Greenstorm's Journal

Avallu turns 7 soon. For a large breed he's starting to not be young anymore.

As I sit here with all the cats and dogs around me, with maybe needing to take Hazard in to get his teeth looked at and Avallu's birthday looming, I'm thinking.

One of the gifts we give our pets, so rare outside our walls, is the ability to get old.

This post is heavy. It's even heavy on my hands as I type.

When I moved to Vancouver I slowly networked into a wonderful, vibrant, unconventional, supportive community of folks. For a little while each I was particularly close to two community hub-type people and by bringing them together the community grew. We took care of each other in various ways and though the connections between individuals waxed and waned there was a general sense that someone would have my back and that I could contribute by having someone else's back. It was large enough that there were generally people I didn't know around, but small enough that the regulars could enforce some of the social norms. I was able to act freely in that group with regards to speech, clothing, interests-- I didn't share the main tech-type interests of folks, but I didn't feel policed and I felt that folks were interested in what I had to say.

There were complications in the group, of course. There was a bit of a fresh meat dynamic with pretty manic pixie dream girl types. People moved from center to fringe and back again as they moved to harder-to-reach parts of the city or went head-down into new relationships. Regular group interactions, movie nights a lot of the time, got handed around but there would be fallow periods as folks burnt out on hosting or as Vancouver housing prices precluded big enough spaces to gather. Relationship drama happens in all groups and this group was no different. Consent got bumped around sometimes, as it does; my experience was that these bumps tended to be handled ok but sometimes they were just ignored.

This group was essentially my home for eight or twelve years. It was part of why I believed the world was generally good, that people were generally accepting, that if I was matter-of-fact and open about who I was that it could be normalized. When new people came into the group they got told that when I was topless it wasn't about sex and to be cool with it. That meant a lot. My kind of playfulness was allowed to exist. Did I mention I didn't feel policed?

In hindsight I think the group was pretty full of neurodiverse types, but that isn't so relevant.

Anyhow, I went to school and it took up a ton of my time so I spent less with the group. For awhile I remember we used twitter to make spontaneous meetups happen. Folks began to bleed away from the group, to have kids, to spend more time with other folks. Regular events weren't hosted as often except for big holiday parties and those often felt more like catching up with folks than being inside a living network. Some of the big personalities left or veiled themselves. I went to school again, to university, and had no energy to engage; my world was also starting to diverge.

Eventually I kept connections primarily through social media, even before I left. For years now that's been the main form of contact I have with these folks. I've been thinking of them as a loose group still, as a bunch of folks who share values and who have each other's back. I've been clinging to that.

But it's just not true. When I left Vancouver kept changing at the pace it always had. Of my dozen favourite restaurants maybe one still exists. I could no longer find a transit route or even a bike route from place to place without significant help from maps because the streets and busses just aren't there. And that social group I was part of dissolved, scattered across the country and skirled into little whirlpools of people who no longer interacted much.

Some of those folks went mostly offline and I don't know them anymore really. Some of those folks drifted away in their interests or shut me out. And some of those folks I retained and kept interacting with on social media. And.

My social media stuff has become increasingly... I hate to use this word, but toxic. It's regular for folks there to express glee in the pain of the folks they consider their opponents. One of the values I shared with these folks was concern for inequality, was the desire to help lift and support those who were at the fringes. With that in mind I ignored this shift in social media, I told myself that it was just how these folks presented with the specific incentives of online. It was social media that was the problem, there were still plenty of folks who had my back.

But now I need to admit that the change is bigger than that. Compassion and support have calcified into rigidity and exclusion. The pain of bad groups is celebrated; progress and breakthroughs are not. Deviations from or questions of the received wisdom of the group are not alright. The world is divided into them and us.

I've tolerated all this believing that I had to in order to keep connections with these folks but if this is what the connection looks like it's nothing worth keeping. Maybe it's true that in person, able to read each others' faces, conversation could flow freely and there would be room for diversity and variation. I'm not currently in that position though. It's time to reassess everyone on their own, recent, merits rather than leaning on a decade-or-two old ghost of their behaviour.

