Winter Was...

Switching to a Journal Style for Now

I recently read a couple of update posts from people I consider “substack friends,” posts that came at the end of January after a period of winter silence. They were open about having to live reclusively, because of health issues, whether physical or mental. Hearing them be so upfront with how they’re doing made me want to share an update as well, like a wounded animal, my instinct is to stay out of sight when my health is poor. I come from a very ableist family, any signs of illness growing up sparked panic and anxiety, while others would bully me if I showed weakness and so I learned to hide any signs of unwellness. Illness and disability in my family cause shame and manic worrying, rather than receive support, there comes pressure, pressure to do “one’s best,” to recover, not because they want to see me well but because being sick or disabled triggers them, bothers them. So they gaslight, show me videos of amputees who ran marathons or miracle cures that happened through faith, to let me know that being unwell is not okay with them, it causes them trouble, it breaks their comfort bubble and that I am the cause of their discomfort.

But hiding or withdrawing doesn’t have to be the default position to being in pain or disabled, right? I am sure that there are ways of being openly broken? I believe that there are species that actively communicate when they are debilitated or deteriorating or out of sorts or infected and seek out help, do they not? I have seen videos of alley cats adopt themselves in to homes when they are worn out from street life and of stray dogs walking in to veterinary clinics when they have an injury. There are many examples of dependancy out there in the non-human world. Recently, reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, I read about the mycoheterotroph, a classification of plant who is unable to turn sunshine in to energy, a full-time receiver of carbon and other nutrients through the mycorrhizal distribution network, dependent on a community of plants, fungi and microbes. I guess I’m like a mycoheterotroph at the moment since I can’t currently photosynthesize and give back some sugar, unable to grow leaves, I need to rely on those who can.

Since I can’t walk very far or for very long, I’ve been focusing on what is within reach, the plants at my doorstep, the shifting clouds above me. Back in January I noticed a couple of common redstarts posed on a pile of stones just in front of my house, is it normal for redstarts to be in Spain in early January? According to Wikipedia, they are supposed to be in the Sahel during the winter. I am, of course, happy they’ve come to say hello in a spot visible from my window and wonder how they have fared since a deluge soon followed their arrival, nothing but rain, heavy rain, perhaps almost 700mm (about 27 inches) after those redstarts appeared, our driveway has become a stream as the neighbors don’t adhere to the catch-and-slowdown-water principle of permaculture and prefer to have it run off their land as quickly as possible. Thanks to this customary (and foolish) “water management technique” that takes water for granted during the winter, where culverts and ditches have been placed to send this wet “nuisance” on their way as rapidly as the slope’s angles and leanings will allow, we receive a large amount of runoff from upmountain down in to our driveway. I rather enjoy it, having a little seasonal stream right next to our home, watching it flow in to and get sopped up by our very forested and absorbant land. As someone who loves the murmur of running water, I am grateful to have it flow right by my doorstep as I am not able to go down in to larger bodies of water in our area right now.

I’ve been spending a lot of time sitting down at the computer, the window in front of my table offering my primary daily update on the seasonal changes. During December and January, I watched the corner of the forest garden that I can see from my window, a curving hedge of deciduous trees framed by one of the windowpanes, slowly lose their last lingering autumn leaves in the strong gales of trans-atlantic storms and ever-so-briefly take on a winter look of bare branches, but not for more than a week or two, as the elderberry precociously begins leaving out in mid-late January, taking advantage of the mild temperatures of our winters and offering little brushstrokes of bright green, fresh vegetation.

I’ll usually be at the computer, and from my window, I’ll feel the slight change in color during the few hours the sun has managed to poke through the clouds every few days and offer a respite from the downpours. I can still walk in to the forest garden but I don’t do it as a gratuitously as I used, like just walking out for a quick stroll when I feel like it and then back inside to finish whatever it is I am working on. I have to be more intentional, my knee’s stamina is limited and if I get distracted I might step in a depression or slip on the muddy paths and reaggravate my injury. And the ground where I live is very uneven, and my knee can no longer handle the off-road walking on uneven terrain for extended periods so I’m limited to some smaller strolls just where we have some established paths on the few bits of flat land we have.

