Finding the courage to change

A turning toward

Yesterday, I attended a networking meeting through an organization called Business Networking International (BNI). I was invited by a friend from tango, and I was truly grateful for the invitation. I’m out of work and lacking an income, and it’s scary. Also, my unemployment benefits just ran out. I haven’t even fathomed quite what that’s going to do to my situation, but it can’t be good.

Every day I tell myself, I can support myself. Of course I can. I always have. Every day, I apply to jobs in my “career.” My career such as it is is being a technology marketing writer. But, do I wake up every morning dying to go to work? I’m afraid I don’t.

I think it’s possible the universe is trying to tell me something.

Yes, I’m a writer. But a tech writer, a business writer? That doesn’t really fit me and never has.

And yet, I cannot say that out loud for obvious reasons. I cannot have a potential employer stumbling onto this post and learning this news.

That would be deadly. It could devastate me.

And yet, I feel I can’t go on this way. I don’t have it in me. I can barely say the words, “I’m a technology marketing writer.” Nothing in me gets behind that statement. In fact, it hurts me.

I went to “church” the other day. I had heard of a church called “Sacred Garden.” I’m not a church-goer. I’m a “lapsed Catholic.” Church has never been my thing. But spirituality is, and nature is. The trees are. The trees were God for my dad too. He lived in Japan for a few years as a young man and embraced Shintoism. He’d sit on the foot of my bed when I was a little girl and tell me that God was in everything. That was his way of communicating his faith.

At church, where my mother dragged us on Sundays, he’d read Robert Ludlum tucked insight his hymnal.

I went to the church because you see I’m obsessed with gardens, and trees. I’ve put a lot of work into creating a garden at my new place, where I’ve transformed a cement pad into a fledgling green space full of trees, vegetables, and California natives. And the bees, butterflies, and birds they draw.

So, when I heard about a Sacred Garden Church, of course I was drawn. I was so excited. I had in my mind’s eye a garden… a sacred garden. To me, that meant, capacious, first of all—big enough to hold a gathering of people. I saw trees on the borders, no fences. No cement. No street. No cars. I had a vision of a fountain in the center, and green leaves growing through cobbles. A soft, green, benevolent world.

After months of receiving emails from the Sacred Garden Church, I committed to go. I went all excited last weekend. I knew it was not far from where I live, in a very urban environment. But, I also know there are magical places hidden behind some of these doors and gates. I know that some folks have surprisingly huge backyards. I know the power that one special tree can cast on a patch of land.

I parked and strode to the address. It was a glass door on Telegraph. Hmm. I pushed open the door to a dark, dingy room with three sad plants in plastic pots at the front of the room. I looked around for the door that would lead to the garden. For surely there was a garden. It didn’t even occur to me there wouldn’t be.

There was no door. I took my seat on a metal folding chair and listened as people spoke. We watched a slide show about the book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, which was very cool. The book had already caught my eye, and I do mean to read it.

Nothing was wrong with the gathering, but I won’t be going back. It appears to be a community dedicated to using plant medicine (i.e., psychedelics) to achieve a union with God or a spiritual practice or as a form of worship. I have no problem with that. My son has long said I need to do mushrooms or LSD, and soon, to get to the next stage of my development, freedom, embrace of self, and I’m sure he’s right. And I will. I think.

But, the “pastor” who spoke was entirely too self-referential for my tastes, and the closing poem read by a participant was at least ten pages long. The whole thing exhausted me.

The point is, it wasn’t a sacred garden. It wasn’t even a paltry garden. It was just a room, and not a very nice one, on a dingy part of a fairly dingy street.

What was I expecting? It’s a bit funny that I expected something like heaven.

It’s a metaphor. The sacred garden is the garden within, the garden of God. That sort of thing. I can get my head around that.

But, I was sad. It felt sad to me that people felt they needed to do drugs to be in touch with the divine. I already know what it’s like to connect with a tree because it happened to me, and I wasn’t high. I wasn’t even “prepared,” meaning, I wasn’t in any kind of altered state brought on by substances, chanting, meditation, or the like. I. hadn’t earned what happened to me either, through years of spiritual practice.

I was simply walking in the forest near my old house, where I used to walk most days.

I was simply walking down a slope in a grove of redwood trees, when one of those trees reached out and touched me, right on the heart. I know this sounds crazy, but it’s true, and it happened, and I’ve never been more sure of anything. I just felt this immediate connection to the tree. It reached, and it connected to my heart, physically. It was like a humming connection between us, and it felt, well, I was going to say divine. And it did. It just felt like I was seen, and held, and appreciated, and loved.

It’s never happened again, though I’d sure like it to.

And when I think about it too much, or try to write about it here, it slips a little. The ineffability of it turns everything a little foggy or murky. It’s like trying to hold water in your hands.

I went to this networking meeting yesterday morning. I felt weird there. It dawned on me shortly after I arrived that my dad had gone to these meetings, had been part of this organization. It’s a referral network, this BNI organization. I haven’t looked into it yet, into what people say about it. I don’t want to be unkind or cast aspersions.

Let’s just say, I don’t think it’s for me.

