I could have run them through the water bath canner again. But before repeating the work, I began considering what else I could make with their contents.

Ketchup.

Subscribe now

Sometimes, when life gives you unsealed jars of tomato paste, you need to make ketchup.

I do that a lot. When something does not work out the way I intended, I start looking for another use, another approach, another possibility. There is usually something left to work with. The challenge is allowing myself to see it when I am still attached to what I thought I was making.

Creative problem-solving at its finest. Though sometimes it takes a little frustration to get there.

This year, I found myself doing something similar with our growing season.

Over the winter, while experiencing burnout from my day job, I realized I was not looking forward to planting a garden. I knew what would follow the planting. Watering, weeding, watching, harvesting. Then finding the time and energy to do something with everything I had grown.

I enjoy that work. But the thought of taking it all on again felt heavy.

So I decided to take a season off.

At first, I felt guilty. We had the space. We had put years of work into making it productive. I knew how to grow food there. It was difficult to look at all that possibility and acknowledge that I did not have the energy to follow it through.

But I also knew that planting would commit me to months of work. The enthusiasm I might manage for a day would not necessarily carry me through the season.

As I let go of the guilt, I began to feel the relief underneath.

Then other things began to happen.

My oldest daughter planted a garden of her own. In a season when I needed to step back, she wanted to begin. I had the opportunity to see her take on something that had occupied so much of my own time and attention.

There was still a garden. I was simply no longer the person directing all of it.

Neighbors, friends, and family shared their abundance with us. Food continued to come into our home. Someone else had grown more than they needed, and we were among the people they thought to share it with.

I had made a decision based on what I could no longer keep doing. As the season unfolded, I began to notice how much was happening beyond my own efforts.

There was also work here that I finally had time to do.

Our fruit-bearing perennials had often received whatever attention remained after the more immediate demands of the garden. This year, I could give them more of my care. Taking a break from planting and tending annual crops gave me time to look after things we had already established.

It felt good to attend to those neglected areas. To put my energy somewhere it was needed without adding an entire garden’s worth of responsibilities alongside it.

I was still participating in the life we had built. My part in it had changed for the season.

That is something I could not fully picture when I first decided to take a break. I could easily imagine what would go undone. I had a harder time imagining what I might finally have room to do, what my daughter might choose for herself, or what others would offer.

Now, with the fall harvest upon us, I am noticing another result of that decision.

I have energy left.

Energy to stand at the stove. To cook down tomatoes. To process and preserve the gifts that came to us through our own land and the efforts of people around us.

The work still takes time. A large batch of tomato paste does not become a small task simply because I rested more during the summer. But I have something to give it now. I can spend those hours making use of the harvest without feeling that I have already given everything I had to getting it here.

And when three jars do not seal, I have enough interest left to wonder what else I could make.

That feels significant.

Curiosity requires a little room. It is much easier for me to explore another possibility when I am not already exhausted by the first one.

I cannot say I understood how this season would unfold when I chose not to garden. I knew I needed a break. The rest became visible as we lived it: my daughter growing, people sharing, perennials receiving attention, and me arriving at harvest with the energy to preserve what was available.

Sometimes we need to trust that life can unfold in a way we do not yet understand. There is only so much we can anticipate from the beginning of a season. We make a choice, pay attention, and work with what comes next.

This year, that meant letting other people’s efforts help sustain us. It meant caring for what was already growing. It meant discovering that I could do less in one part of the season and have more to offer in another.

I had expected taking a year off from gardening would leave a gap. It also made room for things I would have missed if I had filled every bit of that space myself.

Back in the kitchen, I had three jars of tomato paste and the energy left to explore.

There was more than fruit in those jars. They also held the memory of time well spent as a family, gathering and processing the abundance offered to us. Standing in the kitchen, I could appreciate what had gone into them—the fruit, the time, the care—and what I was getting back.

This was part of the life I had imagined. But I am learning that how I feel while living it matters just as much as what I have to show for the work.

It is easy for me to imagine what a new possibility could become. I can see the food, the empty meadow, the thing I might learn. Once I am interested, I want to know more. Truthfully, I get a little obsessive about it. That curiosity has brought a great deal into our lives. It has also required me to learn how to pause long enough to consider what comes with the possibility.

I imagined a life that was slow-moving, hard-working, rewarding, and seasonal. An ordinary day would begin with waking up with the sun and planning the day’s activities over a mug or two of coffee. I wanted to work without experiencing the constant challenge of having more to do than time to do it. I wanted to feel content at the end of the day without feeling completely wiped out. To have the space to do things when I had the energy to do them instead of being ruled by a clock.

I still think that original description fits, with one exception: slow-moving is seasonal too.

I appreciate each season for the gifts it provides. Winter gives me time for reading, resting, and organizing. Spring brings maple sap collection and processing, planting, repairs after the long winter, and the beginning of the gathering season.

Summer brings the beginning of abundance, along with the onslaught of bugs. The physical labor becomes less demanding and more repetitive. Water, weed, prune, repeat. There are materials to gather for food, art, and medicine just as the leaves begin to change.

Fall brings with it the bulk of the harvest, including hunting. Followed by processing, preserving, and preparations for winter. Collecting fallen apples becomes part of the daily rhythm, squeezed somewhere between canning tomatoes and digging potatoes. There is a great deal I love within that rhythm. I also have to consider how much I can take on and still enjoy being part of it.

Here in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the planting window is small. A great deal of work has to happen in a short amount of time. Harvest can feel much the same. Sometimes it seems as though everything is ripening at once. A challenging balancing act ensues, and I tend to measure my success by how little goes to waste.

