My Grandfather Taught Me That Plants Are Sacred: An Origin Story

I did not begin in marketing. I began in a garden. My grandfather tended soil in Iba, Zambales, a long ridge of land that catches every typhoon before it reaches the rest of the province. He rose before sunrise. He worked with quiet patience. He never explained why certain plants grew while others withered. He just observed. Adjusted. Trusted the process. He taught me that plants are sacred. Not in a religious sense. In a practical sense. They respond to care. They need consistent conditions. They cannot be rushed. What you nurture grows. What you extract dies. I did not understand how profound that lesson was until decades later.

The Poet’s Path

I wrote poetry before I wrote strategy.

Poetry taught me something that no marketing textbook could. Precision of language matters. Each word carries weight. Removing a single syllable change meaning entirely.

Poetry also taught me that communication is not only intellectual. It is emotional. It is sensory. It is human.

I wrote about the sea. About the mountains that surround Iba. About the typhoons that tested us. About the resilience I watched my grandfather embody.

I did not know I was training for marketing engineering. I was just writing what I saw and felt.

The Unexpected Pivot

I did not plan to spend sixteen years in marketing, data, content architecture, and security. The path was not linear.

But I kept noticing something disturbing.

The funnel (that foundational model of modern marketing) treated relationships as extractive. Acquire. Convert. Move on. The language itself revealed the assumption. “Capture” leads. “Close” deals. “Harvest” customers.

These were not neutral metaphors. They revealed a worldview. The funnel assumed that value came from extraction.

I watched this play out across companies. Customers were acquired, then neglected. Trust was assumed, then squandered. Communities were marketed to, then abandoned.

Something was wrong with the architecture.

Building a Different Way

I started sketching alternatives in 2020. I had no name for what I was building. I just knew the funnel was insufficient.

By 2023, I had articulated Applied Symbiotic Trust Engineering. By 2024, I had deployed it across enough client engagements to know it worked. By 2025, I had coined Marketing Security and watched the market catch up to what I had seen years earlier.

But the framework was not enough. I needed to share the principles more broadly. I needed to write about why extraction fails and reinvestment endures.

That is why I started The MarSec Schema.

Why I Write

I write because one consultant cannot fix the global trust deficit.

I write because the principles I learned in my grandfather’s garden (patience, care, consistency) are exactly what the Agentic Economy requires.

I write because I was a poet before I was an engineer. And poets know that words matter. That meaning must be protected. That what you nurture grows, and what you extract dies.

My grandfather did not know about AI agents or semantic architecture or machine-readable foundations.

But he understood the fundamental truth that underlies all of it.

Care for what you tend. Be patient. Trust the process.

I built ASTE. I coined Marketing Security. I write The MarSec Schema.

But I remain, always, a poet from Iba who learned something sacred in a garden.