So I pay attention to what’s closest to the house, since that’s the safest area I can actually walk in. Towards the end of January there was a day where a noticed a clear uptick in birdsong rising from the forest garden below, so I pulled out the Merlin app on my phone and heard the year-round species like blackbird, eurasian wren, spotless starling, European robin, great tit, I’ve also caught the European starling, a surreal echo of multiple voices, which I found out are only usually in Southern Europe during the Winter. Now, already March, there are song thrushes and mistle thrushes, European serins, great and blue tits, European Blackcaps and Eurasian Wrens singing at all hours of the day. Scattered around my feet are crane’s bill geranium, must stork’s-bill, violets and primrose are in flower while the hemlock has been fattening and stretching, making Ys and Ts like American cheerleaders holding pom-poms. Sometimes I’ll here the cackle of a magpie and even if they’re far off, they seem to notice every single time I’ve spotted them and so as soon as I’ve laid eyes on them, up in an alder or walnut, I’ll watch their ying-yang pattern fly away

Sometimes, if I am not too triggered by the state I am in, if my unconscious isn’t running tapes about how I have no future, when I take a little walk, it all feels surreal, with my head on a swivel, eyes called in by so many creatures all coaxing in my attention, shifting between narrow and wide focus. The array of textures, close and far that surround me feel somehow more pronounced, more real, more vibrant. Perhaps it is the gratitude of getting to be outside for a brief while, perhaps this illness experience has made me more sensitive as it has forced me to listen and tune in to my body all day, everyday. Perhaps as I have been getting used to being sick and hurt, the alarm bells don’t sound off as much and my baseline when I am not triggered is more sensitive.

The prickle of a monkey puzzle needle, which while it is coniferous seem more like stiff but flexible narrow triangular leaves. The streaking woolly clouds above on a grayish orange backdrop during a rare bright afternoon reminding me that rain will be back the following day. The not-so-edible lemon peels sitting alone among the vestiges of the food scraps that have been happily consumed of by the geese. The white of the camelia flower that somehow seems like it was painted on to the scenery before me, it gleams as if its had some photoshop effects applied to it. Since I cannot work, my brief strolls have no plans attached to them, but feature greater curiosity and simple intention to just be with, rather than to do or alter something. Sometimes, I find myself standing in my front doorway, since its the easiest way to be outside when I can’t walk well, the closest access point. I’ll stand there for a bit just to enjoy having the sky above my head, I find myself asking more questions, such as “how come it can rain on you when there aren’t any clouds directly above you?” It doesn’t feel like its coming very diagonally, so it does it get to you from clouds that feel about a kilometer in front of you?

So, while I have been in this state, my attention hasn’t been focused on Substack. Right now, most of my writing energy has been going to a long-form book and in to speculative fiction. I don’t have any mental energy left over for writing essays on Substack. The health anxiety I carry while I write makes it difficult to come up with something polished and ready for a reading public, working on books that only I am looking at for the time being makes it easier because I can work on them sporadically and imperfectly and then come back and edit them when I am feeling more lucid. But I also don’t want to be invisible, I’d like to have a portal open to the world, a line of communication or a message in a bottle, as I go through this very long convalescence, So I thought that instead I could offer some short journal entries here.

Rather than writing more theory in essays, I’d like to get more real-life experience with what I have written about, to go back in to real-life spaces and see where the zeitgeist is related to land practice, kinship with nature and collapse-aware political and activist spaces. I want to offer liveo games and collectively participate in deeper land practice and then report back to you all. This will be happening from the added challenge of not being fully-able-bodied, which makes it a bit harder. For example, I actually was invited to two festivals last summer (one was like wellness/agroecology themed and the other was permaculture gathering) but both ended up having ableist tendencies and weren’t willing to accommodate my being injured and ended up rejecting me. So it occurred to me that it might be valuable to simply describe what it is like to pursue this project, including the setbacks, the failure, to have a wall.

The telling of the journey hopefully co-creates its ambitions. As in, the journal style is welcoming people in to know how things are going in with the project and possible collaborate or offer others connections. I like to think of us all as having an ecology of projects, each with ideas that relate to others and emerge in to a greater holobiont of a project. Every time I’m on zoom in a breakout room during a conference rooms, whenever I talk about what I am working on, I get great feedback from people around this idea (ecomythologies that you play like a video out on a landscape that embrace non-comfort animism or neurodecoloniality or care ecologies). So hopefully this journal style can give them updates and be a portal to those looking to collab.

I also want to stay connected with the outside world, regardless of whether it helps my goals or not. The social isolation when I am stuck at home is killer. I have noticed on many nights that I’ll be in a thought spiral about being doomed because of my health issues, how I am going to be left behind while the rest of the world is building new worlds in the rubble of climate collapse, and then I’ll go in to a zoom gathering and when I come out feel a bit of weight lifted and no longer feel that heavy cloud of constant anxiety filled with fears for the future swirling around my head and making it feel like I have to stay still, like i can’t move through the storm. So feel free to comment on anything here or chat with me on the discord if you are in our discord group or want to join!