Sometimes I lose produce to rot before I have time to process it. Sometimes it is eggs carried off by the family of crows that repeatedly manages to collect them before I do. When I finish the task with little loss, I feel like I have won. Other days, the crows come out ahead.

There is satisfaction in that work. There is also urgency, and the urgency does not necessarily arrive when I have the most energy or the fewest other responsibilities. If you are considering this life, that is worth imagining alongside the meals and the full pantry. What would it feel like to have a harvest waiting on you during a week that was already difficult?

That is the part I can have trouble seeing when my curiosity is piqued. Everything else fades into the background while the drive to learn far outshines the less enjoyable work that tends to come along with it.

I am especially grateful during those moments for my husband and his ability to ground me. He almost always uses humor to remind me of what truly comes with a new activity or responsibility. After twenty years, he has come to understand that this is the best approach to get me to listen without feeling defensive. He can make me laugh long enough to consider the part I am overlooking.

The actual responsibility of this lifestyle does not always fit the picture I imagined. But that picture still gives me something to aim for. I can change what I take on each year, and I do not always have to wait for a new season to make an adjustment.

This latest season of life has me striving for a less ambitious version of the life I had before. One I can sustain without burning out. I still want to learn, grow, gather, and preserve. I also want to leave myself enough room to enjoy those things.

I lifted the jars of cranberry apple butter from the canner and set them down to cool. As the familiar pings began, I felt the satisfaction of finishing something that had started with time spent together as a family. Twelve jars to enjoy and share, carrying a little of this season into the next. There would always be more I could do, but for the moment, I could appreciate what I had done. And I found myself looking forward to the next growing season, considering just how much I might make room for.

During last year’s harvest season, when it came time to can tomatoes, I had nothing left to give them. I had grown the food. I wanted to use it. I simply did not have the energy to do the next part. So I put what I could in the chest freezer whole, let the rest succumb to frost, and left the canning for when my cup was refilled.

And it’s getting there.

I took this year off from growing and instead found myself supporting my daughter as she explored the efforts of planting seeds, weeding, and harvesting produce. And because it wasn’t mine, it didn’t feel like a burden. Or maybe the burden just didn’t seem so heavy.

I had spent the better part of the past fifteen years going to work and then coming home to work more. So many people would ask how I found the time to do it all. The truth is I didn’t, at least not in a healthy way. Every waking moment was filled with productivity. I didn’t give myself time to just be or the space to even ask myself how I was doing.

Things are different now.

I look forward to giving my family memories of welcoming aromas, a loving house, and a present listener for their daily experiences. Processing the excess produce seems more like a gift than just one more thing I have to do. I find myself wanting, if not looking forward to it.

So I guess what I’m saying is that the past year has taught me a lot about how to live a balanced and more fulfilled life. One where I can contribute and enjoy it too. A life that has room for relationships, growth, and change. Peace, in the form of unstructured time, to reflect on it all.

Just as I supported my daughter this past season in her first attempts at nurturing an activity as old as time, I want to share the knowledge I have gained with other people looking for a life that can sustain them.

And that desire has slowly been taking the shape of a book.

I’ve been writing about our life here. The gardens and the animals, the food we’ve grown and preserved, the things we’ve built, and the plans we’ve changed along the way. Looking back, I can see how much of what we do now came from trying something, paying attention, and deciding what was worth doing again. Sometimes that meant expanding. Sometimes it meant letting something go.

For a long time, I gave more consideration to what I could produce than to what producing it was asking of me. There was always room for another project, another animal, another row of tomatoes. Finding room for myself was harder.

That realization belongs in this book just as much as anything I have learned about growing food or caring for the land. Because the time and energy we bring to this life are part of what makes it possible. I am learning to consider mine when I decide what comes next.

I want to share the practical things that have helped us, alongside the experiences that changed how I think about them. My hope is that someone reading will find something they can use in their own life, and feel comfortable adapting it to the space, resources, and energy they have available.

There is still writing to do. But as I work through these memories, I keep coming back to those tomatoes in the freezer. At the time, they felt like something I had left unfinished. Now I can see that putting them away was also a way of giving myself time.

I’m glad I did.

Subscribe now

After pulling the largest roots from the ground, I brought the horseradish to a table I had set up outside for just that purpose. I began by scrubbing the long roots with a stiff-bristled brush to remove the bulk of the dirt while my youngest ran the hose. Using a vegetable peeler and the sharp end of a paring knife, I removed the outer layer of rough skin to expose the pungent flesh and cut it into half-inch pieces. Placing the root inside my food processor with some salt and sugar, I pureed the harvest to a pulp before adding the vinegar.

I was warned about the horseradish. People don’t always come with that type of label.

I’ve never found it easy to make friends—to let my guard down completely. But occasionally someone comes along who makes it feel easy. Conversation comes naturally. Shared interests give us somewhere to begin, and the feeling of being understood gives us a reason to stay.

We invite them into our homes, into our routines, into the parts of our life we usually keep protected. They become familiar. Expected. Sometimes they become family. The gift of comfort without the obstacle of history.

When I planted the horseradish, I was thinking about the potential. Something I loved, coming up year after year. I knew it could spread, so I prepared. I planted it in a location where harm couldn’t be done.

We don’t always get that opportunity with people. We appreciate what they bring so much that we don’t notice how much space we’ve made for them. Their presence becomes part of how we imagine our life. We begin to count on their understanding, their encouragement, their place in our garden.

We stop considering that they might view the relationship differently.

I love horseradish. I love its pungent, strong-willed aroma. I love the spicy addition it brings. It has the power to make an otherwise mundane experience memorable. A little can change the whole meal.

Some people are like that.

