elainegrey

Goal: to create a biodiverse haven for flora and fauna at the scale of our lot, a place of beauty and retreat for our family, a productive space that is sustainable and manageable as i age.

1. Continue establishing native and nearly native trees and shrubs, plus perhaps some camellias as evergreen privacy border plants in the east glade. Priorities: fruits to replace autumn olive fruits, bright autumn color and showy flowers. Constraint: deer.

2. Manage the grounds, including minimization of stilt grass.

Scattered thoughts:

When i went out to open the door for the cats Thursday morning the sky was bright with stars and the waning moon hid in the trees. I saw a satellite moving against the night sky and caught a bright flash of a meteor.  This Friday morning the sky was even more clear. Venus, which had been muted by clouds on Thursday, blazed through the trees, and the even smaller moon blazed. I sat down and reloaded the table of satellite passes and noted a strikingly bright International Space Station was passing overhead just then. Back outside i went and watched the -3.6 m approach the moon, so bright it was rarely blocked by the pine tops. It did not pass in front of the moon from my point of view. Back inside where i noted that now a 2.7 m was passing through the big dipper, so outside i went again. I decided to stop even though more were passing overhead and instead was distracted by the information about the satellite. I did not know there was a Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport.

The wildlife cam is not too time consuming yet for record keeping. It's such a struggle to motivate myself to delete original images! I still have negatives of my photos from college, grad school, and the early oughts: i'm keeping those. My point is that the lesson to preserve the earliest, best quality image for the future is so ingrained. But who wants to peer at (so far) fairly poor wildlife camera images of deer, a squirrel,  a lens flare,  and a rabbit? I've learned how to do a little editing and compositing on my phone now, so SIGH, yes, if i had kept the possum photos i could have cropped and composed something to preserve as "evidence" but, again, is that single observation really that remarkable?  So, i am making myself delete. It's clutter and future me will appreciate the organization of the observations into a database as well as not having  a gigabyte of boring images and video to go through.

It has been interesting to discuss with Christine what images she will find remarkable. So far deer and squirrels are in the uninteresting category. This weekend i will put up the other camera and move this one to have more a view of the ground since the opossum (interesting!) and rabbit (interesting!) have mainly been in the bottom edge of the image.

I'm testing an embed of the most curious video -- a lens flare? -- below the cut.

I'm framing this coming year -- by which i mean my natal year more than 2024, but i'll try ramping up in the next two months -- as a move from surviving to thriving. My way of addressing challenges has been to put other things aside and focus on the challenge. The first few years we were here we worked madly on clearing the underbrush and overgrowth. Then Mom's stroke and COVID. And subsequently some big things at work. My "surviving" has been with comfortable margins: i don't need to be in survive mode. It's learned. I need to learn to thrive.  I'm trying to frame my expectations and think about this like a myself a transplanted perennial that persists with little change for a few years and then bursts forth growth in the apocryphally third year ("sleep, creep, leap"). I want to transplant my mindset to thrive-mode.

The first change i am making is in my centering meditation that i have been using since the mid 90s. The first focus is on grace, which had been so important because of how disappointed i would be in myself. I have not completely stopped "beating myself up" but i am far far more compassionate and understanding . When i am disappointed with objective fact (for example, still coughing, although its much better, and the work of December still has not wrapped up despite some good long focus days in December) i am not making it my fault.  I've learned to accept grace and give myself and others grace. I am overlaying that focus with a focus on vitality.

This page - https://positivepsychology.com/what-are-your-strengths/ - has a "wheel of character strengths" that has six major classifications. It includes "Courage" at that top level, with Bravery, Perseverance, Honesty, and Zest as individual strengths. I took the https://www.viacharacter.org/ survey to "find my strengths" and   my "top" five strengths as defined fell into "transcendence" (two strengths, but the strongest)  and "wisdom" (three strengths). "Honesty" from the "courage" section shows up as #6, but "Bravery", "Zest", and "Perseverance" are at the bottom. The "Perseverance" strength is entangled with ADHD. I suspect the survey instrument likely does not address neurodivergent perseverance. (The cowboy song of "Purt Near Perkins" comes to mind this moment, as a  change of heart about completion of things - https://www.jeffstreebyauthorizedsite.com/6-classic-works.html .) ZEST though, that's what i want to chase. And maybe it takes bravery to chase it. I think hangups around perseverance may, indeed, be part of the issue. "I can't do zesty thing because must finish thing" -- but so often the finishing of a thing is ... unreasonable? It's too big a thing? I dunno.  Anyhow: exploration there.

In oops news: I associate elements with my age to label each year. This coming birthday i will be 56, which is barium. Barium is in a gem stone called benitoite, and i've considered getting a necklace that has a vial of some sort that has tiny tumbled benitoite stones inside. (Larger stones are pricey!)  But Sunday afternoon my mind skipped and i decided the element must be bismuth and -- lo! -- there are pretty things made with crystallized bismuth. So i bought a necklace and earrings and -- nope, different than barium. 27 years until bismuth.

Random: What the bleep is "magic spoon" cereal that the "deep discount price" is $6.97 for a 9.7 oz box??? Ah "keto friendly" "sweet" cereal. Wow.

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A diagram showing my perceived interrelationships between my health -- fundamental and at the bottom -- and some very embodied capacities of physical energy, cognition, executive function, and "ground and center." "Ground and center" points toward embodied emotional health, but opens to a more spiritual understanding. I know comfort and stress interact with my health; i used the term perspective to denote a positive capacity that has the opposite quantification of stress. Joy and creativity, meaning, and gratitude all have strong coupling with "ground and center." It takes being grounded and centered for me to engage in connection; connection feeds back to joy and meaning. I should also have a line showing connection supports cognition (per aging research).

I've drawn confidence having an uncertain relationship with executive function. I added confidence because confidence, self esteem, recognition and some other concepts came up in some systems i saw, and i felt a stirring that these are concepts i disregard. In drawing the connection to executive function and the question mark, i felt a deep ache.

Health is, i admit, an extremely broad topic, and there were versions of the diagram where it was not treated so differently. As i read about strength and resistance training improving executive function capacity, aerobic fitness improving cognition, the emotional health impacts of exercise, diet and nutrition having effects, sleep.... the care of this aging structure seems critical beyond the positive impact of not aching and not itching and not coughing.

Not all connections are drawn. Comfort includes the absence of clutter irritations which also reduces stress (increases perspective), which also improves health.

That's a tidy little system to think about: to deal with clutter requires executive function, which -- like the other basic stocks of physical energy, cognition, and ground & center (or "emotional capacity")-- is a finite resource that get replenished, more or less, by a good night's sleep. So, investing in addressing clutter may cost exec function for the day, but may mean more over the long run.

It would be nice if there was a dungeon master manual for this: invest 5 points of exec function over seven turns in decluttering and earn an additional 2 exec function points per future turn, plus one point that rotates randomly around the other capacities per turn.

Exec function doesn't point to many things, but basically it's needed to do the things that improve all the other things. Want to meditate? Reach out to others? Exercise? Develop a system that makes it less expensive to do things on the list? Spend your executive function points!

It's possibly a telling gap that i didn't point connection back to perspective and ground & center. When distressed, it is helpful to turn to others for more perspective, which then helps one find that center or grounding.