit and connections are too wide to fit through except dismantled, piece by piece.

I do seem to be losing stamina in externally presenting things to other people, and other people aren't much in the business of drawing things out from me right now. Just writing this I feel done, my mind wanting to go back into some physical tasks to rest, perhaps like seeding some tomatoes and setting them to ferment or walking the south edge of the property and imagining where the daffodils will go.

And there isn't much reason not to let it, though perhaps I'll find something work-adjacent to guide it into.

I just realized I've never had a family member say they were lucky or blessed or happy to have me as part of their family. Mom and my baby brother say they love me, but no one has ever implied they're grateful.

That probably explains a lot.

I need to think very hard about how I struggle to connect impermanence and gratitude, and think of ways to honour and cherish things that don't involve permanence. This is revealing a gap there for me, because everything composts in the end. Why can I not honour gifts given me and also allow them to return to the earth?

Deep dive this afternoon. Music and poem on poem. I'm looking for myself again. I'm bringing myself back here, to my body, to this container of joy and pain. I'm invoking my self. I'm feeling my self. Sometimes we only know we're there because we hurt? And I'm landing, cautiously, into this shockingly loud pulse and grind of flesh. My heart is beating. My stomach is-- that must be hunger? Ow. My lungs are stretchy, a breath in pushes itself out again instead of holding. The body can be so loud.

Love isn't here to be hoarded. It's a gift. It's always a gift, granted for a time and then passing on. I've been granted more than my share, always cobbled together in shapes few outsiders recognise. Always attenuated somehow. Always, in the end, so true to the person giving it. I always consider it an honour to be given something shaped from the giver, not squished into the expectations and templates we freight these things with. Tonight I've been left gifts: blessings on my garden, compliments on my corn, pictures of cats and of plants starting to grow, the lifeline of idle talk and checking in. They're left the way I leave gifts, dropped and run away, with the exception of Nicholas who seems to have taken the role of support crew these last days. I need support crew.

I have so many words. I've been writing about love here for twenty years. The last two years only have six posts tagged "love" that aren't really about the landscape, about plants, or about details of relationships, that are instead considering and probing and weighing and celebrating my heart where it overlaps with humans. I used to spend so much time on it. It's harder here, crumbs from afar really have been my only overlap with people.

I'm not here on this earth to not love people. Let's keep this focus for awhile. I suspect there will be things to say. First, though:


The Ubiquity Of The Need For Love

I leave the number and a short
message on every green Volvo
in town
Is anything wrong?
I miss you.
574-7423
The phone rings constantly.
One says, Are you bald?
Another, How tall are you in
your stocking feet?

Most just reply, Nothing's wrong.
I miss you, too.

Come quick.

Ronald Koertge


Lecturing My Body

Here's the deal: You
take care of me,
I'll take care of you.
The body's a car
Whatever's-not-the-car,
that's the driver.
Or the car's an animal,
the driver a zookeeper.
The animal's a ditch,
the zookeeper a wheelbarrow.
A wheelbarrow bringing
tobacco, whiskey
& even love because,
well, just because.

By Jefferson Carter

( And some more... )

humanity i love you

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

ee cummings

I'm cranky lately. It's because I don't know what's coming next.

Tucker is in Vancouver. He's living there. He doesn't know what's happening next in his life, so he can't give me a heads up.

Josh is in Vancouver. On both work and romantic fronts he doesn't know what's coming next, well, I guess the romantic front is pretty predictable but still. Since we decided not to live together he's not been one to co-plan his life with me. So I don't know what's coming next with him either.

I do trust both of them to stick around in some way but not to commit to a "how" and not to be able to talk about the future together past the next shared vacation or two.

A&E gave pretty much the best possible response to my very clear communication: that is, a communication that is realistic about their energy, abilities, and requirements for assessing whether this thing can work between us. Their timeline is basically till Christmas, with regular work on a plan; if we haven't come up with a plan by then we probably won't, but we also probably won't be much faster than that because they need to find their feet and assess their situation realistically. So the Cor is still on the table for me, which means I really don't know my future there either and cab;t yet talk it out until they figure out their stuff better.

And in the meantime A&E know and acknowledge that I'm the kind of person who, when I decide I need to do something and see a good opportunity, will just go do it. I will not necessarily put off what seems to be a great thing to hold open a maybe. So anything could happen. Maybe I'll meet an established and well-run group of land stewards who wants another person somewhere I can afford to join. So I don't know my own future possiilities.