I've known it was time to find or build a new community for a couple years now. Before covid I was planning to start harvest festivals on this space; hosting is a marvelous tool for both curation of folks and influencing the tone of the gathering. My pagan community has been excellent when I'm in contact with them, they've been online a fair bit during covid, but most of those people live on the other side of the US border. It's great to visit but it can't be the heart of the community I need.

I need... barter, being able to know who needs help and contribute what I have to help. I need many-hands-make-light-work days where a goal is achieved. I need folks to have joy in their lives, and to be able to talk about that. I need folks who are kind. I need folks who can verbalize their boundaries. I need folks who are capable of celebration of good and action towards grave issues simultaneously. I need a place where there's room for different neurotypes, for different interests, for different skills and philosophical approaches to problems. I need a place where folks know each other well enough to notice and celebrate personal growth. I need to feed people. I need to be able to go somewhere when I'm upset and have someone listen to me. I need a space that accepts nuance.

I thought I had these things.

It's heavy, heavy, heavy to realize I don't.

But.

It's a relief too. I've been feeling lonely and unsupported. That's not just me. It's that-- I am lonely and unsupported in a bunch of ways.

Time to pick out some of the truly lovely people I do know and curate a space. Somehow. What even is a space when we're scattered across a continent?

I always do better once I know what the work is to do. Now I know. Now to figure out how to get started.

The sun will set in an hour.

You want to be planting grain, fifteen kinds of wheat and five of barley to eat next winter.

Instead you go back in time. Someone you love gives you sour cherries from their freezer. Someone else you love brings you a precious case of golden-sweet citrus from the big city. In the farmers' market you are sold a huge bucket of bee-distilled clover from the town one over. Brew them into a mead. Bottle them with care, one by one, placing a single oak chip in each.

Instead you go back in time. Two years ago, on a trip to the big city, you bought eggs for an exotic duck to hatch in your livingroom. The eggs did not hatch exotic ducks, but one of the ducks did make a secret nest under the snowblower last spring and proudly led out five perfect ducklings. Drive one of those ducklings four hours into the mountains where you stay overnight in a hotel with someone you love, the last trip you will take before the pandemic, while that duck is killed and plucked by a friendly, kind young man.

Instead you go back in time. Two years ago on your trip to the big city you buy rare flavours: capers and anchovies and French mustard from small shabby shops filled with treasures. The shopkeeper gives you a purse, which you still use, because a two-year supply of olive oil and spices is rich enough to support that shop for the day.

Instead you go back in time. Earlier that week you pop into the grocery store. Cooking takes time and you don't have time: a package of bagels is quick. You toss it in your basket. Might as well grab some romaine hearts too.

Instead you go back in time. Five days ago you take the duck from the freezer and put him in the fridge to thaw. Two days previous you carefully slice the breasts from the duck, using your favourite yellow-handled knife that someone you love brought you the first time you butchered a pig. You carefully slash the fat and salt them, then vacuum seal them and put them into the fridge for the salt to absorb.

Instead you go back in time. At lunch you go out into the sunshine. It's been a day and a half since you collected duck eggs and the nests are overflowing with them: charcoal, mint green, pearlescent grey. The daughter of Snowblower Duck has, true to her genetics, made a secret nest and you leave those eggs be. They will doubtless hatch out lovely ducklings. You fill a bucket with other duck eggs and bring it in to set on one of the few surfaces that is not yet covered in transplants or eggs.

You want to be planting grain. Instead you put a cold cast-iron pan on the stove and lay a single duck breast in it, slashed fat side down, to render as it slowly comes to temperature. It sizzles as you crack an egg into the little blender you bought years ago when you were trying to get through one of the hardest years of your life. The lemon juicer is in the dishwasher so you hand-squeeze a lemon, pour in olive oil and capers and mustard and worcestershire sauce you brought long ago from the city. Pour it over the sliced lettuce and flip the duck breast. The fat has rendered out, it's sizzling in a pool of fat, and a fork run over the skin crisps and cracks.

You want to be planting grain but you have four minutes in which the duck has to cook on the other side. After tossing the salad you hesitate, then take a bagel and lay it cut-side down in the pool of duck fat beside the meat.

