Safe Spaces

Today I have been thinking a lot about safe spaces.  Places where I feel most like myself.  Or the person I most want to be, my highest self.  Places where that simmering, shaking quiver of anxiety that holds my chest tight and my breath shallow recedes.  Places that feel like home.

Even though I have the tendency to be quite extroverted, most of my safe spaces involve being alone, or with other people only on the periphery: bookstores, libraries, hiking trails, lonely beaches.  I love being in empty yoga or dance studios or curled up in a sunny porch, reading or knitting.  I love lying in a field of grasses staring up at the sky, or lying on my living room floor listening to records, or lying in a snowbank at night, staring at the stars.  I'm not religious, but I love being alone in giant, ancient, echoing cathedrals and cloisters, zendos, shrines.  It is the quiet I crave, not the doctrine.

I feel very calm around plants, digging in the dirt, riding a tractor, stacking hay in a loft.  I like animals but their unpredictability makes me nervous.  I'm more at home in an empty barn, when everyone's out to pasture and I'm shoveling shit.  I often feel the same about human animals.  I watch them with intense fascination, observing herd patterns and mothering odd ducks and spindly runts; but I'd rather deal with their messes (perhaps more abstractly!) than be in their constant company.

I relax in an art studio, in front of a typer and a blank page, or a sewing machine, as long as what I'm doing isn't perceived as work and there are no deadlines.

A wall of books and a comfy chair and nothing else to do but drink a cup of hot tea is heaven.

I love sitting up high in trees, looking out at the horizon, or in a greenhouse, smelling the moisture and growth.  Any type of water attracts me, lake or river or swimming pool.  And any type of fire.  I love running, hard, like I'm being chased, through woods and over hills and glens, jumping roots and rocks and water puddles, my heart screaming in my chest.  Preferably, predictably, alone.  I don't want to race.  I don't want to fall behind or feel like I have to slow my pace.  I just want to run.

If I am with someone I love, I want to snuggle in blankets, walk hand in hand through forests, read under the same light bulb and discuss what we've learned.  I talk out of nervousness, boredom, the need to share and grasp at connection, the need to help and heal others, wanting to resolve conflict, wanting to develop ideas that are only presently vague notions, and to attack and defend my private cathedral.  When I truly feel comfortable with someone, I'm able to say nothing and let them into my safe space.  This is a rarity.

I feel like there is some magic key in these revelations.  Examining my safe spaces feels like a road map, telling me future destinations, urging me to go back and dig up treasure I'd long ago buried and forgotten about.  I think there are answers here about where I should be heading, where I should live, what I should do for money and what I should do for fun, and with whom I should spend my time.

Where do you feel safe?  Where is your metaphysical home?

No power? No problem!

It scares me how little we as a culture know about taking care of ourselves.  The average town has about 3 days worth of supplies in the case of an emergency.  3 days!  Can you imagine the chaos?  I must have at least 3 weeks worth of food in my larder.  And that's not counting the freezers.

The power went out today unexpectedly, for a number of hours.  It was starting to get chilly so I built a nice fire.  Then I boiled some water on top and made tea and some eggs for lunch.

I wanted to read but, of course, there was no light.  But it was a nice sunny day, so I went outdoors.  Cold?  No problem, dress warm!  I had a great time on the back deck reading Joel Salatin's Folks, this ain't normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World.

Good book.  Good tea.  Good times.

"When a child plays a video game, if the race car wrecks, in a few seconds the game gives him a new one and he goes right on playing...No one, at any other time in human history, has been able to replace their materials, their tools, their playthings with such instant fabrication or resurrection.  Life is not like this at all...If your tomato plant dies because you failed to water it, you don't count to ten and watch a miraculous resurrection."

Like Joel, it makes me scared and sad that people think there are an endless supply of tomatoes.  Who grows those tomatoes?  Do you know where they came from?  If there was suddenly no more oil to transport them from California (or to make pesticides), what would you do? 

What did I spend the afternoon doing?  Not shopping for out-of-season tomatoes.  Not playing video games.  Though both of those activities aren't inherently bad.  It's when people are dependent on them that scares me.

Nope, I sorted my old clothespins.  Took out the rotten and broken ones.  Sat in the warm sunshine and thought about spring and fresh laundry.  Ahh....delayed gratification.

The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love

 

Parental Advisory Warning: This is complete and pure FARM PORN.  If you get squeamish at the mention of consuming blood pudding or afterbirth, this is not the book for you.  If chasing runaway draft horses on a bicycle doesn't get your heart pumping, perhaps a wedding in a hayloft or a demolition derby might do the trick?  This is the ultimate romance novel for every country woman who dreams of a delicious, muscular, hard-working hunk to throw us over his shoulder and give us a romp in the hay.  But, this isn't a novel.  Ask any woman who's ever spent any time with a farmer, even a beautiful, romantic, idealistic one, and the truth is, as my friend Andrea says dryly about her dairy-farmer husband: "I never knew he'd always be so DIRTY."

Kristin Kimball was a jaded, New York hipster who fell in love with the wrong man.  Mark was NOT the person she was looking for.  NOT the man her middle-class Republican parents hoped she would marry.  But frankly, Mark is irresistible, even to her readers, even when he is acting sorta obsessive and crazy, which is often.  This is a man who cannot tell a lie, believes he possess a "magic circle" that draws everything he needs and wants into his life eventually, lives his romantic ideals (for better or worse), saves a giant roll of dental floss (for later use), prefers everything homemade, adores life and all its potentials, proposes on a mountain top and offers to take her name so their future children can feel the security of a linguistic family connection.  Can you blame Kimball for swooning? 

"Mark, I discovered, had never smoked or gotten drunk, he'd never tried drugs or slept around.  He'd eaten wholesome and mostly organic food, and he'd spent most days of his adult life doing some kind of arduous physical exercise.  He was the healthiest creature I'd ever laid eyes on.  Some people wish for world peace or an end to homelessness.  I wish every woman could have as a lover at some point in her life a man who never smoked or drank too much or became jaded from kissing too many girls or looking at porn, someone with the gracious muscles that come from honest work and not from the gym, someone unashamed of the animal side of human nature."

Amen.