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Gardening. I've had no gardening land until yesterday so I have filled my terrace with pots and bags of soil. Very proud of my (admittedly shitty) beans and tomatoes. I've made raised beds out of rubble in my backyard. A friend has offered me to use some of her land, so that will be next to plant.
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Cat. I was really awfully depressed so I adopted a sickly kitten to have someone else to care for. It helps. The cat doesn't give a shit about world politics. It's now growing more healthy and becoming too powerful for my furniture. When I wallow in bad moods it will let me know without delay. It's currently sitting on my lap making sure I don't get too much screen time.
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Community. The local community is poor, rural and divided into (very conservative) locals and foreigners (who come here to live in more natural settings than where they come from). Since I've turn woefully old I feel like I am now the adult in the room, so I try to work on bringing people together, and a few others are doing the same. That's how we fight the fascists and xenophobes who seem to be everywhere these days. There was a small group of at least four different nationalities banging pots for Gaza in our tiny town yesterday. When it feels that there is not enough community I will come up with some way to create it through common activities. Two or three people meeting and doing something together is a success!
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Bread. I bake sourdough bread because the local bread sucks. Some people buy it from me and enjoy it very much, and that makes me happy.
That said I am often nearly succumbing to all the doom out there. There have been days in the last few months when I was really not wanting to live anymore. I then return to one of the points above and carry on, and the doom passes. I'll keep doing that, sometimes out of spite, till I'm booted out of this place or this life.
All of the points I wrote down connect with caring for human and non-human life (even the sourdough is a friend!). One more point I should add is ceremony/prayer, which sounds stupid to the average anarchist/atheist, but it has become important to me and connects me to ancestors and landscape. The land is alive and my work is to participate in caring for the land and its inhabitants - a lot of that philosophy is borrowed from native and indigenous people. I'm not caring for others because some god tells me to, but because being a good neighbor to people, plants and animals makes everyone involved more happy.
All I do is purposefully small. No big ambitions that would eat me (been there, done that). Just my tiny self doing my best. Plans and ideas don't have to be - shouldn't be - big and sparkling.
