(no subject)
It has been a week of nightmares for me.
Waking life has been mellow and cooling; I am not working and Vermont is slowing down. The sun illuminates trees that are beginning to turn, the sun sets and leaves us with chilly weather. I am fasting. I am hoping to release toxins and mucus and parasites. But I am releasing fears as well. At night there are chases, scenes of running and hiding and plotting and trying not to be killed. I am powerless and wanted by authorities in power. We are all totally fucked and fighting them for our survival, in my dreams. We have forts and secret passages and our intelligence but they have helicopters and guns and their Intelligence. In other dreams it is my Guatemalan friends who are completely fucked, they are trapped on a ship in a stormy ocean with nowhere to dock, brutal waves slap the side of the ship and they know that they cannot stay up and steer this ship forever. One by one they are all dying. They are jumping ship and accepting their death, and I am screaming out, not willing to swallow it. Not willing to accept the way the world is.
I wake exhausted, lately.
I am feeling loved and at home here in Vermont. I have been leaving and coming back frequently, taking days and weekends to explore and connect with other communities and projects going on in the Northeast. I spent some time at the Germantown Community Farm over in New York, biked my way down to the Food Bank Farm in Hadley. Tomorrow is the human-powered carnival in the Northeast Kingdom. It's all much more exciting than Brattleboro, honestly, but each arrival back into town strikes me with the relief of familiarity. I don't need to make friends here. I don't need to learn what is going on, learn how to navigate town, decide what niche to carve. I can just be and live.
It's a double edged sword and it would probably bore me sooner or later. So I'm leaving in a week for Asheville. I have no idea what I'll do from there.
My goals right now are to stay inspired and healthy, and feel productive. It's a higher demand than it sounds.
I have been putting a lot of thought into going back to school, looking for programs in Sustainable Development and Appropriate Technology. The idea of Focus, of Expertise that i would be able to own forever - it would be an amazing tool; it's shiny and alluring. And then I remember what school is actually like, and I'm quite certain I could never go back to classroom standardized group learning. That's not at all what I want; to be honest, I'm just looking for some outside source of direction. I feel like I have this huge void that should be filled by elders, by those who have already walked a path similar to mine. I find myself looking to my thirty year old friends for someone to just tell me what to do; where to be, what to commit to. It's not proving sufficient. Without radical parents or an upbringing in a community, I'm not sure how to go about finding role models or mentors, and being so rootless I have never learned how to happily commit to a particular place or path.
For the last few years I have been living with the philosophy that this is the time of my life to gain skillsets. How to build, how to fix, how to grow, how to heal. How live and relate and communicate and maintain. I' ve done pretty alright with it. I built a cabin, i went to herb school. I grew a great garden and I navigated a complicated communal living situation through a couple complicated polyamorous relationships. I can fix bikes and soon I'll be able to weld bicycle machines. I take pretty good care of myself. I've moved all around to learn; I've given up many forms of stability in order to gain knowledge. I always figured that once I felt like a competent person who can do things, I would settle down into some amazing project. I'm not sure if it's that time yet or not, but I'm getting pretty fucking sick of floating around all the time.
Waking life has been mellow and cooling; I am not working and Vermont is slowing down. The sun illuminates trees that are beginning to turn, the sun sets and leaves us with chilly weather. I am fasting. I am hoping to release toxins and mucus and parasites. But I am releasing fears as well. At night there are chases, scenes of running and hiding and plotting and trying not to be killed. I am powerless and wanted by authorities in power. We are all totally fucked and fighting them for our survival, in my dreams. We have forts and secret passages and our intelligence but they have helicopters and guns and their Intelligence. In other dreams it is my Guatemalan friends who are completely fucked, they are trapped on a ship in a stormy ocean with nowhere to dock, brutal waves slap the side of the ship and they know that they cannot stay up and steer this ship forever. One by one they are all dying. They are jumping ship and accepting their death, and I am screaming out, not willing to swallow it. Not willing to accept the way the world is.
I wake exhausted, lately.
I am feeling loved and at home here in Vermont. I have been leaving and coming back frequently, taking days and weekends to explore and connect with other communities and projects going on in the Northeast. I spent some time at the Germantown Community Farm over in New York, biked my way down to the Food Bank Farm in Hadley. Tomorrow is the human-powered carnival in the Northeast Kingdom. It's all much more exciting than Brattleboro, honestly, but each arrival back into town strikes me with the relief of familiarity. I don't need to make friends here. I don't need to learn what is going on, learn how to navigate town, decide what niche to carve. I can just be and live.
It's a double edged sword and it would probably bore me sooner or later. So I'm leaving in a week for Asheville. I have no idea what I'll do from there.
My goals right now are to stay inspired and healthy, and feel productive. It's a higher demand than it sounds.
I have been putting a lot of thought into going back to school, looking for programs in Sustainable Development and Appropriate Technology. The idea of Focus, of Expertise that i would be able to own forever - it would be an amazing tool; it's shiny and alluring. And then I remember what school is actually like, and I'm quite certain I could never go back to classroom standardized group learning. That's not at all what I want; to be honest, I'm just looking for some outside source of direction. I feel like I have this huge void that should be filled by elders, by those who have already walked a path similar to mine. I find myself looking to my thirty year old friends for someone to just tell me what to do; where to be, what to commit to. It's not proving sufficient. Without radical parents or an upbringing in a community, I'm not sure how to go about finding role models or mentors, and being so rootless I have never learned how to happily commit to a particular place or path.
For the last few years I have been living with the philosophy that this is the time of my life to gain skillsets. How to build, how to fix, how to grow, how to heal. How live and relate and communicate and maintain. I' ve done pretty alright with it. I built a cabin, i went to herb school. I grew a great garden and I navigated a complicated communal living situation through a couple complicated polyamorous relationships. I can fix bikes and soon I'll be able to weld bicycle machines. I take pretty good care of myself. I've moved all around to learn; I've given up many forms of stability in order to gain knowledge. I always figured that once I felt like a competent person who can do things, I would settle down into some amazing project. I'm not sure if it's that time yet or not, but I'm getting pretty fucking sick of floating around all the time.