Their presence brings something we hadn’t realized we were missing. We feel more comfortable being ourselves. We begin to reach out without rehearsing what we will say. We trust that what was once there will always be. Faith like that of the horseradish root sending green shoots up each spring.

Then one day we reach out, and the response is different. Excuses fill the void where genuine reciprocity once grew.

I believe people have the best of intentions. If someone asks for space, I give it. I understand needing quiet. I understand having more to carry than anyone else can see.

So I waited and then I tried again.

The same response. No context. What did I do? Do I try something different?

Eventually, though, it becomes clear that we are waiting for something the other person may have already decided to leave behind. And we are left with the empty place where someone had become expected.

But some roots remain.

I can pull the largest ones from the ground and carry them to the table, but what comes away in my hands isn’t necessarily everything that was growing there. I find reminders later. A familiar place. Something I would have shared. A moment when I still expect a response from someone who is no longer there.

Those are harder to dig out.

I can look back and question what I overlooked and how quickly I allowed comfort to become trust.

Sometimes that reflection turns into shame.

Shame on me for getting it wrong. Shame on me for letting someone close enough that their absence could hurt more than just me.

But I didn’t know then what I know now. I was responding to what had been offered, and I believed it.

A season can pass, maybe two, before someone reaches back out. Too many months. An invitation to meet. A suggestion that we might better understand each other.

By then, I have spent a long time trying to understand on my own. I finally stopped waiting. The space they asked for may have become unavailable. Prepped for something new.

I still love horseradish. But I wonder if I would feel the same way had it come without a warning. Would I offer it the same spot again, understanding its desire to infiltrate, knowing how difficult it would be to get rid of? How cautious I would have to become to enjoy it?

I don’t think so.

Subscribe now

Sugar Island is over 130 miles from my home. It requires a reliable vehicle and a trip on a ferry, a little intimidating for a first-timer. As I pulled up the gravel drive, I pushed my fear aside. There was no turning back now. I parked my car, shut off my headlights, and hesitantly went in search of life. A crackling fire filled me with hope and I padded cautiously up the path. A group of contemplative men warmly pointed me in the direction of camp. I thanked them for the direction and made my way to what would be my home for the night.

As I walked inside the community gathering space, I was welcomed with open arms. This was a place I had never been to before, but felt as if I was returning after a long absence. Can you miss some place you have never been or people you have never met? Can you miss a tradition you have never practiced? I was shown to the women’s quarters and prepared for sleep.

In the morning, several women gathered together, still as the lake in anticipation of the dawn. I experienced no fear as I was led from the light of camp to the blanket of darkness outside. The path among the sugar bush was lit only by a solitary swinging lantern early that morning.

I chose a depression in the earth between a large maple and moss-covered boulder to settle in for the duration of the fast. I prepared my space by attaching my tobacco ties as high as I could to trees in the four directions - yellow for east, red for south, black for west, and white for north, letting Spirit know I was there. It was a ritual I had never participated in before, but my muscles seemed to remember.

I placed my tarp atop the fallen leaves on the ground before removing my shoes, settling into my sleeping bag, and covering myself with a blanket. I placed my belongings beside a basalt cobblestone, atop that soft moss-covered boulder, my makeshift altar. Tobacco accompanied my silent prayers for mother earth and the healing I sought. That was the purpose of the fast as it was explained to me: to give thanks in the reciprocal fashion of my ancestors for all she has given us.

I found myself drifting between sleep and wakefulness as the sun played hide and seek with the clouds. My mind swam as if in a rip current and instead of fighting it, I embraced it. Leaves painted as if by the hand of an artist gently drifted down as the squirrels hurriedly packed away their last bits of sustenance before winter. Time passed quickly in that hazy state. I was surprised, albeit a little disappointed, to hear “Aanii, boozhoo,” so soon from my hostess when she arrived to collect us from the arms of our first mother.

We were led to Lodge for a sweat prior to Feast. It was another opportunity to show gratitude and to purge myself of any sickness that may have taken up residence. And purge I did after scrambling from the heat of the lodge and distancing myself from the other participants. I emptied the contents of my stomach onto that forest floor. With them, I released the weight of the past—the expectations, the sadness, and the guilt. The gift of transformation had me moving more slowly and with far more intention.

Although both of these practices are rooted in the spiritual traditions of my culture, they are experienced in many communities around the world for their physical, spiritual, and communal purposes. And though I arrived in search of guidance for myself, I left this gathering feeling part of something much bigger than myself. I am filled with so much gratitude for the opportunity to have participated in this experience. And by sharing my journey, I hope to calm the tide of emotions others may experience in the murky depths of the unknown.

This act, in and of itself, is not an issue. The issue was the evidence strewn about my work surface. Several boxes of drawing utensils had been left on the desk, my youngest daughter’s half-started attempt at supplementing her school tools. Markers and pens of various types sat unboxed where she had left them the night before.

I had intended to sit down, open my computer, and begin my work for the day. I had much on my mind that I was ready to unload. When my eyes rested on the chaos that was my workspace, it felt like just another barrier to achieving that goal.

Sharing space with others, no matter the environment, is tough. Sharing space with our children is something I find particularly challenging.

And I am not just talking about physical space.

In my experience, the difficulty is not in sharing the space exactly, but in the changes that must be accommodated along the way.

I began this life sharing space with two parents and, shortly thereafter, a sibling. I spent the next eighteen years learning to drive defensively, anticipating the needs and expectations of others without spending much time considering my own. I was always planning ten years down the road, but rarely considering what maintenance I needed along the way.

I spent a brief time in my own apartment toward the end of college and, quite frankly, learned more about myself in that time than I had in the previous twenty years.

