Erin's land journal

My whole life I've had to either make meaning and take value from how I'm different, or hate myself. Luckily my PDA largely rejects society's demand to only be one way so I've missed a lot of the internalized loathing a lot of people have. I've had a couple bouts with it, of course, but the lever of "if I'm happy, who dares tell me I shouldn't be?" has been a strong one.

Most of that work was done in regards to polyamory ("if you really loved me you wouldn't--" was the stuff I had to reject), what I now know was PDA and autism ("to be happy you should--" and "your emotions should look like--"), PMDD ("you should respond emotionally consistently to situations"). Gender stuff honestly flew mostly over my head though I'm still working on trusting femme-type people to give clear consent/non-consent in sexual and romantic situations.

In all of that it's basically come down to believing I have a right to exist the way I am, and that as long as I'm not harming folks by doing so that's really, genuinely ok so any societal pressure, internalized or channeled through humans or human systems, is just fundamentally misguided. It's not necessarily malevolent, it's just... not correct.

Folks have differing opinions on whether autism is a disability. I'm leaving that discussion for right now.. I was going to say that PMDD is "arguably" a disability, but I think that's just because I've successfully dealt with the stigma internally-- something which significantly limits the things our society expects you to be able to do. In the case of PMDD it was recurring, and though I could manage it through planning it did limit things like when I could work, when I could do relationships, sometimes when I could drive, etc. It "felt normal" because I was good at managing it, but it was limiting.

And here's where my internalized stigma comes in. There's a stereotype of disabled people as being unhappy because of their disability or else having to work really really hard to overcome the disability, that is to do the things anyhow, if they want to be happy. I basically haven't been thinking of myself as being disabled, because I enjoy my life. There's also the background concept of relapsing/remitting not being a "real" disability.

So now it's been several months that, as I've said, my capacity is significantly lowered. This doesn't mean I can't do things. It means I can do less of the things I'm used to, and less "active" and "thinking" stuff. It's easy to think of this as doing "more nothing" but I've always rejected that paradigm. There are the same 24 hours in a day. The time still exists, and a narrator could still describe my activities during those times. The activities may just be different, things like lying in a hammock feeling the weight of my body, the softness of a blanket, and listening to birds or resting on the sofa with my head and legs propped up and being sat on by a cat while petting him intermittently. Those aren't "nothing" unless I discount my life's value during those times, and I'm not about to start discounting my life's value now.

So let's say my capacity is altered. Either way I objectively spend all this time lying down, hours and hours a week more. Kind of even hours a day more. This is what stereotypical disability looks like, lying in bed. And that clashes with my internalized idea that to be disabled means I can't do things I want and that I can't be happy.

I am, most certainly, still happy. Some days I chafe at not being able to do as much but not as often as I expected. I do slow pieces of things. I prioritize. Not everything gets done but it's normal for not everything to get done in my life: that's why I make activity menus instead of todo lists. I skim off the things I want to do in the moment and do them, the things that are most important for my self to enjoy later on and do those, and the days are still full and pass like jewels on a necklace. The soft feeling of my cat is a much different experience from digging a garden bed but it's just as much a gift of sensation given to my body. Breathing, particularly, has been uncomfortable but it's layered with these other types of comfort: of watching the light move day after day, season after season, across the walls of my home. Of watching my tomato hand-crosses swell. Of having creatures that light up because they love so much that I exist.

And I most certainly objectively fit some sort of definition of disabled, at this point. 13-16 hours in bed a day seems a requirement, I can carve it out of one day or two days, but then I need to make it up. If I make it up promptly I don't suffer and I find things to enjoy. If I push it off too long it gets into significant discomfort, from being tired to being dizzy and disoriented to having intense headaches and body stuff to, eventually, my body just not moving sometimes when I try to make it move.

I can feel internalized ableism telling me I should suffer. I should be unhappy because of these limitations. I should just stop doing things because I can't do some things, or as many things. Particularly my day paddling with my co-worker and then doing a day of fieldwork, those feel like if I want to consider myself disabled that I should not do any of those things. I did those things. I'm learning: I bought pre-made food for meals, I fed the animals twice as much so I could go straight to bed the next day, I skipped changing the sheets and showering one of those days, I didn't even go near the garden so I wouldn't get drawn into it and away from resting.

And it was fine. I juggled my priorities, as I've been doing all my life, I took lots of rest, and I'm fine.