I’m sensitive to things like this because my dad was prey to organizations that required payment up front and payment along the way and promised help of all kinds, and the promised assistance never seemed to come my dad’s way.

My dad was a gem, an angel. I revered him and still do. He was the kindest man. Everyone says that.

He was also gullible, and he was taken advantage of my entire childhood. He was always trying to start businesses he knew nothing about, and he got fleeced every time. There was the fake crab business, the trucking company, the goddamned Nikken magnets. There were pyramid schemes of all kinds. It was heartbreaking. I remember coming home from school one day to find my dad slumped at the dining room table he used as a desk, just so depressed. The trucks he’d bought had been abandoned in a ditch in Mexico and stripped. Another “investment” gone south.

My mom was ruthless in her ridicule.

So. The networking meeting. I was wincing. Why? It’s just a group of people trying to help one another. But, at the end, when I heard about the payments, the figures they required to be a member, the hundreds of dollars, at least three sets of them, I blanched. I can’t say I was surprised. I tried to be open-minded, but I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

But the interesting thing that happened at the meeting was, I had to stand up and give my elevator pitch, and I had no conviction in my voice. I couldn’t say, I’m the principal of a B2B tech marketing copywriting company.

It’s true I do that. I’ve been paid to do that work for 20 years. And I’ve been told I’m good. One VP of sales said my white paper was the best he’d ever read.

That’s good. But the work doesn’t feel natural to me.

I need money. But I don’t care about that work.

I’m in the Horticulture program at Merritt College. The other night, a man named Gerry Kippe, who started a software company called PlantMaster, spoke to our class. I was so excited. I wrote down his words. He said being a horticulturalist meant not being able to wait to go to work every day. It meant, you just can’t wait to go to work the next day. You have to go. You can’t wait. You’re so excited.

He said, why become a horticulturalist? He said, to re-connect people with nature. He said, because most people hate their jobs. He said, for peace of mind, contentment. He said, what makes horticulturalists unique? We are a very small number of people (I didn’t know that). He said we exist to make the world more beautiful. To make spaces for humans to relax and recover and get perspective. He said, we do this to be in the wonderful world of plants, where sunlight is turned into energy. He spoke of sacred geometry and endless learning. He spoke of the beautification of blighted urban spaces. He spoke of the urgency of reintroducing Mother Nature to people. He said we’re at the cusp of a revolution, and that we have a role to play. He said, Plant large trees!

He also said the qualities you need to be good at horticulture are curiosity, powers of observation, perseverance, humility, and the ability to have fun.

Every day, I apply to jobs in content marketing. But with ChatGPT 4.o and the other GenAI models on the scene, marketing writing is changing, and fast. I’m being approached by headhunters offering gigs writing for Apple for $30/hour—jobs that paid $300/hour a few years ago.

I know that companies using GenAI to produce their content will quickly find at the very least that they need a good editor so they don’t sound like everyone else. Each company will need to find it’s distinctive voice and tone. But AI can mimic that too, if you feed it, and it’s getting better all the time.

What AI can’t do is tell the story of my life. AI is not living my life. AI didn’t go to the BNI meeting yesterday and have difficult and painful thoughts and memories of its father burble up. AI didn’t and can’t attend a meeting at the Sacred Garden Church and look askance at the dusty corners of the room and be judgmental and disappointed. AI can’t envision what a Sacred Garden Church might or could or should look like. AI can’t walk in a forest and have a redwood tree touch it right on the heart, lightly, deftly, in a way that illuminates and swells the heart with love.

AI can’t do those things. It can’t live a human life.

Lately, I feel like the universe is trying to tell me something.

Of course, my most precious dream and hope, the hope of my entire life, is to be a writer. A writer that writes of life, that extends a hand to others, that can support or vivify or enliven or grace with beauty the world. A person who uses words to live, express, connect, explore, and learn.

What do I want?

I want, I would love, to proclaim at a meeting, BNI or otherwise, what and who I really am.

It’s up to me to figure that out.

And I’m a little late to the party.

I’ve been putting one foot in front of the other for a very long time. For my entire life. Doing what I ought. I allowed myself to be buffeted about. I took whatever work I could get. I landed in tech marketing, and I’m grateful. It allowed me to support my children, and even my ex- who was and is still very sick. It gave us security. It was a good job.

But, I’m 56 now, and I have to ask, when will I begin living my life for me, for myself?

What does that even mean? How dare I be so presumptuous?

Can I gather the courage needed to persevere? Can I make a career change this late in the game?

I asked Gerry that the other night. I said, I’m 56 and I’m pivoting to landscape design, but I can’t do the digging or the hard-core physical work of gardening, not beyond my own garden, anyway. I said, Is there a place for me? He said, Absolutely. He said there is. He said I can do garden design. And plants lists. And that sounds wonderful to me.

And the universe is steering me. My God, I’m in the program at Merritt, and it’s wonderful. I love my classes; I’m rapt. A landscape constructor has reached out to me for help with estimation. I don’t know how to do that yet; I will wrestle with it today.

I need a job, any job, at this point, but maybe I can open my blinders a bit wider and find something that pays the bills without harming me. Something that resonates a little more with my spirit.