Living alone gave me the space to understand my likes and dislikes without the influence of another personality. I could choose my own pace and find out where I wanted to stop.

I established what I was willing to live with and what I was not. I learned what I was capable of doing myself and where I needed help. I learned about my own capacity and my own limitations.

How long was I willing to go without washing the dishes? What was I willing to eat for dinner when I had no energy left to prepare a meal for myself? How high was I willing to turn the thermostat in the dead of winter, understanding the financial burden it would put on me?

How much loneliness was I willing to endure living by myself?

Marriage showed me how much love has to endure when you’re both young, sharing physical, emotional, and mental space with a spouse full time. And before too long, we added children to the mix.

I shared my physical body with each of them for nine months, and toward the end of that period began preparing our home. I understood the biology of what was happening. That’s how my brain processes difficult situations: I try to understand them.

It was the psychological shift I wasn’t ready for.

I had nine months to begin building the capacity for raising a small human, but I don’t think anything truly prepared me for the mental and emotional load I would experience when they arrived in this world and continued to grow. I didn’t understand how much energy motherhood required until I attempted to use some for a project of my own.

There wasn’t much left. Certainly not as much as I had before.

When the kids were small, I had to stop every thirty minutes to an hour to feed or change them. I had very little mental energy left for problem-solving anything beyond the daily requirements of motherhood and marriage.

My abilities had not diminished, but the uninterrupted time and mental energy I needed to use them were definitely limited. It was frustrating to be aware of what I was capable of and struggle to find the capacity to do it. I was still measuring how far I should have traveled by what I could cover alone, without accounting for how often I now needed to stop.

It took quite a bit of time for me to come to terms with that change.

I don’t think of it as a personal failure. I simply did not understand the extent of what was coming. I was not prepared for this season of life.

I didn’t really slow down to consider how my expectations might need to change along with my body. I kept moving forward with a familiar understanding of what I could accomplish in a day. Then the days changed, and I was still expecting the same things of myself. I had planned for the additional passengers, but I hadn’t understood how much they would change the pace.

But I also think it doesn’t get talked about enough. People make abstract comments like, “Oh, your life is really about to change,” but they don’t ever really explain. Or maybe I just didn’t understand what they were trying to tell me.

I think I would have appreciated someone saying, “Take everything you are able to accomplish in a day and cut it in half, and then half again. That will be your new reality, at least for a while.”

Something concrete enough to make me consider how much room I was going to need.

Now I have almost forgotten what that uninterrupted time felt like before I had my children. But as they get older and become more self-sufficient, the time and mental energy seem to slowly creep back in. I have more room to follow a thought, work through a problem, or begin something of my own.

And some mornings, I arrive ready to do just that and find a desk covered in markers and pens.

This morning, I chose to be present with the frustration and turn it into a teachable moment. I padded quietly down the stairs because the rest of the house was still asleep. I woke my daughter and asked her to pick up her mess so I could start my workday. I explained how her actions the night before had affected me that morning.

Sharing the space requires her to consider my needs, too. She is still learning what that means, just as I am still learning how to make room for the changes that come with being her mother.

I think the shock of change will hit me again as my children continue to grow and begin choosing their own routes. The difference now is that I’m paying attention. I’ve been practicing. I’m learning to notice what is happening along the way, even when I’m anxious to get where I’m going.

I still need time for my own work, space for my own thoughts, and energy for my own needs. This morning, I needed a clear desk. But I also want to remember this season while I’m still in it.

Someday I will miss the speed bumps my children create in their wake.

Subscribe now

I wrap my blanket tighter around myself in an attempt to ward off the crisp fall air sneaking its way inside my house. Scooting the chair closer to the screen, I settle into the seat that has now become familiar to me. Grasping my coffee with one hand, I reach between my shoulder blades to the spot that isn’t afraid to tell me I’ve been neglecting myself again. I thought it was gone, but the truth is I wasn’t paying attention.

I started a lot of posts this week, but I’ve been having trouble with the endings. I think part of it is that when I feel obligated to write, it feels forced and more like a chore than a pleasure. I find myself thinking too much about how it will be received. That isn’t why I started this. I had created this expectation for myself to post every Monday. People were starting to follow along and I didn’t want to let them down. But it was at that point that I started writing for others instead of myself.

I believe we all do this to some degree. If not for someone else, then out of obligation. And if you look up the definitions of obligation, none of them sound very fun. So what’s the opposite of an obligation? A desire? An asset? How do I transform my writing back into something I desire? I’ll remove the expectation and bring my writing back to where this all started - my journal. So here I sit this morning, before the sun has had time to rise, in a space I now call my own. I stare at the remnants of yesterday’s project, and then my reflection in the window, considering an ending. Not just the ending contained in this reflection, but the one that will close out this chapter.

Some wise women told me recently to just give it time. They said I would be amazed at how much has transpired by the time next spring rolls around. Today’s problems will seem small and insignificant. In order to appreciate that passage of time, though, I intend to live in the present—taking in every single moment: the closing of a dresser drawer as my husband pulls out his clothes for the day, a familiar alarm forcing its way through the still morning, and the complexity of my own thoughts.

They can be exhausting, those thoughts traveling in search of an ending otherwise unknown. I don’t spend enough time planning with the end in mind. I have good intentions, but terrible follow-through, especially when it comes to my own ideas. Each new idea is the shiny object, my dopamine rush. But as I sit here, finally able to admire the leaves outside my window, I can see I deserve better. I promise to look beyond my reflection, focus my attention, and give myself an ending worth waiting for.

Subscribe now

I don’t expect my use of technology to have no impact. But I do expect the benefits of its use to outweigh the cost.

