Thursday! 2-37: Welcome to My Jungle

V2, I37

I’d like to do something different this week and tell you about my plants.

I didn’t have any plants when I started Thursday! and now I have many plants.

For those of you who don’t care about plants and aren’t here for MOAR JIMMIE, that, right there, was most of this week’s newsletter. I don’t have a new poem waiting for you at the end, though you might find something useful if you stick around. I’ll do my best to make you laugh a couple of times.

Let’s go on then. For most of my life, I’ve been a “plant person” in the same way the Grim Reaper is a “people person”. I am who plants speak about in fear late at night in hushed, leafy whispers, afraid I might appear and wither them in their pots. Once, I had a cactus die on me from underwatering, though it’s possible it knew it would never feel the warm breeze of summer on its face again and faded away out of sheer despair.

Over time, and after a dozen or so attempts, I convinced myself that plants and I would never thrive in the same space. That’s where I remained until a couple of years ago, when my boss at work decided I needed to help her take care of her half-dozen office plants. Usually she kept them in her office, but after a couple of them flourished enough to merit bigger pots, she had to move them into the lobby of our trailer where they could get a bit more sun. She asked me if I’d help keep them watered and in the sunlight because she couldn’t always be in the office regularly. I explained to her I was not good with plants, and by “not good”, I meant “deadly like poison gas”. She waved that off and said I’d warm up to it. Honestly, I wasn’t thrilled, but I liked her (we are friends and she is still my boss, albeit on a higher level of the org chart), so I did my best.

To my surprise, the plants didn’t die but thrived. I learned a few things about caring for plants and, more, I built a certain amount of pride in my ability to figure out what they needed to thrive. And they did thrive! When she got promoted to another office, her plants practically walked themselves out the door¹. Except I didn’t have any plants. What was I to do now? Loneliness beset me. Woe betided me. Boredom bedeviled me.

Not long after that, I got a couple of plants of my own — a corn plant and something the tag identified as a bonsai but that looked more like a small ginseng plant. Eh. I wasn’t picky and they looked easy enough to care for. The tags said they liked occasional watering and indirect sunlight. Perfect! I water things occasionally and the window at my desk gets no direct sunlight at all. How could I fail? I brought the plants in, set myself weekly watering reminders, and that was that!

Then came the Wuhan Years².

Within a month, I couldn’t come into the office but once a month. My former boss, who lived nearby, said she’d take care of them for me. I said hello to them when I came in to handle a month’s worth of paperwork in a single day, but it wasn’t the same. They missed me. I could tell. Maybe it was how they spelled “We Miss You, Jimmie” in bits of soil on my desk or how they nipped at me with their cute little sharp leaves when I checked their soil for dryness. You know how plants get

After what felt like 92 years of that particular nonsense, The Powers that Be decided I had loafed long enough and could kind of sort of return to a regular schedule. Hooray! I went back to caring for my plants³ like I had before. Granted, I had a new boss and these were my plants, but I was doing well and so were they. But them something very, very cool happened.

[Wait! Before you go on, why not become one of my rare and precious patrons? You can choose from $2, $5, or $20 a month! ]

My new boss, who is a BIG PLANT GUY⁴, noticed my plants and got very excited! Maybe I too was a BIG PLANT GUY⁵! I was not, but I’d been getting some crazy aspirations, and you can do a lot with crazy aspirations, right? We talked for a bit and that’s when he offered me the BIG PLANT HOOKUP.

OH, did he hook me up. His personal plant jungle is formidable and lovely and we had our talk at just the right time for him to bring me a few cuttings he had already started. And he promised me more. Much more. As much as I could handle! Right now, I’m up to 11 plants in the office and 4 at home, with plans for more in the near future.

So what happened between then and now? Why am I excited about the green and growing things around me when before the thought of getting a plant filled me with a low-grade sense of pre-failure? I don’t exactly know. No single thing clicked in my head and I certainly didn’t pick up some new superpower. I think what caught me was the slow creep of expectations.

