Transgression
This is hard to write. It's delicate: an interior network that sun and wind can dry in an instant. It's private: an interior architecture that betrays so much about me as an inhabitant and as the architect. It's transgressive: my story is not one I see other people tell. I write it here so that my words create meaning from my experience, because writing and storytelling is meaning, and because its too important to be left to fall and rot into the litter without the tribute of words.
I suspect I'll wander a lot. I always do. In the end I'll have been where I need to go, or at least I'll have been closer.
Here I am in my nest. I always nested as a kid. I stole all the toilet paper and blankets and put them under my bed. Later, in high school, I slept under the bed many nights; it as a captain's bed so there was some headroom. Sometimes Kynnin slept under there with me. Now I have the nest-bed in my basement, earth-sheltered, with a thick soft mattress that comes up around me and a pile of blankets deep enough that by body leaves no distinctive mound through them.
My nest is internal. The soil of my land protects it from heat in the summer; it's near enough to my house's woodstove-heart in winter that with the door open it stays cool but livable. It has its own self-regulating heat should those fail and the geese tap at the window when it rains. Right now I am visualising it as a knot in my property where all the subtle lines of connection on Threshold converge. I am drawing on every iota of that power, pulling on it to hold me steady like... no. Not ready yet.
If that power doesn't have my back here, inside, I'll take the laptop outside to write. It needs to be written.
One oblique curve of the spiral inwards ends. Another begins closer to the core.
I'm a machine made for loving people.
I wrote that once. If I wrote it today I'd leave off "people".
I love people. Every time it hurts. I don't know how to tell you about this feeling because I am coming to learn that it's not universal, it's not common. I don't believe that any single feeling can be completely unique, not with the billions of people that live and have lived, but my interior isn't shown in your stories. The only voice that invokes this story is my own voice.
When I first access my feelings of love for someone, at the same time I access the feelings of loss for them. Everything ends. That's not a platitude for me, it's a completely visceral second-to-second experience scribed on my every bone. When light flares within me each scriven line throws a shadow and my skeleton is one continuous story of loss. So it is that when I feel that light and connection I also need to navigate acceptance of the end. I'm not sure if anyone in my life knows me well enough to know that when I fall in love I cry continuously for awhile.
I hide it as a sign of my inhumanity.
So much of my love is a sign of my inhumanity and I have been slowly revealing it. Always the revelation takes every scrap of power I can draw from the land and the people around me and whatever dark centre is in me. I love many people. I love in cycles, like the seasons. I love with my body. I love in words like trying to move a mountain with a teaspoon. I love the land and I love the plant communities thereon as much as I love any human. Some days I need humans to love me back and when they don't I can hold my own hand and it's sometimes been enough.
And. I don't love purely, immersed in the moment with e beloved. Instead I love in the beginning and in the end simultaneously. I feel the beginning and the end simultaneously. The light always holds a shadow within it.
Here I'm remembering how to write. It's good. But. This arc of the spiral ends and we go closer.
My love isn't good enough for many people. Of course communication is all semaphore across the chasm between our minds and bodies. All those people have is my actions. By my actions they are not loved. By other actions they feel loved. With my body and my voice and my hands and my eyes I find a way inside and they want that, but in the end thy do not--
Many people's love isn't good enough for me. I've never said this before.
I come busting through their walls into their dark lonely places and I accept that darkness and that loneliness and they come to depend on that acceptance. They cannot in turn accept me with my many loves and my go-and-return. They say "if you really loved me you'd keep your focus on me always, you wouldn't love anyone else and you wouldn't go and return".
If they really loved me they'd accept the creature that I am. Maybe they would decide not to engage with my body, or with my words, but they...
Well, you get the idea. Spiraling closer. I started this full of tears and now my soul feels heavy. I don't want to engage with those people. They are in my past for the most part. They are chains and scars I am trying to release a little with this writing.
I am trying to spit in their faces with this writing. I am summoning my anger now, protector of boundaries. Because, yes, fuck you, I do love people. Maybe the anger can take me in to the next spiral where tears and the support of the land could not.
I am poly because it's important to me to allow each connection, each love, to find its full consensual shape*. The shape of each connection is more important to me than a set of received default-culture narratives about what love can or should be. The shape of each connection is so important to me that I make choices that ostracize me from most of that default culture and put me right outside most of its understanding. That connection is more important to me than security or stability in other words. It's my driving imperative.
I've put that down in the last little bit. Seasonal, cyclic, and cometary as I am I've allowed my land and my work to carry me from my human connections for awhile. The ones that remain are the ones that can accept this of me, and so they are stronger for it. New connections have been few.
And here's what I need to say in the heart of the spiral: I made a connection at the end of last week. My heart brought home another gift. It can't be a conventional connection. I don't get to lead with my body or maybe engage those bits at all. I need to walk softly. As always I'm mindful of harm that could be done. But.
So many years and I've been told so often my heart isn't allowed, that it's no good.
But here it is, what stands for my heart, this dust devil made of ground glass long since splintered into sand. It's been a battering ram and the tiniest twining of vine. It's been a glass of cool water and it's been a flamethrower. My heart. It's suited for the delicate nature of this work that's to come as it is suited for all the work given it. I will have so much learning and so many hard moments trying to accept this situation, my brain and instincts will need to scramble to catch up, but like always it will be worth it.
I can hold up my end.
