long underwear in july

strawberries! (sometimes a bit moldy)
the raspberries are ready
and cherries
and sudden abundance of things that grow on trees--
next place i live i'm planting trees first thing for sure,
windowbox or rolling hills.

often clarity's hard to come by for me here--
i think i might be sad a lot,
but also i really like this work and the pace of my days,
beans and rice,
going to bed my body exhausted,
getting up and doing it again.
recently we put up 2 acres of nets
so the birds couldn't eat the blueberries;
now we are getting ducks
so THOSE birds will eat the mummyberries, the fallen diseased ones--
inside birds outside birds baby birds dead birds mobs of hungry birds...

for breakfast i am eating often eggs & mustard greens
or oatmeal & yogurt
there's a wealth of dumpstered field roast in the fridge
and politics of sharing the kitchen are confusing to me--
a different texture of communal living,
but i guess it is true that
people who come out to live on a farm want some quietness, private space,
become a little more okay with silence and aloneness
at least silence is easy to come by around here.

and sometimes the sun is glorious!
and there is fresh bread! or pizzas on friday!
i am always excited to eat lunch!
local politics are kind of super interesting!
our dog left and returned!
the hard cider flows and flows!
and when z and i clean the cabin and burn a bit of cedar, it's homey.
and in my head all day i know i'm walking some lines of sanity and also worlds and also dreams.

but so it goes.
i have been writing a lot of letters recently. i'm happy to write you one too if you remind me of your address, you reader of this blog (i have been a faithful reader but posting, not so much...)

happy summer, to those with fur and without, long underwear or no...

oh also this is cool!
"notes concerning recent actions of the police" regarding the recent murder of kenneth harding, a faredodger on the BART in SF, who was shot by the popos...if you scroll down to the anarcha-fem flier that was handed out that's kinda cool too.

dog-eared memories and waxy dreams

i have been full of dirt and cider,
memories and clean air,
rustling oak trees and adjusting to new folks.
i have been quieter than i know myself to usually be...strange. i miss playing and shouting. but it will come.
this place is beautiful
and i realized quickly that the grass is always greener somewhere else,
some waxier dream,
i am confused by having free time, no deadlines, self-managed tasks,
by having no projects i am heading up,
no zines underway,
only holes to dig, apples to cut, fences to fix, bunnies to pet;
i find myself missing theatre, graffitied walls, (structure?), good friends,
find myself struggling to feel joyful to be alive in a new way, without comfort or easy laughter or touching souls or everything shared,
aching sometimes, breathing deep sometimes,
opening myself to be affected by the people around me deeply, to cut away the shame that it is so easy to walk in with
without knowing i bore it.
remembering how to start.
remembering how to surface.
remembering to speak what i have come to assume...
i meditate everyday and feel glad to be alive and have a working body.
and as i begin to see how things developed here, i am not so ashamed of not being an expert,
not so stressed about soaking up everything--this place grows slowly, i am growing slowly here,
rhizomes tenatively crawling out, leaves not too withered and
i meet friendly soil. there are baos and games
there is curiosity and suddening into large questions,
there are parched awkward moments but there is plenty of food and roof and blankets to go around.
things do not stop in me, they start--
love does not stop, it starts--
a place can not be everything, but it is a home for now.

"different enough to make a difference?"

or, "notes from the land of goat cheese."

today i woke up in my trailer and fell promptly back to sleep.
when i reawoke, the blue lace-edged curtains and the billion bandannas were swaying and my toes were cold and the world smelled different than yesterday's world.

it's been awhile--four squids on a trip across eight states in a car smelling of bodies and tea tree oil and endless toast and warmth, camping in the rain, dreaming of burritos and kitchens, marmot humor, building a compost toilet, looking at each other in mirrors and reflections and eyeballs again and again. things becoming beautiful and every day entering someone else's little world for a little while and leaving a small trace (a wine bottle? a whiff of body? artificial toeprints?)

traveling through so many worlds, remembering the feeling of explaining myself and being alone in a new place, pulling in and reminding myself to stay open and not to hoard my memories and histories...it's been hard to write honestly for me, hard to parse out the emotional-intuitive-rush from the practical-factual-blurs. so now i find myself in a new kitchen, a new heart, and i'm a little lost without my handsaw and flogger but excited. and i feel far away but not so different.

