One would think my skill in recognizing the rabbit hole of angst and shame would be razor-sharp by now, but I still didn’t make the connection between my sudden and surprising loss of compassion and the battle flag running up the pole. A talented female friend posted a link in a closed network, asking for support from the members for one her projects. The first sentence of her message was an apology. It was no less than the fifth self-promotion apology I’ve seen from a female friend in the last seven days.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, really?! Why do we apologize for requesting support and attention in our professional/creative/athletic endeavors?

I should be posting my links and asking for referrals, but I don’t, because I don’t want to look like a stuck-up bitch, but I also refuse to apologize, and fuck if I know how to construct a marketing message that strikes that delicate balance.

Somehow I still managed to be surprised when I woke up this morning and served myself a steaming mug of doubt, failure, and shame. Purchasing new batteries for my mouse without outside financing is a major, orchestrated event right now, and my financial worth is facing a sharp decrease before I can even fathom another upswing in income.

Much of that is no one’s fault. The economy is improving at an excruciatingly slow pace. Start-ups, solopreneurs, service providers and small businesses- my market- are struggling to pay their own rent. They don’t have a need for the recurring accounting work that I anticipated would sustain me while I developed my client base; there’s no money to count, much less to pay for the counting.

Much of it is my own fault. I’m an accountant, I’m a writer, I’m a business owner. Things I am not: extroverted, a salesperson, a marketer, a business development manager. The learning curve, the dues-paying, the crippling lack of familiarity or comfort- it paralyzes me. I know who I am, and I know I’m skilled and talented in both of my fields, but you probably don’t, and that’s my fault.

It’s your fault, too.

When I declared my freedom from the whims of old, fat, balding white men that can no longer tell you what a gallon of milk costs or remember the sickening nausea of floating a check before payday, you cheered me on, and I was grateful and emboldened.

Where are you now?

I live in an entrepreneurial community, which as far as I can tell, means that financially secure baby boomers and aimless trustafarians spout platitudes and retweet each other endlessly. There are no referrals, there is no real encouragement or collaboration, there are cliques and cliches and pet projects. My local encouragement and support, ironically, comes from those who’ve relegated themselves to salaries and cubicials, not from the business leaders of Asheville. Most of those leaders aren’t interested in mentoring me because there’s no immediate payoff for them, like the real estate mogel who informed me that he does business with people who use his services first. He owns several properties and a business services firm. I own an iPad and a ten-key.

If you’ve ever inquired, “why don’t you have a publisher? why don’t you get paid to write?”, the answer is simple. You haven’t liked this page on Facebook, you don’t retweet my posts, you don’t comment here and share these words with your networks. A few of you fall over yourselves praising my talent, but can’t be bothered to answer questions via email to help me understand what’s marketable about my writing. Oh, except for the guy who answered immediately to shame me for not wanting to sell a book about my failed marriage or stormy childhood. Maybe some of you prefer me small and cold, I guess.

Perhaps you know me on a deeper, more intimate level, and you’ve helped to the point of resentment. Maybe you know that your approval matters to me, and you’ve wielded that sacred trust to talk to me about looking for work, or getting a job, or you’ve referred to my very real corporation as a hobby, or little project. Bonus points if you’ve availed yourself of my extra time when business is slow. Since you’re available….

Those are solidly half of the reasons why women apologize for self-promoting, and why I’ve cried all damn day.

I’m working on the other half.

Daily living all too easily takes on the feeling of a extended intermission before the elusive third act. We seek, we strive, we taste victory and defeat, but at three in the morning we wonder when we’ll finally be able to rest, when we’ll finally see the plot resolution unfold before us. Uncertainty about the future is responsible for more insomnia than all the coffee beans in Columbia.

No one knows what the garden will look like this year, and we’re all frantic to see what’s been percolating beneath the ground while we’ve been stewing beneath the blankets. But the soil is still cold, and so is the wind, and it’s way too early to imagine exactly what we’ll be watering in our flip flops this summer.