That sounded reasonable until I asked myself two more questions.

Benefits for whom? And who carries the cost?

In my last post, I wrote about gathering cedar bark and the evidence my actions left on the trees. When I open my laptop, those marks are harder to see. I can see what the technology helps me do. Finding out what it takes to make that possible requires more effort.

So I started following the water.

I am good at understanding and creating systems. When I come across a complicated question, I look for connections, missing pieces, and places where something could work better. In this case, each possible answer revealed another question. A way to use less water raised questions about energy. A promise to repair damage raised questions about where, when, and whether that work would actually help. A percentage of profits raised questions about what would count as profit in the first place.

In my last post, I shared that I was organizing what I had learned into a framework—a shared way to work through decisions. These questions are where that work begins. They could help us decide what to look at, who needs to be heard, and how to tell whether we are following through.

I want to share them with you, along with the research that helped me ask them. I am using that research to sharpen my questions, and I expect some of my thinking to change as I learn more. They are rooted in my growing understanding of mino-bimaadiziwin, or living in a good way, and my responsibility to nibi—water. Reciprocity is part of that: receiving with care and taking responsibility for what we give back. I am writing as an Anishinaabe woman learning how to put that responsibility into practice, with room for others to deepen or challenge my understanding.

Read more

I have felt a strong pull to remember the ways of my Anishinaabe people for some time. Since I was a child growing up on the East Coast, in fact. Baa Men Done Ni Bi Ekwe Ndizhinikaaz. My name is (Taking Care of) Water Woman. My name implies a relationship with water, not stagnant, but active. A responsibility to notice, learn, teach others, and consider those not here yet. Nibi (water) connects us all. It quite literally touches everything—from the cells that have built us to the oceans that connect us. It lives within us while we live within it.

I wanted to gather the inner bark of my cedar relatives to teach myself cedar bark mat making and learn more about its cultural significance. I laid my asemaa (tobacco) down at the base of each tree and thanked them for the gifts they were about to give. I pressed the blade of the knife down until I felt it penetrate the outer layer of bark, then worked it underneath until I had enough material to grab onto. As I gripped the strip, I walked backward bringing the bark with me. I did this on six trees and by the end felt pretty confident in my technique. Afterward, I separated the outer bark from the inner, coiling and binding the inner bark until I was ready to use it.

I did not understand the meaning of my name when I received it. Not really. I had shared with the Healer that I was feeling a responsibility to learn as much about my culture as I could so I could pass it along to my girls. I was a new mother and wanted to offer them more insight than was available to me growing up. Taking care made sense to me, but I didn’t quite understand the weight, or rather honor, of caring for nibi.

Motherhood gave me a place to begin understanding that responsibility. I wanted to care for my girls, to give them what I could, and to consider the lives they would lead beyond the years I would be here to guide them. My name was asking me to extend that care to nibi.

I felt that same need for reciprocity as I laid my asemaa beside the cedar. I wanted to receive its gifts with care. I was attempting to follow a harvesting practice passed down by my ancestors, with the intention of allowing the tree to heal and continue to thrive. But feeling confident in my technique did not tell me how the tree would respond. That would take time and attention. My responsibility did not end when I carried the bark away.

And as I think about that relationship it brings me to a moral dilemma I have been wrestling with for some time—technology use and our reliance on data centers. I’m not talking about just AI. Researching on the internet, writing an email, streaming a television show, interacting on social media, taking an online course, and shopping all connect me to that infrastructure.

So how can I honor the reciprocity inherent in my spirit name and the culture I yearn to learn more about while navigating life in the present? I’m conflicted and have been for some time. I am learning about the environmental impacts I contribute to when I reach for my phone or laptop, but I also understand the challenge and near impossibility of trying to avoid that infrastructure entirely.

Where do we lay our asemaa? How do we give our thanks?

I could feel the life encased in that bark, in the movement of the tree as it strained against the breeze, in the energy I felt transfer through my fingertips, in the history its rings contained, and in the promise its seeds hold each year. My actions would remain on its surface as evidence of what I had done. There was no hiding it.

Opening a laptop does not give us the same sense of responsibility. It puts distance between our actions and their consequences. There is nothing on the screen disclosing the effects of our actions as we type away at the keyboard. But maybe there should be.

As I followed the question, I learned that the water demands can extend beyond the data center itself. Water can be consumed in cooling the equipment and in generating the electricity that powers it. Research from Berkeley Lab accounts for those demands separately. Even knowing where a data center stands would only tell me part of the story. I would still need to ask where its electricity comes from and who else depends on the water used to produce it.

I personally would want to know how my intended use aligns with my values. I imagine many of us would. To understand that, I would need to consider more than what the technology helps me accomplish. I would need to consider the lives affected by its use and what those who provide it are doing to care for the water they depend on.

I don’t expect my use of technology to have no impact. But I do expect the benefits of its use to outweigh the cost. Benefits for whom, though? And who carries the cost?

Taking care of nibi for me means mino bimaadiziwin (living life in a good way), and I can only do that using my own beliefs, values, and skills. I am good at understanding and creating systems. Systems to live by, and function within, that align with my own version of mino bimaadiziwin.

I will continue to use the technologies available to me, while asking more questions about what that use requires. I can be deliberate about my choices, ask for accountability, and reconsider what I do as I learn. Creating systems that help turn those responsibilities into action is one way I can practice mino bimaadiziwin. One way I can grow into the name I carry.

Subscribe now

Those questions have led me to research what reciprocity could look like in our relationship with data centers. I have been organizing what I’m learning into a framework that explores potential answers—what we can ask of ourselves, what we should expect of those who profit, and how we might know whether those responsibilities are being met. If these are questions you’re sitting with too, I invite you to subscribe and continue exploring them with me.

