I am struggling to write this cold wet morning, not quite freezing so my tanning vats don’t have ice on them despite being outside for days now. It is cloudy yet again so I cannot finish softening the sheep hides I racked yesterday in a finally rare sunny day, which lifted my spirits. Perhaps the clouds will lift later, into sun I can allow to touch my skin. I’ve been floating in the winter blues lately, doing the workings of my daily tasks, mostly physical and alchemical, while letting my brain and heart sift through whatever thoughts or feelings need to be had or felt, without pouring so much of it out, or pushing myself to ‘think’ or ‘feel’ anything in particular. The alchemical processings of dyeing cloth and buckskin, wool and felt, the scraping of skin, or sanding of skin, or smoking of skin, is what I’ve been enthralled in. I’ve been sewing and canning endless jars of broth. I’ve been cleaning dust that is created from the wood stove, the grime that gets on the deck. Moving my body in the daily tasks. More often than not in the past I tend to be in my cerebral self, thinking a lot, ideas and connections, and joining this thing to that - constantly surfing the vast web, or in the last couple years, my broken hearted self unable to pour anything because of the emotional pain I felt which is ultimately physical. (Cause right? The spirit and the body are not actually split as they have told us otherwise) Lately I’ve been revisiting that feeling, the somber weight, which is never really gone deep down. The lack of sunshine, the social isolation, the weight of capitalism, the inability I feel sometimes to understand social nuance and motions so I self-isolate more, out of fear of messing up, or not understanding, or assuming I am not welcome or invited, which exacerbates my often deep feeling of loneliness. Winter can bring this up for folks anyway, but I think on top of that, my way of perceiving the world, and all the interconnections doesn’t help at times.
As I have said before, grief is a character that should take up all the space it needs, and people who don’t accept you for that part of yourself, which in a way is a reflection of the reality of our disconnect from land, is not who we need in our lives.
And yet, I see all as kin, and perhaps the fact that capitalism and private land ownership forces us to isolate often as nuclear family units without sharing anything with anyone else, is a hard kind of social structure for me to ever feel comfortable with ultimately.
As long as I remember I have questioned things like (and I remember even asking my mom questions like this growing up):
Why am I going to be a girl the rest of my life? Can’t I morph?
Why does one have to get married and wear a white dress?
Why do you have to just live with one person the rest of your life?
Why can’t I wear pants to church?
Why do people stay together even though they are unhappy just living with the one person?
Why do we have to live in walls and separate rooms?
Why is sex never talked about?
Why do we not share our tools and garden with out neighbors?
Why are people who have darker skin lesser than?
Why do we have to go sit in offices under fluorescent lights every day to be successful?
Why does a ‘woman’ have to work all day in an office, AND do all the stuff for the kids, AND have the food on the table, AND do all the bookkeeping and the laundry?
Why do adult men get to squeeze me whenever they want? (as a child I was very uncomfortable with this, yet I did want consented touch)
When do I know it is ok to hug someone or show affection when I care about them?
Why is it not ok to cry when one is emotionally hurt?
Why are all the White Pines planted in rows to be cut down in 10 years?
Why is it considered beautiful to spray chemicals on a field of grass to keep it all short, green and one species but a meadow of multiple species of plants, growing all heights with pollinators everywhere, considered ugly or messy?
Why is God a man? (I swear I asked this in church group, and literally couldn’t understand or make sense of it, and they were super frustrated with me)
I guess I have always questioned aspects of social norms, and of course certain things are in place because they literally function a certain way. A person that breastfeeds is going to have a certain kind of role, and certain needs that someone who doesn’t, for example.
I have been considering doing some podcast episodes coming up on the intersections of neurodivergence, grief, and ecology, and while I know this gets talked about in different ways by different people elsewhere, It is up for me and I’m curious to explore it in my own way. DO we all feel grief to a different degree when we are forced to go against our body’s needs for community, living close to the land, and churning away at the hustle of capitalism?
Capitalism as a philosophy in its advent, was precluded with this assumption that all of the world is inanimate material, that just needs to be combined a certain way in order to create commodity in order to accumulate wealth. What it really means is that we must materialize (rather than animate) our own bodies, and the world around us, in order to get what we need to live on this earth. This is a fairly new concept, that most of us are forced to live by, and so no wonder there is a kind of undercurrent of depression that resides within all of us around it.
So how does this affect our relationships with one another, as transactional, and how does neurodivergence and grief play into this?
Neurodivergence is a way to describe a spectrum of world-sensing, and feeling rather than assuming we all sense, feel and see things the same. It can include autism spectrum, or ADD, or other kinds of modern ways to describe it as a ‘disorder’ when it really is embracing of diversity. Of course, neurodivergence can simply mean being intuitive or psychic, or able to predict the future, or communicate with the spirit world, these are things the Western world mostly dismisses as fantasy. But so does anything that challenges the status quo, like questioning the beauty of grass or the supposition that God is a man when God is infinite forms. More than anything, these things are a reflection of the culture we live in, gender norms, our ideas of beauty, our sense of what is divine.
To stay open and in tune, inherently comes grief. To stay in questioning, is to stay in grief of being not understood. To ask, why is this thing this way and why does it feel bad?
The word gaslighting gets thrown around a lot these days. I’m honestly tired of using the word, and yet also tired of the psychological warfare of the world we live in.
Having to constantly decipher what is real and true from fake news, or biased news, to social pressure to be a digital activist in order to be ‘good’ to interpersonal relations where blame, shame and guilt tend to be defaults rather than empathy, openness and expansion, growth together to re-wire and transform what we can in the spheres we can control. I’m tired of being gaslight by the culture that tells me it costs so much money to simply exist, that I ‘need’ to have all these modern things to be healthy or comfortable, or if I had a kid that I would have to subject them to those social norms as well. How does one have a child and raise them close to the land without being gaslight that you’re somehow ‘wrong’ for doing so, even though it is actually the ‘right’ way?
How do we hold on to what we know to be true in our bodies, despite everything around us telling us elsewise?
It’s exhausting, to translate social norms all the time, that are influenced by the means to the end, by the materialism, by the stress we’re all under to make capital, by the way that dominance over land paradigms affects masculinity that could look so much more nurturing and powerful than we allow it to be. (I’m been reading Sophie Strand’s book on (‘The Flowering Wand: Re-wilding the Sacred Masculine’, and I recommend it). To have to constantly adapt to something that doesn’t always feel right.
How do you navigate this and stay brave? Sometimes I feel like hiding is all I can do, out of fear of messing up, or doing it wrong, and yet it doesn’t solve anything. Certainly I have been told I overshare in my writings, in my connecting with folks in real life, and I have felt tremendous guilt for ‘messing up’ and not always knowing where the line should be drawn. It’s confusing because as a kid, I was told I was messing up for things that didn’t make sense to me or I didn’t understand fully either - proper etiquette as a woman in colonial rural Virginia. Don’t cross your legs, or put your elbows on the table, or chew with your mouth open, or have unbrushed hair. It’s tiring when you’re told you’re constantly messing up.
How can we give one another grace for our neurodivergence, for the state of the world and how it affects us, and share more true love for one another?
Just some thoughts this cloudy morning before I transition to scraping hides, sewing curtains for my truck shell, and using a table saw to cut some boards for my airstream camper shelves.
This was so relatable. Thank you.
If you ever feel called to come to Crestone, I think you'd find yourself sharing space with a lot of likeminded people asking similar questions and having similar experiences.