It’s so easy to forget that winter and spring have been around ages before us and will last long after we’ve done our time. We worry and wonder and wring our hands, and the garden comes back every year, and it’s never quite as we imagined it, but it’s almost always better in some way we never thought to wish for.

Perhaps we just need a reminder. A warm breeze carrying the smell of sweetened soil, an afternoon that finds your sweater cast aside, the first new leaves beginning their eternal lime green march up the ridges. An ancient cellular call stirred by light, warmth and dogwood blossoms.

Hope springs eternal, my darlings, and spring is coming.

Only pollen with enough genetic variety to produce healthy offspring will result in reproduction, which is why most plants require cross-pollination. Fruit borne of their own pollen alone would produce weak stock, vulnerable to blight and sterility, so a molecular defense exists to encourage only successful genetic combinations.

At breakfast the other morning, Wendy pointed out a forsythia bush on the edge of the parking lot. It was covered in half-open blossoms, spent before they could unfurl. I wept for it later, the poor sweet thing, doing its humble best to send fairy dust into the world, expending all that effort and energy desperately pushing flowers into a dormant, barren landscape. Tricked by unseasonably warm temperatures into performing for empty rows of hard metal seats, with nary a honeybee to carry its whisper, and only silence on its carpels.

Nature, for all her exquisite wisdom, delivers such cruelly objective consequences for her creatures’ timing errors. When the blooms open at just the right time, a pollinator that favors that plant and its best genetic crosses will visit just long enough to dance the timeless waltz of creation on its petals, leaving dreams and carrying wishes away on their furry legs and antennae.

The promise of fruit is made that very moment; if the plant is given enough sunshine, water and fresh air but is left otherwise undisturbed, the next generation will push forth from the stems, sent from deep within the all roots and veins, cell by cell, to make new life in the soil below.

The forsythia will most surely find itself frostbitten, frozen over, flowers encased in a coat of icy shards that will cut them to shreds upon thawing, leaving a pile of rotted mush to seep into its roots, inevitably restarting the cycle of life, birth and hope under the ground. Another chance to get it right.

My heart ached to impart some comfort, to reassure it that the secret workings of the universe are as impersonal as gravity: when the season and conditions are right the magical becomes the inevitable, the soil is richened for its failed effort, time and wisdom produce fruit sweetened by experience and patience. Gratitude for its timely reminder seeped from the marrow of my stiff and tired hips: buds and berries set on their own time, in their own way, thriving on a lack of human interference in the magic of nature.

It will have learn on its own the difference between January and March, and the futility of blooming at the first signs of warmth instead of having enough faith to wait for spring, that opening is just a start. In its struggle, it will discover that the beauty of its blossoms are just a vessel for its essence, which lays in wait for that familiar ancient whisper to awaken it to fruition.

I smiled as I wiped the tears from my cheeks, though, because I know the joy of mastering those lessons: an entire existence dripping with life and sustenance from every stem and branch, with roots enough to anchor and nourish, and wishes given flight on the wings of bees.

Are you okay? I know this was a hard day for you, do you want to talk a little? I’d like to know how you’re doing.

We had just executed a mass-layoff in my office, including most of my staff, and my knowledge of this impending doom preceded theirs by a little over a month. I had cried at the prep meeting, while terminating my Payables clerk, and with some coworkers after they were handed their pink slips. I cried all damn day, and only worried a little about my professional reputation.

I’m okay. I meant what I said earlier- this is the right thing for the business, it’s the right thing for those of us who remain- but that doesn’t make it any easier. I know that I’ve been able to look back on my darkest days six weeks, six months, six years down the road and I’ve had the solace of realizing that if I hadn’t faced that hardship, I wouldn’t be right here, and that’s always been a source of comfort to me. To be able to say of the hardest things that they helped make the best things in my life. I’m sad tonight for the people we let go, but more than anything, I just hope that they can look back later on and see that this ending was the beginning of something better.

A relieved smile spread from his eyes to his cheeks, and we chatted for a few minutes before someone cut in and I excused myself.

