Greenstorm's Journal

I've renewed my mortgage here. In Canada you have to renew your mortgage every 5 years at whatever the interest rate at the time is, even if it's supposed to be a 20 year mortgage or whatever. I'm not sure why they do that, but they do.

Benefit of living out here where I do: very low cost of land. Issue with living where I do: not much equity, so while housing value everywhere else is doubling and giving people places to put their house-fixing and property-improving debt, I do not have such an option. So I still have this debt, it is still a stress, but I have tenure in my home for another 5 years at the same interest rate as when I got it.

I guess that's part of feeling like I might settle in here. It's part of thinking of making shelving that fits the weird walls and part of considering where my art will go and part of settling plant lights into more sustainable locations (gosh it's hard to put up wall shelves that will hold the weight of plants). It's a feeling of safety-in-myself.

It's also a part of unsafety-with-people. I was listening to my relationship podcast the other day and they interviewed Brian Mahan, a somatic experiencing therapist. They were talking about how the pandemic made everyone unsafe: people on the street, our loved ones who went out to get groceries to care for us, every person has been a threat for a long time, and in turn we are a threat to our loved ones. Community and feeling like we can be ourselves in community is so important to heal shame and be ok with ourselves, to not hide ourselves, and now our communities are dismembered and we have no way of gaining the social safety and validation we need, they said. This aligns with my experience pretty well: I tended to have pockets where parts of myself were ok and the rest of me wasn't, but because I had enough of those pockets for most of me I was ok.

Now I have nowhere to be ok except at home with myself and I have to rebuild community. This is a hard place for me to rebuild community. The covix/vax issue adds another layer on unsafety to people who might potentially not fit. I used to be really optimistic that anywhere I went I could find folks to get along with. Up here there are lots of interesting folks but most people are tied into family systems: busy with kids and singular spouse after work and socializing as that unit if at all, and then either working or free during the time I'm working. Those normative structures really trip me up. Looking for folks who do relationships outside the norm, who have strong interests they get geeky about, who don't conform to gender stuff: that's easy. Folks whose life structure fits with mine enough to be friends? Not so much. And then folks who aren't moving to a small town to get away from covid mandates? Also not so much, though I'd imagine there were folks who want to move to protect themselves from covid too.

But anyhow, I guess finding and building community is what I'm committing to by staying here. And I guess I can't expect someone else to build the community I want, nice as it might be: I need to do it myself.

African swine fever exists. It's making the rounds globally; it hasn't been into Canada or even North America yet but it may only be a matter of time.

Rabbit haemorrhagic fever was absolutely devastating here; it had a 50% kill rate and stays viable for nearly a year in the environment.

I'm giving some thought to allowing no outside pork on my property, just to be on the safe side. This means I'd need to eat within my means of production for bacon etc.

On the other hand I've just been offered an elementary school's worth of pig scraps/compost. It would be great financially to help feed the pigs, but there would definitely be trace pork products in there and I'd be jeopardising my biosecurity.

This will require some thought and maybe a chat with the vet.