Last week, I published a blog post entitled, ”Good Energy” on Faster Than 20. I try to reconcile what’s going on in this country with what I’ve been doing professionally the past few years. I tie it all together by describing my volunteer work doing habitat restoration at Skyline Gardens in the Berkeley hills.
It’s long and very personal. I thought about posting it here instead, but it felt important to share on my work website. My work is ultimately about social impact, and I want my professional community to know what I’m thinking about, what I’m doing about it, and why.
It’s my first post there since 2021, a record gap. Traditionally, my blog has been a place where I think out loud. Over the past four years, I continued to reflect in my private journal, but for a variety of reasons, I didn’t feel like being “public.” Some of it was feeling like the world is too noisy right now and wanting to shut out that noise so that I could stew in my own thoughts. Some of it was feeling like the Internet is not a safe place right now. Most of it was just not having the energy to write coherently.
When I started this essay, I felt like I had forgotten how to write. Writing has always been a tortuous experience for me, full of dread and self-loathing. I always felt like I had the muscles to do the work, it just was that the task was heavy and hard. This time around, I felt like I didn’t have the muscles. It was an interesting process trying to rebuild these at the same time as I was trying to use them.
The piece is called, “Good Energy,” but I might have more accurately titled it, “Try to Make the Bad Energy Good,” because that is what it felt like I was doing. Several friends reached out after reading the piece, and in our ensuing conversations, it felt like we were repeating that process together. Times are hard. It’s human to be feeling bad energy, but it doesn’t serve us, and the muscles required to shift that energy are as important as any of the other muscles I mentioned in the post. The most unexpected gift of writing this is that it’s continuing to help me exercise these muscles. Hopefully it helps others too.
I want to mention two folks who didn’t quite make it into the piece. The first is Kathy Kramer, the founder of Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour here in the East Bay. Everybody interested in native plants in the East Bay (and undoubtedly beyond) knows Kathy, because she has been a force for the past 30 years. The tour was an invaluable resource for me when I was just starting to learn, and it was where I first came across Glen Schneider. Kathy also organized the walk that Glen led, which set me down my Skyline Gardens path. Her impact has been stunning, and in many ways, she is a classic case study in not skipping steps, which I talk about in my post.
The first time I met Kathy, she welcomed me warmly and took time to get to know me. At subsequent events, she always went out of her way to say hello, even when surrounded by a crowd of others. When you are in a roomful of strangers, and you don’t feel like you belong, and someone important in the community comes up to you and greets you as if you were an old friend, it means something. It also makes you want to get more involved. It is no wonder that Kathy has been such a catalyzer in this community for so long.
The second is my friend, Joe Mathews. Joe is a long-time journalist and a leading scholar in democracy. He was our storyteller for the Delta Dialogues, which I mentioned in the piece. Yesterday, after a conversation with another friend, I went searching for something in my archives, and I inadvertently came across a column that Joe had written earlier this year during the Eaton wildfires in Southern California.
It’s a beautiful, harsh piece, more raw emotionally than I’m used to in Joe’s writings. It felt very much in line with what I’ve been feeling for a long time now and some of what I was trying to express in my post. He talks about the writer, Zane Grey, who lived in Altadena and whose lifestyle had not quite aligned with his exhortations:
In his hypocrisy and self-centeredness, Grey was like today’s prosperous Californians—moralizing to the world about living responsibly and respecting nature and seeking justice, while denying themselves nothing, and certainly not a nice hillside home with a view.
When our friends’ homes burn up, or slide down the hill, we tell ourselves that this is the price we must occasionally pay, the hardship we must temporarily endure, for all the beauty and bounty of everyday life. And in this age of climate change, we make resolutions—to retreat from the fire, to be more responsible, to live differently, to accept limits.
But do we really intend to keep any of our promises? Do we really believe ourselves?
We know the honest answer. But we never dare say it out loud.
Except when we gaze at the homes and businesses burned in Altadena. Or watch a row of billionaires’ beach homes burn on TV. Or drive down Mariposa in Altadena and find that the Eaton fire has destroyed the Zane Grey Estate, a well-preserved architectural treasure.
Then, only then, do we blurt out the truth.
“Unbelievable,” we say.
Of course, it’s not the scenes of destruction that are unbelievable.
We are unbelievable.
…
As Jim Lassiter, the main character in Grey’s greatest novel, Riders of the Purple Sage, says: “You dream or you’re driven mad.”
But we can only defend ourselves with dreams for so long. Eventually, the nightmares awaken us.
Maybe you’ll think I’ve been driven mad, but I believe the biggest nightmares, the disasters that shake us, are not a California curse.
Rather, they might be our state’s greatest gift. Because they rouse us from the distractions of our dreams. They make us look away from the arresting beauty of this place, and compel us to see one another, and even talk to our neighbors.
When we awake to the nightmare, we are at our most connected. We are at our most generous and human. We consider reality head-on and make new plans. We are, however fleetingly, believable.