And Threshold loves me very much and is keeping me pretty happy, honestly, as I begin to reduce numbers of animals a little and spend more time planning this space. I may stay here with her, and in that way too I am having a conversation about my future.

I like to think about my future because I like to plan out my options and my next steps. I like several paths laid out before me. I think in some ways it's a PDA response: doing the same thing every day for the rest of my life is a demand, and following only one path is a demand, but choosing every day to do my favourite option out of many is less of a demand. And someone else suddenly doing an action that forces an action on me? Definitely a demand, whereas with a conversation beforehand it could have been a choice. So I'm twitchy and uncomfortable in my relationships right now because no one can talk them out in advance with me, so I can't make choices: I can only react, not act. Well, I can't act in a collaborative, aligning-myself-with-folks way anyhow, I can just do my own ting and hope that the path of anyone I know keeps intersecting.

I guess that's why I don't like surprises. They're a constraint on my choice.

Hard to believe so many people don't have to do all these workarounds and live on the edges of their tolerances, but that the world is in fact built to hold their minds. They can just... do things. Not sure I'm ever going to get over that.

My ring will soon be on its way to me. I'm nervous. To wear it is a big commitment, and I intent to honour that commitment. We will see where this goes.

Anyhow, I'm tired and my eyes hurt from all that sunlight. Time to bring the plants in and eat some kind of food.

A place where I really need to get down in the mud and wrestle, every time, is: if something upsets me, is it because something is a little off with me (trauma/interpreting through past experiences/trouble with transitions/etc/AFOG) or is it my emotions helping me see a real situation I need to remove myself from (bad for me and my core self). Of course, putting it into a binary like that really is the problem. I wrestle with each new situation, each new person, in this very ambiguous muddy slurry of neither land nor water. Sometimes I even come to a decision.

It's time to make this a little more formal.

All my life I've wanted someone to see me, to not necessarily walk beside me every step but to know my story. That's where I kept my eyes when everyone got married, maybe had kids, got divorced, did careers. There's no one left in my life who's been there from the start and will be there until the end except one.

I'd have wished for someone who remembers it all and can put it in context; instead what I got is someone who's supported me every step, who believes in the spirit inside me wholeheartedly, who thinks it's important that I follow my calling and my meaning.

I don't have someone who loves me unconditionally, all the time, and is always able to open her heart to empathize with my pain. I do have someone who's learning to do so, and who sometimes stumbles upon it as the right thing to do, and other times who's able to invite me into that space of love and healing.

There is no one person who will complete me, who I can disappear into for years and never come out, though I've wished there is. Still, I have someone at my back, who speaks for me in community and whose well of interest never runs dry. When things are rough she'll entice me into what I love and I find comfort that way; when my interest leaps away into some new thing she lets me follow my joy and takes care of me as best she can when she's able.

Time and again she's pushed her limits to be there for me; not always, but often, and when everyone else fails she's the one who always comes through.

She can't be everything for me. Our physical intimacy comes and goes, sometimes it's fraught, and it's never as robust and immediate as it is with other people. She doesn't have as much capacity as I'd like, and time and again I've come up against her limits. She forgets to be compassionate in the midst of fixing things and soothing things. Her emotions overwhelm her and sometimes she forgets what to do or how to do it. She's not given to constancy and promises come and go and come again, though she's better at knowing her limits around that now.

Still, here we are, so many years later. She's been writing to me for well over twenty years now, for my entire adult life. She's been supporting me and in these times where everyone else is receding she's the one I trust not to go anywhere. Neither of us minds the ride of NRE, the bit of a break, and we've ridden out my various relationships shockingly well.

So it seems reasonable to acknowledge this now, to cement it with a symbol. I'm working with a designer on the ring; I'm not sure if I can afford the gold or if I'll have to hope the silver will survive maybe 40 years of wear. There will need to be a ceremony at some point, I've been chewing on that for a couple years but I'm not sure how it'll look. There may be a small private ceremony in the meantime. I don't know that there'll be a single set of vows; perhaps a small book to recall me to the heart of meaning here.

It's too bad monoheteronormativity is such a thing; I think when most people do this they get gifts as well as a dual income or childcare out of it. I won't be getting that. It's still important to do, and to do in the sight of community, though I'm nervous about that.

I don't expect this to change things but I do believe it will help me remember.