I have been a little obsessive about this particular problem.

There are holes in the family tree I am trying to construct. Names change from one record to another. Dates don’t quite line up. People seem to disappear and then reappear somewhere unexpected. I will follow one possibility for a while, only to find myself somewhere I don’t trust.

So I stop.

I go back to what I know.

I return to the primary sources. The people in the tree I am confident about. The names, dates, locations, occupations, and relationships I can actually substantiate. Then I look at the problem from another direction.

I don’t find this frustrating.

I love it.

Subscribe now

Learning and problem solving have probably always been my dopamine fix. Give me something I don’t understand and enough room to investigate it, and I am quite content to disappear for a while.

Which is more or less what I have been doing.

I have also been struggling with what to write about lately.

My best writing tends to come when I feel intuitively pulled toward it. It happens suddenly. Something I have been thinking about connects with something else, and I feel like I need to sit down and follow it wherever it wants to go.

That hasn’t happened much recently.

I knew I wasn’t avoiding writing. I also knew it would come when it was meant to. This morning I made sure to give myself some space for it.

And here I am.

I think part of the reason I haven’t been writing is simply that my attention has been somewhere else. I have been in a flow state, happily trying to solve a problem for someone I care about.

Six months ago, I don’t know that I would have allowed myself to do that.

I might have followed a problem if I believed solving it would directly improve my current situation. I would have needed to justify the time somehow.

Now I am choosing problems because they bring me joy.

Sometimes they bring me joy because solving them brings joy to someone else.

I have learned to trust the ebb and flow of my drive a little more. There is something comforting to me about believing that the things I feel pulled toward aren’t always distractions from where I am supposed to be going. Maybe that pull is my intuition. Maybe my intuition is being guided by something bigger than myself.

Whatever it is, I am learning to listen.

And lately, there has been enough room in my life to share some of that joy with other people.

I think that is profound.

For a long time, so much of my attention was turned inward. I was healing. I was trying to understand what had happened and who I was without the occupation that had become so tangled with my identity.

There wasn’t much room for new.

I think I have said what I needed to say about leaving teaching.

I don’t feel particularly compelled to keep looking backward anymore.

I want to tell you what I’m enjoying now.

Maybe that is its own kind of evidence that something has changed.

I stopped thinking so much about who I used to be when I started choosing who I wanted to become.

I don’t think I need a fixed answer anymore, either.

I would rather wonder what else I can do.

Labels have an irritating ability to limit us.

Teacher. Artist. Researcher. Designer. Writer. Homesteader.

Genealogist, apparently.

My interests can look a little scattered from the outside. For a long time, I suppose I thought they were.

But underneath them, I am beginning to recognize the same thing happening over and over again.

I love a good problem.

With genealogy, I am trying to figure out who someone was, where they came from, and what their life might have looked like. I gather primary sources. I look for patterns in names, locations, birth dates, occupations, and relationships. When I reach a dead end, I return to the people and information I trust and approach the problem from another direction.

And when I find something, I get to understand someone a little differently.

So much of what I find seems to be about survival and necessity.

And then, occasionally, you see love find its way into the records.

I find myself wondering about the same things when I work with plants.

If I want to weave something, the problem becomes: What material could make this form, and why should it?

I want to know the plant before I use it. Its strength. Its color. Its smell. Its length. Where it grows. How it changes when it dries or gets wet.

If something doesn’t work, I don’t consider the experiment wasted. It gave me information.

I take what I learned and return to what I know.

Then I try again.

Part of the satisfaction is finding out what I am capable of.

Can I solve some of the same problems my ancestors did?

Someone had to be the first person to wonder whether a plant was safe to eat.

Someone observed.

Someone experimented.

Something probably failed.

Someone remembered.

Someone tried differently the next time.

Knowledge accumulated.

Eventually, that knowledge became practice, and someone shared it with someone else.

What really separates that from what we now call research?

Or from the way I approach genealogy?

Or art?

Or the work I have been building?

When I design curriculum or architect a learning system, the subject changes, but my thinking really doesn’t.

There is a learner who needs to get from where they are to somewhere they aren’t yet.

So I gather information.

Who is the learner? What do they already know? What do they need to know? Who is facilitating the learning? What are the expectations? What does the environment look like? What resources already exist? What constraints are present? What has already been tried?

Then I look for patterns.

I look for gaps and unnecessary complexity. I look for connections. I look for places where we are asking someone to expend energy that isn’t actually contributing to their learning.

And if the solution doesn’t work?

That gives me more information.

I zoom out.

I return to what I know.

I try another direction.

Humans have been doing some version of this for a very long time.

Long before we decided learning was something that happened primarily in classrooms, people learned because learning was inseparable from living.

They observed. Experimented. Failed. Remembered. Shared.

I see this same process play out around me all the time.

And maybe that is what learning has always been—building upon what we know until we can see something we couldn’t see before.

Most days, I don’t notice the spiderwebs stretched throughout the fields and woods around my house.

They are already there.

I just can’t see them.

Until the conditions are right.

Early in the morning, dew settles onto strands that were there all along, and suddenly this unbelievably architected structure reveals itself.

The dew didn’t build the web.

It just made it visible.

Maybe our minds aren’t so different.

We are constantly building connections between what we already know and what we are discovering. A new experience creates another strand. Sometimes something doesn’t hold. Sometimes part of the structure gets damaged and has to be rebuilt. Sometimes we have to choose a different anchor point entirely.

And no two webs are exactly the same.

