@Malleus Hmm. Do you feel this negates the concept of presence? Of feeling, at least, that you're in a moment? This concept of shutting down prefrontal cortex narrative for a moment and allowing for space?
You are right, though, and I'm considering how that relates. Perhaps the analysis is always after, the narrative beginning before our consciousness of it catches up. But that doesn't mean we can't press the pause button on it, I suppose
Considering the nature of my life as it is: a series of moments, only occasionally written by the time on a clock face, but more often punctuated and defined by the urges of bodies: mealtimes, the feeding and watering and playing with of animals and children, naptimes and sexual encounters and physical touch and sometimes the settling down and reading of a book or indulgence in art or film or dancing. The ecstasy of simplicity, of doing what bodies ask of us, of doing what the land asks of us, its parched tongue caressing our worn hands. The walking of food to a neighbor, the kind of grief and acknowledgement of need and sickness and the days of our lives intertwined with the cycles of this shifting, rolling earth. The kneading of dough and the movement of water, acts of humility: contact with one another's skin and fur and feathers, with one another's sustenance and perspiration and hot breath and excretions. The breaking down of one into all, of all into many moving parts, of breezes and shadows and sunset and parasite life cycles. The rising of all like performers -- synchronous and slow -- in this grand dance of existence in all its demands and guiltless wanting, in all of its perfect splendor, in all of its grace. The setting of all simultaneously ruled by the Sun: the children to bed, the birds to roost, the dog to patrol and then to sleep, the breeze shifting and calming as though tired and making way for brilliant stars.
So much of our culture inspires or at times requires us to relate to ourselves and the world around us purely through a lens of conflict:
Whose side are you on?
It insists that there is no nuance, that you are either on the right or the wrong side. It insists that the disengagement from these infinite wars will lead to certain death, that it makes you complicit, that you cannot be good unless you perpetuate the psychological warfare perpetuated against you against the very people you are supposed to be standing up for. This, it says, is the only way to truly be good.
You are constantly at war, it says, with every externality you can think of: you are at war with everyone and everything you can imagine. The price of losing is death. It tells you that they are going to kill you. It tells you that it is going to kill you.
There are no draft dodgers here: to be accepted into society you absolutely must pick a side. The people who claim allyship with you will turn around and ostracize you in an instant if you don't, and then you will have no allies, no friends, no support. The cost is isolation. There are no pacifists, we must all determine who we are in the face of never ending conflict, and who we are is defined by whose side we are on.
So whose side are you on? Huh? Are you a good person or a bad, evil person?
Have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps the only thing you really need to be fighting is your own lack of awareness? That regardless of how much you yell, or banter, or argue, or insist that you are GOOD, god damnit! you will do nothing but perpetuate the systemic failures that you claim so vehemently to be against unless you first recognize that everything is a mirror reflecting itself? And like that long, illusory hallway created by two mirrors reflecting one another, the ramifications of culture stretch from the macro to the micro, infinitely into the distance, but that it is the very same thing reflected the whole way down? That rather than believe the lie that disengagement is complicity, that you might have to recognize that engagement and perpetuating these never-ending conflicts is the complicity you fear taking accountability for?
Our culture insists we must take a side -- the easy choice. Stomping your feet at the edge of the trench and claiming you believe in the right things is much easier than getting into the trench and doing the work of doing the right things. In other words: our culture aims to absolve us of hard accountability through the perpetuation of constant psychological warfare that makes us feel better when we project it towards the next person but that leaves us ultimately unable and unwilling to look within ourselves and make critical changes where we are capable of making critical changes.
You are a victim in this unending psychological warfare that leaves you chronically stressed and stretched thin in an constantly emotionally reactive state, and yet you are also the abuser: the perpetrator of the crimes perpetrated against you, and on and on and on forever. You are a reflection of the reflection of the reflection. Just like any abuser with a trauma history that leads them to harm another, you ARE culpable for not taking the appropriate steps to recognize and reconcile your own patterns, and to find ways to cope that do no harm.
When you hold a lot of space and give a lot of energy, sometimes you end up finding that you're surrounded by people who require a lot of space and energy but who aren't capable (for one reason or another) or willing to hold that same space or give that same energy to you.