A few days shy of my thirty-second birthday, I still believe that. I can’t defend it, I can barely explain it, the best hope I have is to point to nature and say it is evidence to me of a higher order that we have not yet grasped in our knowledge of the universe.

If faith is an innate knowing, then this is mine, and I understand it in my bones.

I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, and I don’t know why some lives end so early or so unexpectedly. I understand that people hurt people because they hurt, but I don’t understand the cosmic value in so much pain. Perhaps there isn’t any at all, and I only seek to ascribe it some value to make peace with it somehow.

Since my earliest years of awareness, I’ve been called an old soul. Certainly, I’ve had a few encounters with strangers that were more recognition than introduction, and have always read between the lines without really realizing it. What that means is beyond any of us to understand, and I won’t do it the injustice of pinning it down. Those kinds of things are still magical to those of us that want to see them, and I suppose my biggest question for my coincidence and science friends is, simply:

Why wouldn’t you want to think that things happen for a reason, even if we don’t understand how or why?

I’m incredibly suspicious of anyone who doesn’t believe in something, one thing, anything that they can’t see.

Last night, I sat in the kitchen nook. The steam from my soup kissed my cheeks, and the faint smell of woodsmoke sat in the back of my throat. My thoughts drifted to my upcoming birthday and the annual reconciling of reality against my visions and dreams.

As always, my life looks nothing like what I ever imagined for myself. The people and experiences that filled the gap between my dreams and my defeats are both precious and priceless in their own right, and I choose to believe that they put me right here, right now, with this particular perspective. Any variation on my history would not have produced this moment, with these people, and my capacity to appreciate them.

You can argue with that all you want to, and I would relish the discussion.

What you can’t argue with is the sense of recognition and belonging that strikes deep and true, past my neurotic brain and my poor schizophrenic heart, straight into the marrow. It produces a warm calmness that whispers above all the noise of doubt and fear.

You belong here.

They’re hanging in there, even sprouting a new leaf or two every so often. The house is far too dark to coax blooms out of much anything, save a Christmas cactus and my grandma’s African violet. Still, I am amazed that the magic didn’t run out when I stole them from the ground. I water them a few times a week, and every time, I rotate the dish roughly ninety degrees to keep the growth even.

Plants turn towards the light. This phenomenon is called tropism, from the Greek trope; to turn. It actually occurs on a cellular level; growth hormone floods the dark cells of the plant and elongates them. The shaded side of the plant grows faster and pulls the stems and leaves towards the light.

At the very base of its existence, the plant understands that it is fueled by the sun. It seeks that nourishment shamelessly and instinctively, stretching and turning towards a better life and a better view.

Which is why I find it startlingly amusing that we are considered the intelligent life form.

Even the most shade-tolerant people need light to live and grow, but we take the gift of free will and use it to wire our branches into the darkness. The human brain hates an unsolved puzzle; we stare at the ceiling in the pre-dawn twilight and work emotional rubix cubes, twisting and shifting and thinking, hating the damn thing but unable to throw it out or give it away. We writhe and stir with regret, doubt, shame, hurt and confusion.

For some it is a dangerous cycle of destruction- they began to seek darkness and shun light. So shamed by a lack of blooms that they forsake the one thing that would correct the fault.

The rest of us just forget to let our shadows fall behind us and unfurl our leaves in the sunshine. We need a periodic reminder to commit our time, energy and effort to the people, experiences and places that bring us joy, inspiration and contentment.

Consider this yours.

Turn towards the light.

When spring came back around, I planted calla lilies, lily of the valley and some of Brit’s gladiolas around the stumps, almost not believing they would come up for me. Instead, I concentrated on my vision for all of the front beds and made a list of things to transplant, move and buy. Until another plant in my garden failed to thrive, and that death brought the sharp edges and raw spots, and I found myself swallowed by a relentless emotional rip current. All the will and strength within me was expended merely surviving the pain and trauma of being continually slammed into rocks wedged just under the water’s surface.

Coming home from Vegas to find the broad, speckled leaves of those calla bulbs unfurling was at once both shocking and reassuring. My squeals of delight and peals of laughter were as much a reaction to my experience at BiSC as the appearance of these bulbs I spent two months doubting.