Maybe that is part of what fascinates me so much about learning.

How has this particular person architected their web?

What are they trying to catch with it?

How can we help them build something that works for them?

I think I have been building my own web for a very long time.

The structure underneath the work I am doing now didn’t appear when I left teaching. Much of it was built over years of trying to work smarter instead of harder.

I take pride in my work, and for a long time I had an awful lot of things to accomplish in a very small amount of time. So I built routines. Procedures. Systems. Frameworks.

Not because I wanted everything to be rigid or identical, but because I wanted the repetitive parts to require less of me so I could give more of myself to the parts that actually needed my attention.

I was reducing cognitive load before I had any intention of building a business around the idea.

The structure was already there.

I just couldn’t see the whole thing yet.

I think that may be what is changing now.

For the past several months, I have written a lot about what I was leaving behind. I needed to. I was untangling myself from a web that, in many ways, I had helped construct.

But I don’t feel like writing about what I left anymore.

There are too many things happening here, now, that I am excited about.

I have been building. Learning. Researching. Making. Experimenting. Solving problems simply because I want to know whether I can solve them.

And I think I am finally ready to share more of it.

Not because everything is finished.

Not because every strand is perfect.

But because maybe the conditions are finally right for the web that has been there all along to become visible.

That is an act of trust that begins in childhood if we are fortunate—asking for guidance. “Did I do this right?” “Can you help me?” “What should I do?” And then as we age, our circle expands, and we find ourselves surrounded by people who guide and shape our decisions, and ultimately us, along the way. As I watch the leaves blowing in the breeze, I am reminded of the forces on wind. Pressure, rotation, landscape, temperature, and friction are the sculpting forces behind its path

.

There is something interesting that occurs when you live through a challenging experience and feel comfortable enough to share it…or maybe you’re not comfortable, but just don’t give a damn anymore. You share your experience as a method of working through it yourself. The interesting effect of inviting others into that journey is the assumption that you now have some profound wisdom to share…and maybe you do. Who am I to decide?

I have had the same revelation twice recently (I think someone is trying to tell me something). I was reflecting on a feeling of inadequacy I was harboring. I had been asked to teach some culture classes, sharing my creative practices, with fellow community members at my local tribal center. I didn’t feel qualified. Teaching culture to a people that had had their culture all but stripped from them over the past 200 years, my family included, felt wrong... Cultural teachings in my Anishinaabe community are limited at best, partly because we are a culture in which knowledge has traditionally been transmitted orally. As our language was taken from us and our communities were torn apart, much of it was lost. Now here I am being asked to teach a cultural class on something I have experience with—land-based art—but doing so would highlight the limits of my knowledge. The class would be lacking in cultural teachings I don’t possess, and my Anishinaabemowin is only at a beginner level.

But I had an epiphany. My life experience has taught me a lot and blown me in directions I did not expect. I’m pushing aside those feelings of inadequacy and placing all of my faith in my good intentions and maybe the wind. But I will be teaching from my perspective, my lived experience, and will not begin to claim anything else as my own.

It was still dark when I woke, the quiet almost uncomfortable, echoing the emotional message of the day before. I was intent on responding, not wanting them to wait any longer. I spoke from a place of knowing, not of what she should do, but of what I had done for myself.

Subscribe now

The secondary interview I had scheduled did not go as smoothly as the first. In retrospect, the interview itself was fine. The conversation just revealed an incompatibility. There is something to be learned from that. I knew almost immediately that something did not feel right during the video conference. There was an uncomfortable tension in our voices as we tried to use words to explain our perspectives and understand where the other person was coming from.

My stomach felt tight, my body emanating heat. We had misunderstood each other’s expectations for the second meeting we had scheduled.

Subscribe now

In hindsight, I should have listened to the discomfort in my body sooner.

I take a lot of pride in the things I produce, and I was unwilling to compromise the integrity of my work for the sake of a quick turnaround. I believe in the value of quality, repeatable systems, the type of systems that are constructed, implemented, and then evaluated for fidelity, efficacy, and equity. Is it intuitive and impactful? Can it be improved? Is it the very best that it can be?

Part of me was reminded of the discomfort I experienced for so long in my last position, and it frightened me a little. So maybe I did need to sit with that discomfort for a few minutes and remember. To remember a feeling I had spent a long time learning to ignore.

I had almost forgotten what it felt like—the frustration from feeling misunderstood. However, this time I could recognize my body signaling this wasn’t the direction I wanted to go. I needed to remind myself not to fight for something simply because I think I should. Instead, I listened to what my body was trying to tell me, thanked her for her time, wished her the best of luck, and ended the call. There was no winning or convincing—just recognition of the mismatch and acceptance.

So I laced up my running shoes, grabbed my asemaa (tobacco), and headed out the door. I felt grounded as my feet worked out a beat on the pavement. My breath matched the rhythm as I felt pulled to the lake by my home. I tend to be an afternoon and evening runner, running as an outlet for the frustrations of the day. The pace provided room to observe the August blooms, and somehow, noticing them expanded my capacity for the gifts around me. The evening air was comfortable, and the buzz of late summer insects filled the air. I made my way onto the crunch of gravel, past the local convenience store.

An old bridge lies partially obscured by the dense foliage over the creek I feel called to. Maybe bridge isn’t quite the right word. Two weathered 2-by-12s lie anchored to a bit of concrete, the footing adorned with handprints from someone’s desire for permanence. The path, supported by cast-iron pipe railings painted black, drew me in. The metaphor is not lost on me. I found myself following the path as it wound through a mixed landscape until it revealed the mouth of the creek.