Disability doesn't feel like an identity to me. It feels like a description of the mismatch between the society's expectations of me and the way I exist within the world. It's not on me but is instead on society's limited ability to understand and support my self, and the selves of other people I know. It's like, I don't know, someone starving while standing next to a field of camas or potatoes: the issue isn't the plants, it's the people who don't know how to appreciate the plants.

There are so so so many strings from this set of thoughts to how I think about autism and also interpersonal stuff generally, but I'll leave this here for now.

I was invited to infodump about my favourite topic today. I responded with this:

I like plants, especially edibles, and especially temperate and cold/temperate edibles, especially growing in ways that genetics and combination on the landscape contribute to carefully-chosen system goals, especially heterogenous varieties eg modern landracing (or old landraces, I'll take 'em all!), especially if those goals are non-conventional (eg not 'how much land can we farm with the fewest people but the most gas and tractors' but more to optimize for human power or climate or the particular site's water or soil or aspect or or), especially if animals are involved in that small human-designed ecosystem, especially if it's allowed to evolve through propagation and selection over time, especially if the surplus that humans take from that system is optimized for local community use including aesthetic preferences and values as well as flavour, comfort, etc, especially if those surplus foods (but also fibre etc) is aligned with cultural use and preservation practices, plus I enjoy learning those use and preservation practices including charcuterie, brewing, canning, drying, annd fermenting. But sometimes I go on a kick and grow a monstera or my grandma's spider plant or fifty kinds of hot pepper just for fun and I keep a bunch of geese and cats and dogs and an old hen around as pets even if they're not contributing to my system. Oh, and I love love love plant variety trials; I live where the only domestic plants that grow reliably are from the old Siberian breeding programs so I need to trial and breed my own varieties (it's super cool here over the summer so nothing ripens, and it's -40C in winter so any perennials die).

Last year I trialled 24 varieties of corn including my heart-corn (gaspe) and discovered some new ones that do well here and I'm going to landrace them, and I made a a surprisingly successful squash grex, and I'm growing a bunch of tomatoes that a collaborator outcrossed to wild relatives to try and get the flowers to cross-pollinate more and thus allow more natural geneflow within the population so I don't have to make a million hand-crosses (tomatoes don't naturally cross much). I was asked in the group this evening about what kind of plant breeding I was into and kind of saved this up for a more appropriate spot. 🙂

Gaspe corn is knee-high and comes from the gaspe penninsula in Quebec, it's one of the shortest season corns in the world; it's a grain corn and grows about knee-high and fills me with absolute awe and gratitude that so many hands cherished corn from the time it was a grass in south-central mexico, and with love and attention they slowly selected and planted and selected and planted until it was corn, and then selected and planted and selected and planted and it spread into myriad forms across north america, slowly, going at the rate of friendship and sharing and at the rate the plant could adapt over so much time, through forms 20' tall with aerial roots, and then eventually spreading up to Quebec where it was so cold and short-season that it was basically unrecogniseable from not just the original plant but from the intermediate forms. All those people, all that persistence, that cooperatively created this plant that now can come live with me where no modern corn can grow. I love it so much. Also if you want to try growing some grain corn and are serious about it, I have seeds to share. (imagine a sea of green heart emojis)

It always starts out utilitarian.

I've approached something sideways. There's something I'd like in my life, to store excess pork, to see how something grows, to wear comfortable clothing that fits.

I can't really afford the easy solution: buy another freezer, hire a gardener or get fancy raised beds built full of groomed soil and irrigation systems, shell out for the kind of high-end clothing that both fits and suits my set of temperatures and activities.

I sit with the lack awhile and live, either in anticipation or in real time, with what happens if I keep on business as usual: half my carefully-loved pork goes bad, the meaning and connection in my life disappear, I don't want to get out of bed and am in varying degrees of discomfort when I do.

The pressure of the unsatisfactory situation builds until a spark manifests in the right place at the right time: an article on old-fashioned meat curing, a post on seed diversity and appropriate variety selection, an ad from somewhere I bought mask-lining fabric a couple years back.

It neither looks nor feels like an explosion. It's not really a spark. It's a seed crystal falling into supersaturated liquid. Is it saturated with discontent at my current situation? Is it saturated with my current knowledge and love of patterning? That's not what it feels like. It feels like I'm suddenly part of a structure, a part of humanity, that has always existed, that I'm being woven into the world one strand of knowledge at a time.

I click on a linked article. A strand of knowledge connects me. Another article is suggested and I read it too. Another piece of crystal forms, another stand in the web patterns me in. Maybe I search for a facebook group and join it. Facts, technologies, methods, approaches, new ways of playing, new ways of engaging with the world: some I see and they pass me by, but others click into my situation. They give me options other than my dissatisfaction.

