Good Energy

In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.

—Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003)

Earlier this year, my partner and I were spending an evening with friends, enjoying a beautiful dinner. We mostly avoided talking about current events, but eventually, one of them asked us how we were grappling with our nation’s turn toward authoritarianism and our federal government's attack on much of what we care about and believe in.

In truth, I was dealing with it by avoiding these conversations when I could. However, I felt that these friends knew me well enough, both personally and professionally, for me to answer without having to explain myself too much. So I told them that I was dealing with it by going to the nearby hills every Sunday and weeding.

My Mom has always been an avid gardener, and she was disappointed that neither my two sisters nor I seemed to take to the practice. I killed many houseplants before giving up on them entirely. They were just too much trouble. As much as I loved being outdoors, I couldn’t tell one tree from the next.

That changed for me during the pandemic lockdown. I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone other than my partner and my younger sister. We ended up spending a lot of time outdoors. And for the first time, I really started paying attention. Truly, actually paying attention.

It started with the birds. I’ve always liked birds, but they were all mostly flying brown blobs to me. One day, my partner decided to fill a birdbath I didn’t even know she had because it had always been hidden by a mass of weeds. The next day, we heard something splashing around in there. That was enough for me to clear the weeds and move the birdbath somewhere visible. The payoff came quickly, and we were rewarded with the sight of a little brown blob taking a bath.

I was bewitched. I sat there and watched. I listened to the water splashing as the sun faded. I noticed that this brown blob was bigger than most brown blobs I had seen. I decided to look up its name. “California Towhee.” The next day, I saw my friend perusing the yard with its mate. “Hello, Towhee,” I greeted it. It ignored me, hopping around, scratching and pecking. Once again, I sat and watched.

Over time, I learned the names of other brown blobs, and I greeted them too. I watched, and I watched. I didn’t have to go out of my way to look for them, because they often were just there. Something started changing in me every time I came across these happy little critters, and I started wondering how I could attract more of them.

It turns out that birds eat bugs. Lots of them. They vastly prefer them to other types of food. The best way to bring more birds to your garden is to attract more bugs. The best way to do that is to grow native plants.

My previous track record with plants had me hesitant about diving in, but I was newly motivated, and I was lucky enough to have the time and the space. I scoured local nurseries and the Internet, trying to soak in everything I could find. I bought one plant at a time, put them in the ground, and did my best to keep them alive.

Miraculously, most of them survived. Native plants are resilient, and they’re already adapted to our local conditions. They don’t need the rigamarole of unnatural watering regimens or soil modifications that traditional gardening requires. I mostly had to stick them in the ground, and most of them did okay.

A few years into the practice, I had started to suspect that my enthusiasm for gardening and native plants was more of a dalliance than a passion. I appreciated everything that gardening had done for me, but I wasn’t sure how much more time I wanted to invest into it. Weeding, in particular, felt like just another maintenance task that I was mostly failing at.

When my partner and I first met, she introduced me to Skyline Gardens in the hills just outside of Berkeley, California. We didn’t know the name of the place at the time. The trail didn’t have a clear marker, and we didn’t know where it ended. We would park on the side of a road and hop a fence to reach it. It quickly became our trail, and we would walk it often.

During the pandemic and my subsequent gardening deep dive, I realized to my delight that there were many beautiful native plants along the trail. I assumed that they had been there all along and that I was noticing them for the first time, but that wasn’t quite true.

Most of the beautiful, “wild” spaces we enjoy are being actively stewarded, whether we realize it or not. Trails need to be cleared, weeds need to be pulled, shrubs and trees need to be pruned. It’s not just about creating lush, accessible, green spaces. It’s also about maintaining safety and balance in the ecosystem, from removing dried foliage from fire-prone areas to creating habitat for endangered pollinators. There’s so much invisible work, it’s easy to take it all for granted.

But Skyline Gardens had other gifts beyond active stewardship. A combination of elevation and terrain and location, location, location has made it the most botanically biodiverse region this side of the San Francisco Bay. As someone who was nature-blind prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to tell if an area were biodiverse or not. It all just looked like a bunch of greenery to me.