this morning i held a day-old chick...there are a couple of them trying to break out of their eggs, and some don't make it--still eggs with a couple cracks. there are also guineas and peahens and quails i think, and a couple goats and sheep and two cats and 10 humans and a small garden with a big sign that says "rhubarb." my first job here was to make bread; then walt pulled me aside and told me the focus of my internship here will be bread-making...experimenting, researching, compiling a log for future windward breadmakers of how to make really good bread with the soft white wheat and other stuff growing locally. apparently a working person needs about a million calories a year to survive and people can eat about 4 pounds a day (which is why you couldn't survive on asparagus); 200 pounds of apples a year, he said. i think apples and bread sounds better than apples alone.

this is a funny place, a mix of old and young and influences ranging from philosophy degrees to years of polyamory to something about the military (seems like a community fetish) and something about the Six Nations and something realistic. their up-front intellectualism has kept it pretty much white. it's really research-oriented, as opposed to primarily producing for farmers' markets or being a leisure sideproject...it's an investment for the people who live here in surviving past a collapse and an opensource project in creating not only an environmentally sustainable homestead but a sustainable community structure. the care and love is scattered over a half-mile of little trailers and projects, fences and gardens, greenhouses and ramshackle somethings-that-once-were.

there's a little music; not much art around; i am the only tranny with a handsaw (though i haven't held a handsaw here yet.) but the people seem good (this kid andrew is into wildcrafting and medicinal forest-gardening/agroforesting and sarah & lindsey are thinning the forest...opalyn is working on gasification and they've got some wormies trying hard to compost...lots of building stuff and slow projects taking form) and i'm sure i'll learn a lot.

and there's so much goat milk-cheese-yogurt! more insight and maybe a picture promised with my next post; my heart is still weighing and swaying in my chest.

mugged by the muggy

it's been awhile--

my skin's a little browner, my tummy a little emptier, my room a little messier, a couple projects finished, a new couple projects in utero, my thoughts tumbling around like damp clothes in this broken-dryer-wet heat,

in the mornings, i stumble out of my bed (sort of like sheets left on the floor of a sauna) and put on the minimals and walk to the lake. so the first apprehension of my day is engineered, clear--i count to ten before i can dunk myself into the icy water. then i take a deep breath and count to ten again. and then i breathe for a little while. and then i dive--

this morning i sat on the porch swing with my coffee

and noticed a tiny spider hanging on a web
between the ropes of the swing

she must have built that home last night
while i dreamed of clay bodies

while no one was watching, she began to wait

and i watched her crawl around and didn't want to ruin the intimacy

(the promise of my silence, our tacit agreement that our shared story would turn out a particular way, that is,

enduring)

i didn't want to break our moment
by being the one to point out that

her home couldn't stay there,
that her home would be folded in upon itself

within the hour.
(and then that i might be the one to do it, to undercut
the optimistic fantasy that drove her to create a home.)

the man who supports the weight of his white crippled dog as they walk through the ally walked through the ally with his dog. the biker who lives in the house with the garden rolled his bike out, strapped on his helmet, and squinted at his watch. a car-driver in a car drove by. things went as they do, the listeners listening and the coffee-drinkers drinking their coffee and the bikers biking and the wakers waking and the sleepers sleeping.

LB wrote, "'i didn't think it would turn out this way' is the secret epitaph of intimacy."

(and i wonder, how do i change my living to avoid that--

not to say cynically, authoritatively "i knew it would turn out like this,"

but to think that in our intimacy, nothing is sure or promised or forever,

and this is okay and good and beautiful because it is)--

and to the spider, what i might have wished i could say was:
"i'm sorry i cannot be seduced by your web
but my aesthetics of attachment are not careful enough
for us to flourish together. it doesn't have to make sense."
but the quietude was tempting and i intimated with my breath
...it doesn't have to make sense.

last week my brother was here, what a quiet charming fresh young mind,

we adventured around and i felt my spirit of adventure returning,

to the MCA to live on metal mobile islands, biking, bäoing, sitting by the lake,

a sip of a beer is an illicit transgressive simple delight,

the world is not so hard, it is good, and the days flow by filled with ideas that are sometimes followed through till completion and sometimes the sketches are left behind.

and these days have been days of making and unmaking,

tinctures pickles lentils paintings drawings beginnings plans truths quietudes stories bread zines

promises obligations burdens annoyances aspirations falseness messes stresses desires pressures expectations stories bread zines

i'm finding great satisfaction in these small projects which have become daily rituals, and though sometimes the process is painful the reward is always great. i am content being alone and together, quiet in groups, fermenting and bubbling in my desires and allowing them to slowly unwind as i bike up, down, back, forth, through the prairie and the froth and the broken-dryer-air.

for now, that's all. i'm thriving on air and memories and presents and futures and glasses of water and icy mornings and the sparest of intimacies and the occasional loaf of hot hot bread.