I can't afford to kit out a charcuterie fridge but there are bags that help regulate humidity and can let a regular old hand-me-down fridge stand in for one. Pink salts (not the himalayan ones) prevent botulism, which grows in the absence of oxygen. Smoke can delay rancidity. It doesn't take much to buy one of those fancy bags and put some meat in it; once I've done that I might as well try a different cut of meat, a different set of spices, a different salt level.

I can't afford to make a conventional controlled garden but there are animals that can dig the soil, mulch that can smother the lawn I can't afford to have tilled under, varieties that will grow without the infrastructure of a greenhouse. If I put pigs on the lawn I can eat them later and their feed cost is basically just paying for fertilizing and rototilling and the eventual meat. Straw is cheap. If I assemble relatively inexpensive seeds from people who have similar environments and do selection on them and their offspring, I can get ripe tomatoes and squash from much more garden than I can afford to cover with greenhouse. Once I'm there I might as well use ducks and chickens for bug control, geese to mow the lawn, and I get such lovely nutrient-enriched straw from them. Once I'm there I might as well select not just for ability to ripen but for flavour and beauty and story since I can grow out so much on my land and don't need to expand greenhouses to do it.

I can't afford to buy expensive fancy fabric straight up but there are misprints, seconds available that have the same function, places that sell weird shapes and amounts and colours more cheaply. I can't afford to buy dozens of patterns and the highest end fabric but I can alter a pattern to accommodate the cheaper fabric, the one that has less stretch but equal warmth and softness so is a significantly less cost. I can't afford a ton of fabric but I can use every last bit of what I have, can make neck warmers and fingerless gloves. And I can sew scraps together, use different types of fabric in one garment so nothing goes to waste, and now I'm colour-blocking and using precious stretch fabric on side panels where I need the most movement and using bits of fabric for pockets on everything and planning out overlapping uses for each garment so I need the fewest different ones without doing too much laundry.

I'm curious, I have an outcome in mind, will I meet that outcome or will I learn something? Either way I get drawn in and meeting my utilitarian goal becomes a way of playing with the rules of the universe, and also of playing with the people who have come before and have worked and frolicked and built knowledge in this same pool. They talk about parallel play and in some ways this is it: people play and they write or video about it, and I take that and alter it and run with it and maybe write about it back. I almost never find people who want to do the thing close to me physically but there's an undeniable closeness from playing the same game as someone else, even if I'm playing it somewhere else.

And that play is pretty much where I find my joy.

I'm not consistent. I do charcuterie a few times a year, I garden a little more than half the year, maybe a little more than that if you count the spreadsheeting that always comes with my interests. And apparently I do sewing every six years or so.

My memories live in these activities and I access my past and future self through doing these things.

I remember my mom and brother helping me put the first batch of pork in cure, and they help me often enough with these things that my brother's handwriting is on a lot of my meat. I remember those first pigs, their noses peeking out of the little house. I remember the long wait to learn what was too salty, the way each spice sparks curiosity: what would juniper taste like in prosciuttini? What about madagascar peppercorn? Homemade absinthe? Berbere? I remember sharing things I'd made and trading them for my old boss's tinctures, opening the way to new explorations in a way that felt like an unobtrusive collaboration.

I remember the scent of the first plant I interacted with, fennel growing out of the paving stones in Las Angeles, and I remember harvesting Lunaria seeds in the side-garden a few years later, and hauling manure in a wheelbarrow up from the barn years after that and so I remember the barn and the texture of the side of the house as I put up nails to strong my tomatoes on. I remember my first greenhouse, built with Juggler, and I remember my first black tomato. I don't have to reach back far to remember the first time I saw hugely varied textures in tomato foliage. My downstairs is still a cornucopia of widely varied squash, one of which my cat hauled to his bed last night.

I remember the month in college (was it more than a month?) where whenever I left home not in a work uniform I had to leave it in a newly-sewn outfit because I couldn't tolerate anything I already owned. I remember the florescent-lit basement of the cheap fabric store where the extra-cheap seconds were. I remember scoring the full rolls of "athletic fabric" I still use for mock-ups, and my skirt, strap-vest, and veiled top-hat ensemble I put together for an event that now escapes me. I remember laying out patterns on Josh's floor before our winter backpacking trip, measuring and checking and measuring and checking to make pairs of pants that would work for me. I remember learning about fabric structures and I remember the sound of my friend the sewing machine and my body remembers how to swoop the thread down and sideways and up and around and down again to settle it into its guides. I still have a few tattered garments that don't set my body off, that don't send pain and electricity down my legs, that don't raise hives on the front of my thighs or the tops of my hips, that let me get out of bed in a cold environment and move freely through it.