Of course they’re coming up! Because everything is magical! Because I am magical! Because life is magical! Why does it take a weekend in Vegas with my incredible biscuits to remind me: all the things! They are magical! How silly I was to be sad and small and doubt the magic!

Indeed, my front beds are teeming with life, lush and green, a palatable current of energy creeping up around my foundation. Now that the high of magic! has receded just a little, I’m craving some order. There are tall things in front and bare spots in the back. My flag iris need to be divided. There’s a hosta in the middle of them, vying for its share of the afternoon sunlight. The bed in front of the laundry room is a schizophrenic tangle of wild strawberry, dill and what appears to be oregano- ghosts of an herb garden attempt some years ago.

Before I can fetch my gloves and trowel, the inertia of hesitation overcomes me.

The schizophrenic herb bed is also home to a pretty blue native Asiatic dayflower that only blooms for a single day, usually in mid-June. If I clear out the wild strawberry and out of control dill, I risk losing that wildflower. My English ivy crawls up the porch and through the windows into the basement; it really belongs out on the hill in the backyard where it can run unfettered, but it has entwined with a wild rose that I would surely mourn for years. The lily of the valley are still just seedlings, and while I know there are some clover and dandelions hiding among them, I fear pulling the wrong thing or disturbing still-fragile root systems. The bulbs in the right bed need to be divided and moved from the front edge to the back edge, but my native pitcher plants are buried in the center of the clump, and somewhere towards the back, a tigerlily stem with four tight green buds soars above the iris leaves.

My flower beds have become a philosophical dilemma. I can take complete control of what grows there, unmercifully putting plants into their respective places, ruthlessly pulling up anything that looks like it might be undesirable. It would take all of an afternoon, and I might lose some native wildflowers, or even the lily of the valley I so mindfully planted there, but there would be order, depth, design. Plants, much like people, are replaceable.

I could just as easily learn to love the chaos and leave the magic undisturbed to see if I’m fond of what blossoms. That would require me to surrender, to loosen my hyper-vigilance over what unpleasant surprises might spring up mid-summer. Retiring my vision for that patch of land and being satisfied with what grows and dies there.

How long can I wait before my inertia becomes my decision?

What is just a very flat spot in the dirt around some old juniper stumps will burst forth from the ground. Sprout pretty green leaves and sturdy, waxy blooms that will return every year when the wind turns warm and carries the smell of summer sweetened grass. Despite the care I took in measuring the depth of their homes and tenderly covering them up, I found myself doubtful. I realized that I was struggling to believe that I had given them what they needed, that they would do what I wanted them to.

It isn’t a wholly unreasonable position. They are living things, and all living things are subject to failure, death and fruitlessness. Still, why bother to so mindfully plant them only to doubt their ability to survive?

Because if I don’t expect them to come up, it won’t hurt as badly if they don’t.

Except: that is a total big fat fucking lie. There’s an eighty five percent chance of tears if I don’t have calla lilies and lily of the valley in my front beds this summer, and a one hundred and ten percent chance of foot stomp. This little game I play about managing my expectations will only fuel daily inspections and frequent hand-wringing. I’ll tell myself that my hypervigilance offers me some security, which is the biggest fattest fucking lie there ever was, forever.

Looking at my friends and family sitting around the table later that night, I saw loving eyes and sweet faces, but I also saw gardeners, tenderly planted bulbs, and rocks. We are our own gardeners, we are each other’s rocks, and if our plantings don’t burst forth in bloom, we will still have each other. Most bulbs do sprout, though, and ours are more likely to bloom than to fail. Isn’t that the knowledge behind our willingness to so carefully plant them?

Happiness is a damn precarious state to live in if you’re unaccustomed.  A combination of justified realism and the lowest tolerance for uncertainty known to the species propel me to look for the ending, the fall, the hook, the catch.   It’s always interesting and a little surprising to find out who among one’s social circles is threatened or embittered by one’s rise to grace, and I was more than a little disgusted to find myself on the list. I am seemingly incapable of declaring my happiness without the obligatory <cue anvil> disclaimer.