You want to be planting grain but you pull crispy bagel halves out of the fat and prop them in a mixing bowl full of caesar salad. You thinly slice the deep red duck breast, still oozing red juices and crisply protesting the knife, and place it beside the bagel over the salad.

You want to be planting grain but you pour a juice glass of cherry-lemon mead and carry it to the sofa with your dinner.

It's good to be eating dinner. You eat dinner, wiping the last bit of salad dressing up with the last bit of duck breast.

The sun sets. It's too late to be planting grain. It's still a good night.

Today I can hopefully take the tiller in to get it looked at. Josh says it's probably the carburetor.

In the meantime my plan is to plant spinach and grain, and maybe pick up a bale of straw for the pigs tonight.

Planting continues: I got the rest of the melon seeds into pots yesterday, and hopefully by the end of today I'll have the squash done.

Josh is doing the expected trajectory with the new relationship. We usually talk once a week and he's like, "no change" but then it turns out in the ensuing conversation that they're gone from one weekend a month to seeing each other a couple times a week, or the "maybe we'll see how this goes" has changed into "this is definitely a permanent relationship" or whatever. You know, the exponential growth that is NRE.

I'm tired of it. I'm tired of talking about it, I'm tired of thinking about it.

In actual fact I'm pretty tired of dealing with relationship stuff at all right now. I want to be outside fixing fences and putting things in the ground.

It occurred to me that the folks I relationship with tend to go on trips for a couple weeks a couple times a year where they're largely-to-completely unavailable for contact. I don't tend to travel, but there's... actually no reason I can't deliberately block time off away from contact even if I'm not travelling. I mean, I tend to fade out a bunch at this time of year anyhow but I can be more deliberate about it if I want.

Once the boundaries door is wedged open it seems to just keep creeping further and further open. I hadn't realized how many things I was doing to make the people around me comfortable, or how many things I was not saying and not doing. I can hold up my poly lens and say, I tended to be punished for doing relationships in an atypical way so I tried to be as typical as I could be, allowing what I absolutely could not avoid and shoving down my discomfort about anything where I could pretend to the standard narrative. Interestingly, I can hold up the autism lens and say the exact same thing.

My highschool friend -- the one who was close friends with me for years and years and then never responded to a single word after he got into a longterm relationship, such that I only learned he was 1) in a relationship 2) married and 3) had kids from mutual friends -- said that I only ever talked about relationships and plants, but that I made it interesting.

This week, or this month, I guess I want a break from talking about relationships.

Maybe living somewhere with non-gardening winter really is bad for me. I'd really missed immersing myself in my garden.

There's no way to start at work later than 8am. My commute is ~20 minutes (+/- 5 depending on season). After work, 5pm or later, I do not have energy.

At my previous job I started much earlier and could sometimes be home by 4:30. I did chores after work.

My start time here was set automatically to 8:30 and I've left it there. This gives me plenty of time to do 6:30-7:30am yoga before work, or to do chores. It gives me enough time to do both, though it's a little tight.

This schedule feels good. It feels nice to be outside when I have my energy, to be checking in with my land before I go in to work, to anchor my day in the tasks I find meaningful. It feels good to come home and be able to choose whether to do more or to just relax.

My circadian rhythms like it when I do my manual labour or exercise in the morning. They also like sun in the morning, and though there's not much of that right now in a couple of months there will be. My body is happy, humming along in cycles constantly corrected by those mornings spent outside.

In the city everyone complained about waking up as late as 9pm. They'd stay up till 3am. All the people I knew who were even vaguely willing to meet up with me in the morning when my head is clear and I feel light and happy: those people have moved out of the city. I pretty much couldn't attend parties and things because I wanted to be in bed by 9 or 9:30 and I always wake up around 5 or 6am. None of them, of course, were willing to set an alarm extra early every second visit if I was willing to stay up late every second visit, to trade sleep dep cycles. Nonetheless they did all complain constantly about how they were discriminated against.

It's good to be out here. It's good to have friends who meet for morning coffee (although admittedly doing chores and getting out there by 6am feels early to me). It's good to stay over with people who, by 10 or 11, will say they're done and we go to bed. It's good to eat breakfast with Tucker. It's good to see the sunrise.

Many other things aside, this cycle suits me nicely.