The next situations of dissatisfaction are an inability to afford new snowboots (could I really make boots?!) and my inability to afford fresh vegetables (when lettuce is $8/head, hydroponics does seem to be the answer, and that's what kratky was designed for).

All this is to say that I have pork jowls in my freezer that need to go into cure; seeds I crossed this summer in all manner of ways from controlled to insect-and-crossed-fingers and it's good. Then, after spreadsheeting and fabric buying and pattern cutting, last night for the first time in years I felt the clatter of my cheap little sewing machine and the silky hum of Josh's antique Singer. It was, as is everything I do, utilitarian to serve a purpose I could not otherwise afford. I even paused a moment and thought - what would I do with my time if I could just buy these clothes? Would I talk to friends? Spend evenings watching TV and lazily chatting? Take up jigsaw puzzles?

So I'm not writing all this to say it isn't work, and that it doesn't come at many kinds of opportunity cost of time, thought, knowledge acquisition, and energy.

I am writing it to say that this way that I accommodate myself in this world also feels like coming home within it.

drive through the night:
the feeling of morning;
vision before colour

I got up at 4 in the morning so I could give the stove a bit of a burn on fresh wood before turning it down. The road was dark but not snowy, frosty but not wet. Newly-painted centerlines stood out under my single aging headlight and my high beams had a long reach. Sometimes I had company on the highway, usually in clumps going to the mill, to the pipeline camps, to a town. Often I was alone and that was better.

The Highway of Tears is becoming familiar. The cell signal is much better courtesy of a political push; this is how we deal with missing indigenous women (though to be fair the men die at a pretty high rate too): we put money into a program, in this case into some company's pockets. They put a bus in down here too, though it's not tremendously useful. Meanwhile the folks north of me, in Middle River and Takla, apparently call the ambulence when they are in dire need of a ride to town.

There was a lot of dark this morning. When I woke up, when I pulled out of the driveway with my grow lights shining through the window behind me, the sky was the clear bowl full of stars that dominates our winter landscape. The moon was a sliver superimposed on a sphere, low near the trees, and it took a very long time for the sky to grow pale grey behind me as I headed west.

There's no snow on the fields. The word I associate with this open, windblown, waiting-for-winter feeling is sere, colourless-dun and patient. When the light came up I was in the Bulkley Valley as it opens up, as the mountains rise to shape a valley, as the trees retreat to the hills and leave even the patchwork of the previous valley. With the mountains it feels wilder; with the fields it feels cozier and more settled. I like it here.

When I stopped for gas I could tell it was light because the truck, still for the first time in three hours, started crowing. The ducks were upset, chattering away, and that's always hard on my heart.

Three days of especially hard labour, of angling the vibrating pressure washer to kick up a minimum of bird-shit-spray, stray, and feathers into my eyes and sinuses as the light fled; of rounding up the ducks and pulling out the keepers over and over as they kept running back to rejoin the main group; of hauling and pushing and pulling heavy carriers as gently as possible; of carrying bucket after bucket of grain to every group of animals so they'd have days of food for the day I was gone and for an extra day in case something happened; finally four hours of relentless driving in the dark until the light crept up behind me and a bright spot of sunrise showed in the south (why the colour just in the south? I have no idea).

Unloading was easy, having enough carriers is a blessing that way since the animals don't need to be transferred.

The morning was for errands, but first I passed a sign that said "Alpine World" on the highway. When I stopped, the man who ran the plant shop said he'd forgotten to bring in the sign the other day and gave me a two-for-one deal on winter-bare potted apple trees: a Gloria and a State Fair will join my collection. We chatted about apples for a bit, then I moved on. The feed store was less helpful: $22 for a bag of layer pellets ($48 for organic) and I figure I should just wait till I get home. Then the wholesale place, where I get my yearly bakery-quality flour to mix with my home-ground stuff and where I picked up hedgehog mushrooms grown by a small local company. Since I'm innoculating logs with them I might as well taste them, right? The "taste like crab" thing arouses both my suspicion and my interest.

I'm also somewhere I can replace the headlight that went out the day before, so I picked up one of those and some oil. I think she might be burning a little oil? Too hot to check right now though.