There is so much to community building that becomes so complicated, and everyone is unhealed in their own ways. Sometimes those ways are compatible with the ways in which you are unhealed: and you find that you are able to hold space for one another, mutually, and that the space you hold doesn't open up into wounds (or it does, but the very act of holding space becomes healing, less self-sacrifice than a pouring into one another). Sometimes, though, those spaces are incompatible, and the opening of space feels like the opening of wounds, and if not at first then after a time, as though something has rubbed you raw right down to the bone after the accumulation of each time you've let it touch you. Sometimes this is just a critical incompatibility, perhaps you aren't the right people to be in community with one another at this time. Sometimes it's the result of someone not being able to recognize the ways in which they demand. Boundary holding is so vital, but often leads to the triggering of maladaptive defenses and sometimes the ending of the relationship you were trying to preserve by setting the boundary in the first place. Some people advocate for boundary setting loudly, but are also the loudest to criticize you and claim you are abandoning or harming them when you do so.
The bringing together of people and the fostering of intersecting relationships requires time and effort and very careful communication and consideration, and is sometimes the rolling of a snowball gently towards the cusp of a hill: from there it flows so holistically and genuinely and easily, and these people find each other and fold each other into their nets and the shared net of the community. Sometimes it is Sisyphus rolling the ball up the hill over and over again until eventually you realize that perhaps one or more of these nodes must exist in satellite to the whole, and will not or does not desire to integrate within it.
Right now I am tired, and feeling as though critical boundaries must be held. A few of the relationships I've spent the past months fostering are crumbling for their own reasons: one because the other person is determined to remain in a power position that I refuse to engage with any further (giving the benefit of the doubt has to stop at some point, but the loss of this relationship impacts more than just me, which is hard) and the other because boundary holding is causing the other person to feel abandoned. After weeks of holding space for this person through a crisis, at the very moment I need that space held this person is pushing away and yet dragging me towards them -- unwilling to hold space but still demanding mine. And I am just tired, and wondering what patterns exist that push me to continue to forge unequal relationships in my own life, or if this is just really how most people are.
Someone I recently met who studied under Buddhist monks put it this way:
"The only thing we can really control is how we relate to everything else."
When you choose to relate to everything around you in conflict, when you choose to relate to the world as its victim, you inevitably become a void. You accept a station that was not given to you, but that you've given to yourself. You accept a mindset of eternal war: war with yourself, war with others, war with community, war with society.
I find myself less and less on here, because this once positive space of learning and shared ideas has, for some reason, devolved into voids. Voids of self-appointed victimhood, of constant warring with everything, everyone. I find myself more and more particular about the people I allow into my space, because even some people I find very dear are voids, and I am very sensitive to it, and because I am still learning how to create the appropriate psychic boundaries. Because I am, also, prone to becoming a void, and because if I spend too much time in others' I tend to then create one myself, and I want to choose not to allow myself this.
It's harder for many of us to choose the alternative: to relate to the world as its beneficiary, as a responsible steward of it, as a crucial moving part of it, even when it sometimes wrongs us; to relate to others with compassion and empathy and appropriate boundaries rather than constant conflict. It's easy to choose neural feedback loops of cortisol and adrenaline -- it feels good for a moment (and then it feels bad long term as it impacts our health negatively), our society provides plenty of opportunities to do so, and many of us learned to seek these feedback loops in our environments growing up. But what feels better, long term, that is harder to cultivate, are the feedback loops of dopamine through appropriate action and fulfilling achievement, oxytocin through true connection and existence among and with others, and so on.
It's easy and even rewarded in our society to tell me I'm wrong: "I don't get to choose how I feel about anything. If it's bad, it's bad, and it has to be bad." It takes work to relate to hardships with resilience, to accept that "trauma", the way that our lives shape us, is not always negative.
Pain is real, suffering is a choice. This I've learned. This I continue to learn, the hard way, each and every day as I engage with this journey I've been tasked with.
It's been a long period of necessary isolation due to some really intense psychic experiences after the Solstice event, and yet it feels as though the intentions I worked towards at that & the previous ritual I held are slowly beginning to manifest.
A long time friend of mine was kind enough to furnish me with exercises to improve psychic hygiene, and I recently just met with someone who has been working with a spiritual healer on the same and who is willing to engage in ritual space together to share some of her techniques with me. It's incredibly profound to have begun to build or find this community, and I am so grateful to everyone who shares their time and space with me.
I have some really interesting tattoo work planned that I can hopefully pick back up in April or May, after this month's push to improve the land and the two weeks in April I'm dedicating to a survival medicine class.