I am a machine made for loving things.
It's nice to have another thing to love.
*Relationship Anarchy came around after I started identifying as poly. I'm not sure I want to climb into a box with those folks but I've liked some of theie writings.
I suspect I'll wander a lot. I always do. In the end I'll have been where I need to go, or at least I'll have been closer.
Here I am in my nest. I always nested as a kid. I stole all the toilet paper and blankets and put them under my bed. Later, in high school, I slept under the bed many nights; it as a captain's bed so there was some headroom. Sometimes Kynnin slept under there with me. Now I have the nest-bed in my basement, earth-sheltered, with a thick soft mattress that comes up around me and a pile of blankets deep enough that by body leaves no distinctive mound through them.
My nest is internal. The soil of my land protects it from heat in the summer; it's near enough to my house's woodstove-heart in winter that with the door open it stays cool but livable. It has its own self-regulating heat should those fail and the geese tap at the window when it rains. Right now I am visualising it as a knot in my property where all the subtle lines of connection on Threshold converge. I am drawing on every iota of that power, pulling on it to hold me steady like... no. Not ready yet.
If that power doesn't have my back here, inside, I'll take the laptop outside to write. It needs to be written.
One oblique curve of the spiral inwards ends. Another begins closer to the core.
I'm a machine made for loving people.
I wrote that once. If I wrote it today I'd leave off "people".
I love people. Every time it hurts. I don't know how to tell you about this feeling because I am coming to learn that it's not universal, it's not common. I don't believe that any single feeling can be completely unique, not with the billions of people that live and have lived, but my interior isn't shown in your stories. The only voice that invokes this story is my own voice.
When I first access my feelings of love for someone, at the same time I access the feelings of loss for them. Everything ends. That's not a platitude for me, it's a completely visceral second-to-second experience scribed on my every bone. When light flares within me each scriven line throws a shadow and my skeleton is one continuous story of loss. So it is that when I feel that light and connection I also need to navigate acceptance of the end. I'm not sure if anyone in my life knows me well enough to know that when I fall in love I cry continuously for awhile.
I hide it as a sign of my inhumanity.
So much of my love is a sign of my inhumanity and I have been slowly revealing it. Always the revelation takes every scrap of power I can draw from the land and the people around me and whatever dark centre is in me. I love many people. I love in cycles, like the seasons. I love with my body. I love in words like trying to move a mountain with a teaspoon. I love the land and I love the plant communities thereon as much as I love any human. Some days I need humans to love me back and when they don't I can hold my own hand and it's sometimes been enough.
And. I don't love purely, immersed in the moment with e beloved. Instead I love in the beginning and in the end simultaneously. I feel the beginning and the end simultaneously. The light always holds a shadow within it.
Here I'm remembering how to write. It's good. But. This arc of the spiral ends and we go closer.
My love isn't good enough for many people. Of course communication is all semaphore across the chasm between our minds and bodies. All those people have is my actions. By my actions they are not loved. By other actions they feel loved. With my body and my voice and my hands and my eyes I find a way inside and they want that, but in the end thy do not--
Many people's love isn't good enough for me. I've never said this before.
I come busting through their walls into their dark lonely places and I accept that darkness and that loneliness and they come to depend on that acceptance. They cannot in turn accept me with my many loves and my go-and-return. They say "if you really loved me you'd keep your focus on me always, you wouldn't love anyone else and you wouldn't go and return".
If they really loved me they'd accept the creature that I am. Maybe they would decide not to engage with my body, or with my words, but they...
Well, you get the idea. Spiraling closer. I started this full of tears and now my soul feels heavy. I don't want to engage with those people. They are in my past for the most part. They are chains and scars I am trying to release a little with this writing.
I am trying to spit in their faces with this writing. I am summoning my anger now, protector of boundaries. Because, yes, fuck you, I do love people. Maybe the anger can take me in to the next spiral where tears and the support of the land could not.
I am poly because it's important to me to allow each connection, each love, to find its full consensual shape*. The shape of each connection is more important to me than a set of received default-culture narratives about what love can or should be. The shape of each connection is so important to me that I make choices that ostracize me from most of that default culture and put me right outside most of its understanding. That connection is more important to me than security or stability in other words. It's my driving imperative.
I've put that down in the last little bit. Seasonal, cyclic, and cometary as I am I've allowed my land and my work to carry me from my human connections for awhile. The ones that remain are the ones that can accept this of me, and so they are stronger for it. New connections have been few.
And here's what I need to say in the heart of the spiral: I made a connection at the end of last week. My heart brought home another gift. It can't be a conventional connection. I don't get to lead with my body or maybe engage those bits at all. I need to walk softly. As always I'm mindful of harm that could be done. But.
So many years and I've been told so often my heart isn't allowed, that it's no good.
But here it is, what stands for my heart, this dust devil made of ground glass long since splintered into sand. It's been a battering ram and the tiniest twining of vine. It's been a glass of cool water and it's been a flamethrower. My heart. It's suited for the delicate nature of this work that's to come as it is suited for all the work given it. I will have so much learning and so many hard moments trying to accept this situation, my brain and instincts will need to scramble to catch up, but like always it will be worth it.
I can hold up my end.
I am a machine made for loving things.
It's nice to have another thing to love.
*Relationship Anarchy came around after I started identifying as poly. I'm not sure I want to climb into a box with those folks but I've liked some of theie writings.