Two years ago, while slowly emerging from my nature-blindness, my partner and I were walking through Skyline Gardens on a beautiful Spring day, and we decided to wander off the beaten path. We walked up a series of switchbacks through tangles of waist-high weeds and a grove of eucalyptus trees. We emerged onto a rocky ridge with panoramic views of the Bay, Oakland, San Francisco, even the Golden Gate Bridge. We walked along the ridge, skirting around thickets of coyote brush and silver bush lupine, until we suddenly came upon this high meadow. I then realized that biodiversity can look like a lot more than a bunch of greenery:

Even the most nature-blind person in the world could understand, without explanation, that these fields of colorful splendor were beautiful and exceptional. What I didn’t know was that, a century and a half ago, this was actually the norm for much of California.

California is known as the “Golden State,” which is mostly an allusion to the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. But it might as well be a description of the warm, ochre hues dancing across the hills throughout the state for most of the year. This is the California I grew up with, and in truth, I think it looks beautiful. But those evocative yellows also represent barrenness and destruction. It is the result of invasive grasses, mustards, and thistles that suck up moisture and nutrients, outcompeting everything else in their relentless quest to go to seed and reproduce as quickly and as bountifully as possible. Not only do their shallow roots barely sink any carbon, their short lives make the hills especially fire-prone.

Before colonization and industrial agriculture, much of California looked like what Skyline Gardens looks like now. In the 1880s, the conservationist John Muir described the Central Valley as “one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than four hundred miles, your feet would press more than a hundred flowers at every step.”

I had read Muir’s description years ago, but I had had trouble envisioning what it looked like. Thanks to Skyline Gardens, I no longer had to try to imagine. I could see it for myself a quick 20-minute drive from where I lived.

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a visualizer. I would spend hours as a kid imagining what it might be like when I was older, how I would want to behave, what I would do in different situations. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, not exactly at least. I grew up in a middle class household in beautiful Southern California, where the sun was always shining. Both of my parents were active in our lives, I was close with my two sisters, and I made friends easily.

Still, there was turmoil in my household, secondary trauma from my parents’ experiences growing up in Korea under Japanese oppression, losing close family members during the Korean War, then immigrating to this country without any kind of support system and trying to make do.

My parents had a dream for me and my sisters, and they scratched and clawed and fought to try to make it a reality. They fought with people and institutions that did not necessarily like how they looked or sounded or smelled, folks who did not necessarily want them here, much less to succeed. They also fought with each other and with my sisters and me. Every day, they were tired and stressed and scared. When they didn’t know what else they could do, they yelled and screamed. Sometimes, they went beyond that.

In those times, I tried to find a place where I could be alone and visualize. I often envisioned difficult situations, and I would think through how I would deal with them. In these scenarios, I always figured things out, although not necessarily easily. It was empowering and hopeful, and it not only helped me problem-solve, it made me more resilient.

I first met my mentor, Doug Engelbart, in 1997, when I was in my early 20s and he was in his early 70s. Doug made my little exercises in visioning seem like child’s play. Among the many things I learned from him was that we rarely permit ourselves to truly think big. What was so unique about him was that he wasn’t a dreamer. He was a doer, and his enormous vision was his roadmap.

Doug passed away in 2013, and he was depressed the entire time I knew him. Mental health is a complicated affair, and I don’t want to pretend I fully understood everything that was going on with him. What I did understand was that he had made the fate of humanity his mission in life and work, and he constantly felt like a failure as a result.

His insight, first formulated in the 1950s, was simple. Problems were scaling faster than our ability to solve them. If we were to have any hope of survival, we needed to get smarter together, and fast. He made it his mission, at the ripe old age of 25, to do something about it. He approached the problem practically and systematically, taking his cues from his boyhood experiences growing up in the Oregon countryside during the Great Depression. He had a way of articulating complex ideas simply, using everyday objects to make his points: a brick, a pencil, a mirror, a bicycle.

The focus of everything he envisioned was to make people’s lives better. And yet, his peers almost overwhelmingly rejected his concerns and his vision.