I think that’s why I’ve been so angry with the last few people to cross me; they are the safe, external personifications of my own self-destructive thought patterns. Hating them is easier than hating the parts of myself that do their work while they skip merrily along with their lives. It’s also much lighter work than letting go of their tired refrain.

As it turns out, I am not all that demanding, and my expectations are more than reasonable compared to what I have to offer. I am as deserving of love and happiness as anyone else is in this world, and my joy only causes pain for those who cannot face their own demons. There isn’t any reason to be suspicious or superstitious, because the only difference between something that works and something that doesn’t is the intention and the effort behind it. There isn’t some kind of cosmic logic that conspires to take from me what I choose to believe in.

There are only people who are too closed up, bitter and lazy to invest of themselves- the very same people that have that stale belief that love springs from some finite source- that what is given cannot be replenished. Which is quite possibly the worst way to live and love.

Somewhere between fielding snarky comments from miserable people, encouraging my sister to take her own risks and uphold her own standards, and stretching my zen muscles in various airports, it became very clear to me, once again, that we find what we seek in this world. Love, hate, success, failure, betrayal- it is all there for the taking, and we choose what seeds we nurture.

The final straw, though, was fielding a friendly yet earnest death threat.

“If you break his heart…”

That small, simple reminder that I have as much control and responsibility as anyone else, the realization that giving in to my fear and guilt is endangering him as much as it endangers me, the undeniable truth that you steer towards what you concentrate on, gave me the courage to starve the seeds of fear and nurture hope.

I hadn’t truly considered that I might not be the only person to be vulnerable and end up hurt; my concern was looking like a fucking idiot for believing in yet another emotionally unavailable zombie who only knows that old dance of seducing and withdrawing. There is a special place in hell for men who do this and are also charming enough to manipulate women into thinking that they are requiring too much in exchange for their affection and attention.

I hadn’t truly considered that I was accepting unacceptable behavior from frenemies because I viewed it as a penance to be paid in exchange for the incredible joy that this man has brought to my life. The hatred, jealousy and denigration put just enough of a tarnish on my unadulterated bliss to make it seem possible, attainable. My poor little heart couldn’t just soak up all that light without what I had been so sadly trained to believe was enough requisite darkness to keep my universe in balance.

So there it is. I’m happy. I’m involved in something worth believing in, with someone who is more than I ever hoped to find. Frankly, I find myself wishing there were new words to use, because I never would have used most of them to describe anything or anyone else if I had known this first.

I’m finally getting what I deserve, and I welcome the responsibility to deserve what I’m getting. That means weeding fear, bitterness and failure from my heart’s garden.

If you’re getting the cold shoulder from me, maybe you should ask yourself: how does your garden grow?

My darling, my sweetheart
I am in your sway
To cold climes comes springtime
So let me hear you say

My love:
I am going to stand my ground
They rise to me and I’ll blow them down
I am going to stand my ground
They rise to me and I’ll blow them down

- decemberists “rise to me”

In the coming years, I would learn about soil quality and amendment. Which is a very delicate way of saying I went looking for dead stuff to rot in a chicken wire cage on the hill. Fevered with images of lush herbs and juicy tomatoes, I eyed the dairy fields along the river with hunger. That is, in case you were wondering, the true sign of a gardener: one who is willing to pay money for cow shit.

We develop the capacity to see beautiful flowers and enviable vegetables in a pile of compost. The more varied and disgusting the contents, the richer the resulting compost will be, and we see the effect of yesterday’s coffee grounds in the brightness of azalea blooms.

If only it were so easy to take the advice of Buddhist monks and internalize this wisdom; to see fear and pain as the compost that feeds the blossoms of love and happiness. Curing emotional compost is slightly more complicated than keeping a pitchfork and a hose at the ready. It requires more compassion than I can muster some times, which in turn spurs shame. I harbor anger for people that hurt me, and then turn that rage inward at my loss of control. I’m complicated like that.