See, before, I expected that if I got a plant, I’d kill it. My expectations changed my behavior, which created the result I expected. I would forget to water the plant, not because I was inept but because I’d always find something else to do. I’d see a plant not doing well and simply give up. Wasn’t that always what happened? That changed when I helped take care of my bosses plants and learned I could have success. I also learned that I could research any problems I came across and try out different answers until I hit on the one that worked. I wasn’t bad with plants; I didn’t know what I was doing and had convinced myself that caring for plants was purely talent and gift, not skill.

Now. Doesn’t that sound a bit familiar? It did to me when I thought about writing this essay a couple of days ago. It reminded me of the years I convinced myself I couldn’t write poetry because [insert crappy reasons here]. It reminded me of conversations I’ve had with some of you about how much you’d like to try your hand as some creative endeavor but you’re convinced your failure would light the sky like the Beacons of Gondor. It reminded me that we humans love to create reasons not to try new things out of safety reasons — not physical but emotional. I couldn’t care for plants because I just couldn’t and besides what if I tried and failed and then more dead plants? Obviously, that was the plain truth and no use going back over it.

Except there were reasons. The plain truth wasn’t the plain truth. I have plants now. I like having plants. They bring me joy. They give me a little rush of accomplishment when I see my Swiss Cheese plant has pushed out a new leaf or my oldest Mother of Thousands has curved a little closer toward the sunlight. I’m excited for the new roots growing from the pothos cuttings I have in a little container of water because soon I’ll be able to put them in soil and they’ll grow bushy and wide. I’m eager to get a couple more new cuttings so I can get them started, too. I’m excited at the prospect of sharing the cuttings from my plants like my boss has shared from his.

And I’m excited to know something new.

Going from no plants to many plants has taught me quite a few things, as it turns out. Sure, I’ve learned more about plants and how to care for them but I’ve also learned about myself. For instance, I’ve learned that I’m not inherently deadly to plants. More to our purposes this week, I’ve learned that I’m not as inept at I thought I was with plants. I was wrong about myself and, thanks to that slow creep of expectations, if I was wrong about that, where else might I be wrong?

See where I’m going? If I can transform myself from a guy who kills all plants to a guy who raises many healthy plants, then perhaps I can be the guy who writes great poems and the guy who writes cool stories. Maybe I can be the guy who teaches other people how to write poems and stories. Maybe — and this is flat-out crazy — I can be the guy who becomes one of the very best poets in his state or his region or…the whole country?⁶ I think, today, those maybes are closer to reality than they were before because of the little shots of confidence my new little jungle has given me.

I bet you could leverage something new into confidence about that other creative thing in your life too, couldn’t you? There’s no guarantee that success in one thing will lead to success in another thing, but isn’t it strange how a little success here grows confidence there? I don’t think you’ll lose very much by trying. Maybe you don’t get into plants. Maybe you try your hand at a clever limerick or a drawing or you break out that musical instrument you laid aside “for now”. Maybe you surprise yourself a little. Maybe you do something fun and instructive and your creative brain wakes up a little more and jumps up and down a couple times.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. But why not give it a try?

I guarantee nothing except that, after you’ve tried, you will have another story to tell. That’s not a bad thing, is it? Nope. It is not.

Oh, and feel free to ask me about my plants. I’m that guy now.

My office is a triple-wide “manufactured building” we were supposed to use for 4 or 5 years while my Department finally built us a new building. That was 7 1/2 years ago.

1. But not actually. That would have been weird as most of them have short leaves and no vines at all to use as legs.

2. Dun dun DUNNNNN!

3. Which have no names, by the way. I figure if they have names, they’ll tell me and they haven’t yet so they probably identify themselves with clouds of plant pheronomes or spores or an intricate dance of leaves in the passing air-conditioned breeze.

4. He is big into plants. He is not a giant man. Just so we’re clear.

5. Same, but for me.

6. Okay. That last part was crazy…or was it? *shiftyeyesgif*