I travel to a Circle of mountains. I step inside and live and know that pre-history is now and the future is now.

I haven’t moved into my new house yet, but I’m busy researching many different aspects of homesteading. As part of that effort, I’m reading the blogs of lots of other homesteaders, farmers, and people who are otherwise in line with what I want from my life. Here’s my list of what I’m reading.

I was at a regional burn once, and an acquaintance who was new to the burn scene grumbled to me that she hadn’t seen any of this gifting thing that everyone was talking about. Five seconds after she was done speaking, someone ran up to us to give us some handmade soap. The “gifting thing” is an integral part of burns, and is truly everywhere when you are open to it.

I have some mixed feelings about it, but I’m going to use parsley this week to attempt to bring an early onset to my menstrual cycle. I’m currently on schedule to start bleeding at Burning Man, which wouldn’t be the end of the world, but wouldn’t be perfectly ideal. I’ve got plans to get laid as much as possible at Burning Man this year, and while menstruation rarely causes me any consternation since I use the Diva Cup, it does get in the way of sex, especially with new partners.

I simply love the idea of composting. You mean I can take my trash and turn it into something highly useful? Awesome!

I’m looking back through my tweets trying to see when I started stretching my ears… looks like April 27th. On August 9th they went up to 0 gauge, which means it took almost exactly 15 weeks to go from 18 or 20 gauge to 0 gauge.

One of my big goals for homesteading is to raise animals for food. Bees are in the works, and eventually down the line there may be chickens and goats and rabbits. What I’m really excited about, though, is raising a pig!

I first settled on a pig because I’m curious about how I will feel raising an animal on my own and then killing and eating it.

From the Burning Man website: “Radical Inclusion: Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.”
Radical inclusion. Everything about Burning Man is radical, to be sure. It starts at the very basics, though, and says anyone may be involved.

There are lots of things that squick me out about religion. I was raised Southern Baptist, but that died around the time I became sexually active. I became Pagan in college, but that began to die the first time I tried to speak to deities out loud in a ritual (“Who the fuck am I talking to?!”) and finally ended when I went to a burn for the first time and realized that everything I wanted from religion was available without religion.

Some things that squick me out: rules and regulations about everything from what are the right clothes to wear for celebrations to how to conduct romantic relationships. Here’s a new one by way of the Friendly Atheist: God is an abusive partner!

A basic definition of polyamory goes something like this: A relationship structure that allows for the possibility of romantic/sexual relationships with more than one person at a time with the full knowledge and agreement of all participants. Not surprisingly, there are lots of variations amongst people who call themselves polyamorous. While there is plenty of room for me under the poly umbrella, I’ve recently begun to shy away from it a bit, leaning towards just calling myself slutty instead. I am still polyamorous; it’s just that I don’t want to give people the wrong idea. There’s a lot that gets said about polyamory that doesn’t suit me at all.