By that time it was 11, and my check-in at the hotel was 1:30. I borrowed their parking lot, right in downtown, and walked to lunch and to more errands and sightseeing: replacing insurance, getting soft pretzels and doughnuts for lunch on the road tomorrow, inhaling and looking for inspiration in the european deli/sausage shop, picking up beer from the local brewery, looking at potter's shops and bookshops.

Halfway through my plate of pierogies and sour cream I noticed a cat come to the front door of the restaurant and sit expectantly in front of the glass. After a nod from the owner I let him in and he stalked meaningfully into the back room; twenty minutes later as I was nearing the bottom of my London Fog he stalked back out and sat by the door again, at which point I let him out. "It's not my cat" the owner said, "but he can come in"

The most delightful part of the town was the little farm/craft hub. It had two walls of fridge and freezer cases, with each little section labelled with a different farm: this one had lamb, this one had pork, this one had frozen meat pies. I was badly tempted by another set of mushrooms, and by a mushroom grow kit, but my strategy of doing a full circle of the place before picking up a shopping basket paid off: I was over budget, but not as much as I could have been.

Beside the fridges and freezers were tables of storage produce, mostly garlic and squash at this time of year. There was a bunch of baking, dried mushroom powder and coffee and jerky, and then the other wing of the building was occupied by arts and crafts. All sorts of paintings were on one wall, glass baubles hung from the ceiling, and a blacksmith's display of hooks and pokers took up the back. Textile arts and cosmetics were displayed in two rows down the center, each arranged by artist as the food had been arranged by farmer. Here was a farmer that raised their own alpacas and spun impossibly soft scarves; there was someone who sewed waterproof canvas diaper covers and bags; on the other wall was jewellery and sweaters and round hats and pointy hats.

Altogether it was perfect: in effect a condensed farmer's market full of lovely displays closely side-by-side. The lovely variety and texture of goods was highlighted by how closely the displays could be spaced: unlike a farmer's market there was no crowd and no one was standing behind their goods watching. Lacking the budget to buy paintings I bought three greeting cards from one artist and four from another which will get clustered in frames in my two bathrooms. I chose three kinds of garlic because of course I did, music and spanish roja and marino, half of each to eat and half to plant. The music was notably bigger than the others. I also brought three chocolate bars out with me, half-sized ones (!) suitable for my way of eating sweets: sour cherry with light and with dark chocolate, and a peanut dark chocolate. The mushroom kit remained behind, as did the soft fingerless driving gloves and the frozen spanakopita and the blacksmith's towel hooks.

With that I checked into the hotel. When I reserved the room I asked for something on the top floor (I don't like people above me) with a bathtub and that's what I got. With a courteous "are you alright with stairs" I was given actual keys and headed down the long corridor, up the stairs, and then back the length of the building to find a big, old, worn, sparkling clean, comfy room facing a quiet back street. One thirty, time to collapse, to touch base with folks, to just enjoy the feeling of...

...there's nothing. My hobbies aren't here (though I brought patterns and books to read) and folks are still at work. These days of working my body hard (I was hobbling last night until I put on my muscle salve) and planning and keeping the pressure on myself let up into this evening of perfect release where I sit in a hotel room and contemplate the options of bath or nap, pizza or sushi, light from a bulb or an open window.

I love this feeling and I also can't get here without the buildup. A lack of demands is in itself a demand, and I can't experience it except when the cliff of necessary work falls out from under me and I'm left in midair, still trying to run and finding that instead I'm flying. In a good world I fly far enough to land on the next, carefully-chosen cliff and dig into another good run followed by another flight, and so on. Pacing those leaps and those runs is everything, is the difference between energy and burnout, is the difference between flying and crashing.

There's room in this space for all of me, for delight in the farm hub and deep sadness as the way the goslings' father called after them as I carried them away, for the texture of locally-raised beef jerky strips and lazy contemplation of dinner and the sideways leap of just sitting and writing instead of any of that. There's room for feeling capable and confident as I look up headlight replacement videos and for relief at being able to go home from a place where civil rights stickers in the windows are all in reference to vaccines and masks and wistfulness and envy and possible future thoughts about living somewhere full of small farmers and a little hub I could contribute to. There's room for my body to be tired and for the bed to come up and support it and for me to stay sitting up, typing, with the silvery feeling of exhaustion in my head and for that to be an ok choice.

Pizza or sushi? Bath or nap? I could install the headlights first, even?

Either way, I made it. I did all of it, on my own, and I am here fully filling up my space.

Vision first, but then: colour.