Doug likened our situation to all of us being on a giant, Goldberg-ian contraption that was hurtling toward a steep cliff. He felt like a lone wolf, insistently pointing toward our impending doom, begging others to join him in trying to steer us back to safety. Nobody seemed to see him, much less listen to him. Even worse, many folks perceived the messenger as the bigger threat, and they did their best to marginalize him.

Doug was incredibly stubborn, and he pushed forward despite the opposition. He became most famous for some of the things he invented — graphical user interfaces, hypertext, the mouse — all of which he revealed to the world in 1968 at an event that’s come to be known as The Mother of All Demos. But those of us who were lucky enough to enter his orbit knew him for and were inspired by his all-consuming mission.

I hated that he felt so much despair, given all that he had accomplished and the many, many people he had inspired. In making his mission my own over twenty years ago, I swore that I would not fall into the same trap. I would remember that this could not be my mission alone, that I could not judge my success on the overall state of the world, and that I needed to right-size my expectations. And yet, even before the current shitshow that is masquerading as the United States government, I was failing at this.

In 2012, about ten years into my journey of helping groups collaborate more effectively, I pulled together an all-star team of practitioners to help a group of highly contentious stakeholders come to a shared understanding about one of the most intractable, some would say religious issues in the state of California: How to divvy up our limited supply of water.

We succeeded, but something bothered me about our success. I wasn’t sure how much of it was due to our most sophisticated (and expensive) techniques. Much to my surprise, I also realized that our most basic interventions — ones that we often took for granted — had played a major role. These stakeholders had been more than capable of doing these basic interventions without us, which would have saved them time, heartache, and money. They just needed to realize this and believe it.

I spent months pondering this, reflecting on past work and on other groups I had observed or been a part of. This led to what, in retrospect, seems like a stunningly obvious revelation: High-performing groups do all of the “basic” things well. They regularly check in with each other to get clear about what they are trying to do, how they are trying to do it, and how they are actually doing, so that they could adjust accordingly. They also treated each other like human beings as opposed to automatons or brains-on-sticks.

One of the trademarks of my work up to that point was how inclusive I was. Making stakeholders co-conspirators in both the design and implementation is largely what enabled us to achieve our goals, but it had the added benefit of showing people how to do the work well. It gave them the opportunity to learn by doing, which meant they could succeed in the work well after we left. Or so I thought.

It’s not that people didn’t learn something from our work together. It’s that simply going through the experience once was usually not enough for them to sustain the work on their own. I and my team had muscles that many of our clients did not, and when we went away, things usually reverted to how they were before.

My revelation, obvious or not, felt like a major breakthrough, because it meant that groups didn’t have to acquire world class skills in facilitation or design or strategy or communications to be successful without us. They just had to do the basics well. Helping groups do the basics felt achievable. If I focused on this, I could be much more successful in helping groups in a way that might last.

More importantly, this approach felt scaleable. Democracy requires muscles, not just structures, to succeed. The muscles required to be and work together well at small scales — with our families, our friends, our work teams — are the same muscles required to be and work together well at larger scales — in our organizations, our communities, our country as a whole. Those muscles have severely and collectively atrophied for many reasons and over many years, and it’s resulted in fascism in America today. Re-building these muscles at a small scale not only felt achievable, it felt critical in newly urgent ways.

So I pivoted how I did my work. I’ve been lucky to have found groups willing to let me test and evolve this approach with them, and it’s reinforced my belief in its efficacy. But this feeling of being a failure began to accelerate over the past few years.

I can think of two reasons why. First, if you’re in the business of making the world a better place, and society is going in the wrong direction, it’s hard not to feel bad about it. The problem is placing outsized responsibility on yourself. It is factually incorrect and a little narcissistic to think that any individual — even those with great structural power (which I do not have) — can have such a huge impact on our collective success or failure. I’ll call this the Doug Fallacy and hope that my mentor forgives me. It manifests in all sorts of silly ways among progressives, such as feeling guilty about driving to the convenience store instead of taking public transit or taking your kids to the park and being silly and joyous with them instead of going to a protest.

