January is a slow month. The holidays consume the end of the year, whether good or bad, hectic or calm. There’s a sort of ignorance you have to assume during this time, a brief pause of normal life and an adherence to tradition. The world around you is celebrating, it can’t be escaped, whether you choose to participate or not. New years was typical, cheers, and lets carry on, resolutions and all.

Then the abyss of January arrives and leaves you wondering about the next year, and probably the previous one.  Clean the house, pay your workers, if any are left after the holidays, take a nap. Take a long nap. Netflix, HBO, a good book, a warm blanket. This is what gets me through January.

Since I started gardening I realized each year was its own perpetual cycle. In the beginning, when I knew barely anything about the plant or the process, I began the year enthusiastic, dazzled by the seemingly golden ticket I had found, a way to be a part of something that could help people, that could help myself. What I didn’t realize was in how many ways the game was rigged. Maybe it was lack of real connection with anyone in the industry at the time, an inability to access the minds of those who came before me. Naively, I felt like there was this luminosity to being a gardener, this sort of entrepreneurship, pioneering glory to be found. While I still romanticize the position and the responsibility of the gardener, I realized quickly it wasn’t the golden ticket I had expected; the reality was a consistent struggle of loss, isolation, failure, spotted by meager successes, just enough to keep me going. I blame stubborn optimism for my persistence.

Sometimes I wonder why I stuck with it, why I subjected myself to a lifestyle that I had never anticipated or saw for myself. Sometimes I wonder what else I could have done, imagining that while I am happy with my lifestyle now, would have I been happier if I had followed another, possibly less glamorous path at the time? I turned down graduate school to grow cannabis in my garage. Imagine how proud my mother was to hear that.

Writing from this vantage point, from an altitude of seven years of experience, I hope to share what I learned and am still learning. I hope to take a look back at each year in which I was given a choice to continue down this path and the exponential changes that occurred: internally, politically, legislatively, environmentally.  In no way am I ignorant of the fortune I have found. While it wasn’t that shiny golden ticket I had first imagined, I found a lifestyle that I love. It is with great respect that I write freely about my experience cultivating cannabis at a time when in most places in this world people are persecuted for growing this plant. I am thankful to all the pioneers who came before me, who fought for this, who persevered, so that I could grow my garden.