Earlier in the week, a rage and shame bender found me driving a little too fast down the Appalachian Highway. I stopped in Sylva, at a Chinese place tucked into a strip mall. The sign said they closed at 930p, my clock read 855p. Desperate for some egg drop soup and tempura fried chicken smothered in some sickly sweet sauce, I poked my head in the door. The manager explained in a torturous display of the English language that they closed at 9pm, but that I was welcome to sit down. So I did, and I drank two glasses of sweet tea with my egg drop soup and lemon chicken while they mopped the floors and wiped down the booths. The guy who brought my meal to my table held loving-kindness in his gaze.

Don’t hurry. We still have to clean. Take your time and enjoy it.

So I did, and I felt better as I left a sizable tip and got back in the car.

I thought the whole way home about how to turn my compost into pretty flowers, about my failure to find compassion for those who have trespassed against me, particularly the betrayal of dishonesty- the deadliest sin as far as I’m concerned. Logically, I understand they are lying to themselves and I just happen to get in the way, but that does very little to soothe my hurt and rage.

The darkness was edging in on me, and as usual, I had no idea how to hold my ground against it. I braced myself to drown again, gasping in a futile attempt to save enough breath until I could break the surface of my sea of grief.

I didn’t drown, though. That familiar heaviness, that awful sinking evaporated, and I felt myself floating on top of the waves, drifting towards the shore, towards the light shining there.

That night, I learned how one finds the compost in their flowers and the flowers in their compost. That rotting pile of trash is sweetened through the rains of acceptance and compassion and the warmth of affection, gently and mindfully scattered on a patch of fertile ground, and gazed upon with loving eyes.

I just needed someone willing to put their hands in the soil.

The garden is a god awful mess. Rotten veggies hiding beneath a sea of weeds, some of which are taller than me. Whole cabbages rolling around in the depths of it, paths hidden by weeds and grass and marigolds gone wild. The corn didn’t even send out ears, it stunted and turned brown and died.

I want to plant berries and garlic this fall. To do that, I have to rehab the garden. To do that, I have to figure out how to get it plowed, or alternately, till it 4000 times. To do that, I have to get it somewhat cleared out. To do that, I have to weedwack or mow it. Which is hard to do when your lawnmower is broken and the guy who has the part and knows what to do has no phone. This guy is really sweet, but I am really, really frustrated with how long all of this has taken. Plus I’m scared of the weedwacker. The ex never used it without promptly angering a yellowjacket nest.

My poor cellular signal repeater landed in Utah today, so hopefully they will send out a good one, with the directional antenna they promised, and hopefully it won’t take a week and a half to get here, and hopefully my friend’s boyfriend will be more on the ball than the lawnmower guy. Because I miss you. Badly. Oh, and taking an online college class when you can’t get online at home? Difficult. Awkward.

My wedding dress is still hanging on the back of my office door. I refuse to bring it back in the house. I just won’t. What on Earth I’ll do with it, I don’t know. I’m seriously considering taking it to Goodwill. I can’t afford to have it cleaned to sell it. No one seems to want to buy it anyway. Let someone who might not have had a proper wedding dress without Goodwill wear it down the aisle. We’ll all just hope that her story has a better ending than mine.

There are good things, and good news, and just general goodness, like the package that someone sent me- full of love and gummy worms and notecards and little things that mean as much as the big things, because you know that you’re loved and thought of and it makes you cry when you didn’t even feel like you were going to cry, but you’re headed to Belk to sell your wedding ring, and you’re thinking about how good it felt to have someone in this world, even though it turned out that you really didn’t have someone, probably ever, but only thought you did, but still, denial was an okay place to live for awhile, and you didn’t eat dinner alone. So you open your mailbox, and her pretty handwriting is staring back at you, and you burst into tears, because it occurs to you that you have a lot of people in the this world, even if you have no one to eat dinner with.

I’m really fearful that if I don’t have a yard I’m not ashamed of and a working internet connection under my roof by the beginning of next week? I’ll be writing the three part series on girls who make me crazy from the looney bin.