Let’s try to make everything all right
We lost a good one last week, as John Schulz left us for what I hope are greener pastures. If ever anyone has earned more bucolic climes, it was John. His nickname was “John the Plant Man” as he spent his career making the world a more beautiful place through thoughtful landscape designs, bonsai arrangements with his wife, Dekie Hicks, and other beautiful growing things.
Not only did he strive to seed the world more wonderful through planting, he likewise sowed clever, encouraging and soul-soothing words through books and blog that never failed to bring a smile and a sigh of contentment.
When I first met John, many years ago, he was doing these unusual succulent gardens arranged in handmade concrete pots. I bought several from him and still own a few of those pots today, and I remember that his easy enthusiasm for plants was enough to make anyone feel they could sprout a green thumb.
I actually majored in Horticulture in college, but I cannot claim to hold any particular magic when it comes to keeping green things alive, but John sure always made me feel like I could.
Throughout the pandemic John made daily posts on Facebook, with sections titled according to where we were in the “process” — and every single one was designed to make the reader feel good.
His catchphrase was “Everything is going to be all right” and he truly believed and lived those simple words, even to the very end. His last post before he passed was simply that statement, and I remember thinking that its implication didn’t feel the least bit all right to me, but I knew that he would want us to keep our chins up in the belief that it absolutely would.
John was the kind of person who could believe that everything was going to be all right because he spent every waking moment, as far as I could tell, working to make everything good.
It’s kind of hard to believe in good if you are creating bad, and so of course one of the most positively intentional people I know could hold the most positive outlook, even in the hardest of times.
This week I had the opportunity to get a sneak peek at a wonderful film project that my friends Stacie Marshall and Brian Campbell have been working on for the past few years, and it was another spectacular reminder of the potential for good in the world.
I don’t want to give the whole story away, but you may recall that Stacie made the front page of the New York Times last year with the story of her efforts to create some form of reparations with her neighbors after learning that her grandparents owned slaves as she worked to revive their farm.
When Stacie was struggling to nurse her firstborn daughter, her grandfather told her she came by it naturally as many of the women in their family had struggled in the same way. So much so, he told her, that the family purchased a slave woman to nurse their babies, and that she became a real part of their family.
As Stacie cleared her grandparents’ home she found copies of the slave records that showed her ancestors owned 7 slaves in all, two men, the nursing woman named Hester, and Hester’s four children.
Stacie’s desire to figure out a positive response to this history has prompted a wonderful journey for her family and friends who were raised from the slave and sharecropping residents of Chattooga County — including the creation of an organization called Hester’s Heritage Foundation with the purpose of holding their history with both truth and love in hopes of healing.
This intention sure feels like a way that we can try to make everything all right, doesn’t it?
Hope for the healing of wounds that have been born forward from such deep history is exactly the kind of way that we start to repair a broken relationship between races and people of different experiences. I think John would have loved that. Everything’s going to be all right as long as we are each working every day to make it so.
The love that we witnessed on that screen, and on the stage for the discussion that followed, is a true inspiration for hope for the future.
I know, I say it all the time, but the worst thing we can do in this life is allow the talking heads to convince us that we should hate each other for our differences in experience, politics, beliefs, or any other reason.
John saw the good in every person he encountered and made it his mission to put positive and beautiful things into the world every day, so that others might feel hope for beauty even in the darkest and most troubling times. If you’d like to read his inspiring words, visit his blog at JohnThePlantman.com.
I look forward to your opportunity to see “Her name was Hester” in the coming months so that you, too, can be inspired by this story of forgiveness and neighborly love. If you want to learn more about the story and how you can get involved, visit their website at HestersHeritage.org.
Everything really is going to be all right, but especially if we set our intentions on creating goodness for those around us. Let’s get out there and make John and Hester proud.