Spring feels fruitful and hopeful, and there is grass growing everywhere, triggered out of dormancy by the rain we received in January and early February.
We're not moving backwards, or forwards, but rather engaging in an unending cycle of existence, death, decay, and existence. Of growth, slow and then exponential and then not at all.
The world is not ending. Let me be clear: "our" world might be. But we are but a moment, in harmony and in concurrence with all other moments simultaneously. The world is not ending, simply moving through another cataclysmic cycle. We are simply myopic, we are simply enveloped in ego and fear. The universe, the world, however, does not have these shortcomings. It is indifferent, it honors both death and life equally.
And when we are all "gone", we are not really gone, but simply shifting states of existence to ride the ferris wheel of cyclical Being once again.
Sometimes it's hard to live out here, and winter is especially isolating. As we all retreat and focus on inner work and reprieve from the often constant movement of other seasons, we tend to reach out less, travel less. This is true for both us and our friends we see often, usually, and so since the Solstice it's been quiet here at the Ranch. We've really not gone anywhere, and no one has really come to visit.
However, I'm reading "The Independent Farmstead" by Shawn & Beth Dougherty, and feeling renewed and inspired. Sometimes this path feels too difficult, and I reminisce on the period of my life where I was ignorant of the depth and multitude of the issues that plague our species and where I just lived in the way that society dictated. In a way, ignorance really is bliss. In a way, it was just easier.
But I think back on the suffering I experienced then: the suffering I experienced at jobs, at the hands of others abused by our society, the suffering I experienced feeling like I was drifting along without a purpose, and the suffering that came from seeking purpose in careers that I could never attain because of my chronic inability to engage in personal politics. In a way it was easier to work many hours a week, eat out, go to parties, and move through life unthinkingly chasing the next thing that made me feel alive, connected, loved, despite that those experiences never lived up to my memories of them and despite that they were always so fleeting.
So it's not that we don't suffer now, of loneliness or of hardship or of our own interpersonal shortcomings. But we feel guided by purpose and by duty, and in so many ways that eliminates suffering. Though we don't always have other humans here to feel connected to, we do often, and in their absence we are connected to place, and to other living things that help sustain us and which we sustain in return.
It's been a while since I've posted meditations, and I hope to begin again one of these days, but in the meantime, this is kind of a personal one I suppose:
I've been spending a lot of time reflecting on the relationships I have with the people around me, and feeling a little frustrated by the lack of mutuality in some of them. On the other hand, someone I just met in October is willing to fly across the country with me to help with my daughter so I can take clients and not feel so isolated during the trip and I'm eternally grateful for her and the people like her that we have around us. Truly we are blessed if just one person shows up for us in this way once in a while, and we are fortunate enough to have a small handful of people who show up like this frequently (and for whom we are always happy to show up in return).
Every small community is a microcosm of the greater social context, and unfortunately our broader social context punishes a lot of the traits that make people truly great members of a small community in favor of traits that make us productive in our economic system, or good members of a much larger and much more disconnected (in most senses) community. Context matters, and dysfunctions within small communities are usually the result of mechanisms that serve individuals in a dysfunctional broader context. We have to understand that, and we have to give some grace, and we have to be willing to accept that these dysfunctions exist and that people just simply aren't perfect (and that we share in these dysfunctions, too, no matter how much work we think we've done). Many of our friends and loved ones still must exist in much of their space and time in jobs and homes within the broader social context, and the work occurs, according to them, the most when they are able to break from that and come take space. But there is no great trigger to take that leap to leave the macrocosm entirely: we are often bound in complicated ways to it, and sometimes occasional space and baby-steps towards preferred potentialities are all we can manage.
There is also the reality that some people are just not interested in existing in a space made for community -- even if (I'm learning, and this is very confusing to me but I'm starting to understand) they explicitly state aloud that they would like to. And we also have to give grace for that, and have patience with that, and hold fast our boundaries and be willing to do the difficult work of disentangling with people we care about when their needs and desires begin to disrupt our community, our family, or our peace. It does not have to be perceived as violent or rude to do so, although unfortunately again it often is, even when people state that they respect and adore our boundaries.
It's tricky to exist this way, but I'm learning slowly to hold fast and not be hurt when people don't appear to have meant things that they've said. I'm learning how to deal with people, I guess is what it is.
Accepting a lack of control is one of the hardest things (seemingly) for people to do. I can say something like "you cannot control another's thoughts and feelings", and most of the people I'm conversing with would agree with me.