Second, it’s hard to believe in the power of relentlessly and collectively doing the basics over and over again, especially when the world (or even just your job) feels like a tire fire around you. When you’re on a team, and things have been falling apart for a while now, and you’re struggling to do your job while immersed in toxicity and dysfunction, it’s hard to believe that having regular team checkins over the next year or so will help correct the problems.

Or, if you’re a social justice organization, and your communities are under constant attack, and all of your government grants have been cut because you had the word, “diversity,” on your website, and now you’ve had to let go of a quarter of your staff who were already overworked and burnt out, it’s hard to believe that aligning around priorities and checking in on them regularly over the next year or so will help correct the problems.

I get this, and I’ve tried my best to be empathetic and to meet groups where they are. But I also know that most groups (just like people) are inclined to skip steps and that skipping steps will not lead to success. I think I’m better than most at holding my ground with groups, but I still relent more often than I would like, and the results are predictable. I feel guilty and responsible, and then the Doug Fallacy creeps in again, and the bad feelings start to spiral. These feelings aren’t just bad for my mental health. They’re bad for the work.

Skyline Gardens was founded by Glen Schneider, a retired landscaper. In 2016, while walking the trail, Glen noticed that the local municipal district, which owns the land, was removing a grove of Eucalyptus trees. He knew that when the trees were removed, the land underneath would be newly exposed to sunlight and that invasive plants would quickly take over. So he started to weed. Over time, the municipal district discovered what he was doing, and rather than raise a fuss, they encouraged him.

Skyline Gardens became a sanctioned project. Almost a decade later, dozens of volunteers come there weekly to help restore the land.

Last Spring, I and others were invited to walk the space with Glen. I didn’t know anything about him other than that he had founded the project, but I was anxious to learn as much as I could from him about this place that I loved.

I had low expectations. I had been to other native plant gatherings, and while people were generally pleasant enough, I didn’t feel any affinity toward most of them. People rarely introduced themselves, much less asked about me or my interests, even when there were only a few others around. I felt tolerated, not welcomed, and I got the sneaky feeling that most of these enthusiasts preferred plants to people. Everyone seemed so much older (thought I, a member of the half-century club) and whiter.

This walk felt different from the start. The group was more diverse than I had seen at other gatherings. To my surprise, Glen even kicked things off with introductions!

We started up a fire road to the top of a ridge, giving us gorgeous views of the hillsides below us. Then we made our way down to the trail below — my and my partner’s trail! — before taking a detour up another ridge and ending up at the meadow of purple and yellow and red and orange that my partner and I had stumbled upon one year earlier.

Glen stopped often, sharing stories of the plants and this place. He explained the differences between native bunchgrasses and the invasive annuals that are so pervasive here. He showed us the telltale signs of deer grazing on the tender, green stalks. And he told us his story, how he fell in love with this place and how he set about to save it.

Glen was passionate and practical, and despite his “I’m-just-a-retired-landscaper” demeanor, he knew as much about people and human systems as he did about plants and the land. He spoke casually about his approach to restoration and to wrangling volunteers, but it was clear how much thought was behind them. For example, they only sought volunteers who were willing to make a weekly commitment. The first six weeks were “training” sessions, and if you made it that far, you would get a cool hat. Volunteer sessions began with a discussion about that day’s tasks as well as what people were seeing and learning. The days ended with snacks, a ritual that Glen clearly treasured. He wasn’t recruiting hands. He was building a community.

Similarly, Glen didn’t make a big fuss about his evolving relationship with the municipal district and other agencies, but it was clear that his approach was a huge reason for the project’s success. He not only had positive relationships with the different entities involved, he seemed to be changing them from the outside-in.

“Every system wants good energy,” Glen explained. “When you bring good energy, it flows throughout the system, encouraging others to bring their good energy, and it flushes the bad stuff away.”

Something shifted inside of me when he spoke those words. We stood at the edge of the bright, colorful meadow, listening to Glen share his small, simple formula as we experienced first-hand what it looked like to heal vast swaths of land, despite the odds.