But then, if I were to re-word that and say "you cannot control whether or not someone is racist", or "you cannot control whether or not someone is upset by your attempts to moderate their behavior" or something along those lines, most people would (and do) instantly begin coming up with reasons why they can, in fact, control the outcome of the above two scenarios.
Part of this seems to come from a semantic misunderstanding: control is not the same as influence, and vice versa. To control someone's prejudices is impossible. "Control" means that you would actually decide the outcome that you desired and make that happen, unequivocally. To "influence", or attempt to influence, would mean that you might try to educate someone, expose them to new ideas, to the damage their behavior or ideology may cause or is causing, etc.
We all have the ability to attempt to influence outcome, but that does not mean we are guaranteed success or that we have control over an outcome.
The understanding of this, in my experience, has been crucial to my well-being and ability to productively make decisions based on my own values (and not the attempt to control or change someone else's). And yet, it's generally a conversation that causes a significant amount of discomfort and frustration.
Welcome, winter! Welcome, crisp pink mornings and cerulean full-moon evenings by bonfires dug into the sand, burning away the year's resolutions and warming bare blue feet.
Welcome, winter! Welcome openness and all day outside, coming in red-nosed and panting.
High desert winters are harsh and yet somehow mild, with biting dry winds and freezing nights, but tolerable chilly days and not much snow. We're around 2000ft above sea level, so we don't have quite as harsh a season coming as those who are higher up in the valley.
The climate here is tricky: it's dry, with a moderate growing season, but the extremes of summer & winter make it a little tricky to choose crops & sustainable shade trees that can survive both the extreme heat and the severe cold. Many species that are touted as being "drought tolerant" and that are popular are unlikely to make it through the freezing nights and occasional frosts. Succulents and cacti are included in this: I've noticed that once the liquid in their pads freeze they're unlikely to survive. It'll be interesting to see how our agave, aloe, and nopales do this winter now that they've had a few months to establish themselves. I know that they're possible to grow, because there are many, many homes here that have enormous specimens of all three. So I'm optimistic, we'll just have to see how it goes.
Last year, wild things began to sprout in October, including a wild species of lily, wheat and other grasses, and a kind of daisy. This year, with significantly less rain, I haven't seen a single lily shoot or a single daisy flower, and the wheat that began to optimistically poke its head out after the single August storm has stayed brown. There's an urgency here, amplified in my mind by the tourist hype: off-roaders will be making noise and carving up topsoil for the next month or so en masse, and camper vans and Subarus have taken over nearby Joshua Tree, making the most of camping reservations they made last year and milder temperatures in the park for bouldering and hiking. Some visitors come with respect for the delicate altered ecosystem, many with the misconception that this land, if left alone, will itself save desert tortoises and chollas, and spring forth abundance. Some come with the misconception that this land is useless, and all it's good for is spewing gasoline and destroying native grasses with rubber tires.
This winter will be full of making plans as we weather the weather and the influx of visitors. We have a plan to try to buy some vacant land nearby to expand our regeneration efforts, and in the spring hope to (finally, we hoped to this year but weren't ready) introduce ruminants and poultry to help manage our existing property.
I recently watched a video of Cedar Springs Ranch in the high desert of Western Colorado, and the owner said something along the lines of us needing to become the animals that once managed this land. Settlers eliminated the bison & buffalo that trampled grasses, grazed & spread manure, and the beaver that once dammed streams and slowed down water. So we must be the bison, we must be the beaver. Through holistic management of livestock and thoughtful earthwork, we can coax life back here while maintaining the existing ecosystem.
So, anyways, this is a long, rambling update/rumination as the seasons change and my mind is full of considerations, possibility, and energy to work through cooler days.
it never stops
this feeling worthless
and falling from grace.
men are always angry,
she said
it's in their goddamn genes
maladaptive mutations
all blamed on you
you you you you
you disrespected me
you rolled your eyes
you talked back
you weren't down
you sighed
you made me feel like maybe I need to look inside
but I can't because of how I learned to treat you this way
"you don't know how it feels"
the fucking irony
we carry your pain, you men
it came first from our fathers
next from our brothers
then from our partners
we carry the hurt tenfold
yet you think its yours alone
like that absolves you of something
of the work of healing
like it's your god given right to be healed by a woman
while you make us meaningless
while you feed us your anger
and then doubled
when we dare
to get angry