I thought about all of the groups I had been working with, all of the resistance I had been experiencing, all of my failures. I thought about how tired and demoralized I felt by my work and by the previous four pandemic years. I thought about how helpless I felt about what was happening in this country. And yet, when I stood there, when I heard Glen’s stories of how this place became what it was, when I felt his and other people’s good energy, I felt validation and hope.

Skyline Gardens came about because he cared about something so much, he decided to do something about it, however small. And small it was. Keeping even a small patch of land clear of weeds is an arduous task, one that most people (myself included) disliked. There was no way Glen could succeed in his task, even if he could recruit an army of volunteers. It was too big, too hard.

And yet, Glen has succeeded. He has succeeded by being thoughtful and strategic in how he does the work. He has succeeded by bringing others along with him, investing in community, taking time to get to know and develop the knowledge and leadership of those around him. He has succeeded by balancing rest with relentlessness. He has succeeded by not skipping steps. He has succeeded by bringing good energy.

When I got home that evening, my partner asked how the walk went. I told her about the things I experienced, the people I met, the stories Glen told. I told her about what he had said about good energy. Then I started sobbing uncontrollably.

Many years ago, I was getting to know a new colleague over dinner, and he asked me if I had a spiritual practice. “I play basketball every Sunday morning,” I responded.

Last year, after two decades of living in beautiful San Francisco, I moved across the Bay to Oakland. I happened to be nearing my 50th birthday, and I knew that someday soon, my body would force me to find a new “church.” Moving away from my regular game seemed to be a good excuse for me to try something new on my own terms.

I had been dreading this moment for years. No other physical activity brought me the same joy as running around the court, trying to make that silly orange ball go through that round metal hoop. Nothing else allowed me to breathe, to let go of whatever was occupying me, to stay in the moment the way basketball did.

But for the first time, I felt that maybe there was something that could take its place, something that could serve as a weekly physical, mental, and spiritual reset.

One week after my move, I showed up to Skyline Gardens, ready to work. I wasn’t sure at the time if I was in it for the long-haul, but I committed to making it through the six-week training period and getting that coveted hat.

Two weeks in, I was sure.

Time in nature and gardening have well-documented physical and mental health benefits. I’ve known this for a long time, and I’ve always felt the benefits, but I’ve never been able to make either a habit before Skyline Gardens. The quality of the people who volunteer there is a big reason why. There is also something special about the weekly rhythm. When you literally stick your hands in the dirt week after week, you start to notice the little things. You see plants go through different cycles. You hear the Spotted Towhees clicking and the California Quail warbling. The vast array of insects stop being “bugs” and start becoming green sweat bees and stink beetles and checkerspot caterpillars. You start to understand the eating habits and preferences of bunnies and gophers and deer.

Time. Slows. Down. And you slow down with it.

Over time, you start to see the impact of your work. You see seeds that you’ve sown start to grow. You see natives that you didn’t plant start to emerge from areas that you’ve weeded. You start to understand why you should ignore the mustard seedlings while relentlessly pulling the six-week fescue, even though the mustard is right there and would only take you a few seconds to remove it.

These little wins accumulate over time, and they strengthen your faith and your resilience. And if your faith ever waivers, you just have to remember that gorgeous meadow in the Spring, and you feel the good energy surge within you once again.

Faith, it turns out, is also a muscle. I remember why I’m doing my work. I remember what I’m trying to help others do, and how. I remember the importance of vision, but also the dangers of it. I want people to understand that taking time to make small things — however trivial they might seem — builds our muscles, our faith, our resilience. All of these things are what make big visions possible.

Thanks to Eun-Joung Lee, H. Jessica Kim, Travis Kriplean, Kate Wing, Doug Obegi, Jenny Lau, Rebecca Petzel, and Renee Fazzari for helping me crystallize these thoughts over many conversations. And many, many thanks to all of the wonderful volunteers at Skyline Gardens, especially Glen Schneider, Cynthia Adkisson, Margaret Flaherty, and Mary Palafox.