I sat down at the water’s edge, watching a battle of wills unfold. Yesterday was hard, and I saw the challenge of it all mirrored in the water. Life is filled with these forces I feel like I am just now beginning to understand. For time immemorial, the lake and the creek have played a game of give and take. The creek holds a desire to reach its final destination, not much different from my own. Which side is the wind on? Are we living our life or is life living us? The direction of the wind was in the creek’s favor that evening. Whose will is stronger? Or is there meant to be reciprocity? What are we to do when there is no wind at all? I laid my asemaa beside my questions on the water’s surface.

I am also reminded of the peace that can exist when you find yourself in the water, letting the current take you where it will. The waves pushing and pulling. Maybe the connection is that the water doesn’t exhaust itself emptying into the lake. It has learned which resistance is part of moving forward and which is a warning. Some days it flows uninhibited, and other days the lake, in combination with the will of the wind, says not quite so fast. There is no sadness; there is just acceptance. Acceptance that not every resistance needs to be overcome.

There was a little note taped to the top right corner on a piece of craft paper.

She loved you. enjoy :)

I have no idea who left it.

I don’t know why they left it, or how they knew it belonged with me. The whole thing was a little weird. But somehow, before I even found the signature in the bottom right corner, I knew.

I could feel her in the loose strokes of color across the aged paper.

Robin.

God, I miss her.

It’s been more than nine years since she died, and when I read those three words—She loved you—I got choked up.

It felt like I had been waiting nine years to hear them.

Robin Mulligan was my high school art teacher. She was my mentor and, eventually, my friend. She had a scruffy voice and kind eyes, and she was beautiful. But what I remember most was the way she made you feel when she listened to you.

She really listened.

I never felt judged by her. She didn’t tell me who to be or what to think. She asked questions that helped me see things from a different perspective. She had more faith in me than I had in myself, and she wasn’t afraid to give me a little tough love when I needed it.

There was one conversation in particular that has stayed with me.

My girls were very little, and I was exhausted. I was an art teacher, but I wasn’t really making art of my own, and somehow I had convinced myself that meant I wasn’t being creative.

I felt inadequate.

Robin reminded me that I was creating.

I had created two beautiful little girls. I was creating a home. I was creating a life.

Creativity was just looking a little different for me at the time.

For some reason, I had developed this belief that I needed to continually earn my place in the world. That I needed to make something or accomplish something or prove something in order for my existence to have value.

Robin reminded me that sometimes just living is enough.

I could really use her right now.

Nine years ago last May, I got the phone call that Robin had died unexpectedly at her home. I had spoken to her only the week before about an adjunct position I was considering applying for.

And then she was gone.

Subscribe now

I spent that summer moving through the fog of grief without much direction. I remember feeling an almost immediate need to create something from it. I began sketching ideas for a body of work about the void loss creates—mostly abstract vessels attempting to give some kind of shape to absence.

They never made it beyond the preliminary sketch stage.

Then Robin’s teaching position was posted.

How could I?

I had spent the previous seven years commuting an hour to and from work, and this was an opportunity to teach closer to home. I understood Robin’s vision. Hell, she had helped mold the teacher I had become.

But I worried about what everyone would think.

I also knew Robin would have kicked my ass if I didn’t apply.

So I did.

I had sat in that classroom myself as a teenager. Robin had been my teacher before she became my mentor. I understood what those students had lost because I had lost her too.

Looking back, I think maybe I was the bridge.

I could honor her while helping them move forward. I could understand their grief while working through my own.

The first time I walked into the classroom after accepting the position was surreal.

It looked as though Robin had simply gone home at the end of an ordinary school day and would be back in the morning. Notes in her flowing handwriting still sat on the desk. Messages had been left unreturned. A partially finished example remained on an easel at the front of the room. Student work sat unfinished.

It smelled like old paint, paper and glue. Like morning coffee.

But sadness had settled heavily over the room.

I remember feeling drawn to the same table where I had sat as a teenager. I sat down on the same stool I had occupied when I was Robin’s student.

I couldn’t sit in her chair.

I didn’t belong in her chair, at her desk.

Eventually, though, I realized I couldn’t teach in a room frozen in the moment Robin left it.

I emptied the desk.

I rearranged the classroom.

I organized.

I began making the room my own.

“That’s not how Ms. Mulligan did it.”

I heard those words more times than I could possibly count that first year.

They hurt because the students were grieving, but I was grieving too. I wasn’t Robin. I could never be Robin. And it took years before that classroom truly felt like mine—time for new students to arrive who hadn’t had the pleasure of knowing her or experiencing her creative energy.

But I never removed her completely.

Her last school photograph sat in a frame behind my desk for every year I taught there.

She was 60 years old in that photograph. It was the last school picture she ever took.

And when I packed up that classroom for the last time this summer, I consciously packed Robin too.

I needed something tangible from her to carry with me into whatever came next.

Maybe that’s why finding that pastel outside my door feels like more than simply receiving a beautiful piece of artwork.

Once again, I find myself wondering what I’m supposed to be creating.

Once again, I’m tempted to overthink it.

And once again, Robin has shown up to remind me to change the lens.

As I stare at the loose, abstract strokes of her lilies, I think about the body of work I wanted to create nine years ago. I wanted to understand the void that loss leaves behind.

I understand that void differently now.

Loss leaves empty spaces, certainly. But people also leave pieces of themselves behind.

We are irrevocably changed by the people we encounter.

Robin was there as I transitioned into adulthood, processed difficult relationships, and began my career. She was there as I navigated early motherhood and questioned my value and identity as an artist. And after she was gone, her influence remained as I became the teacher she had once believed I could be.

I think about how much impact she had in almost 20 years in the classroom.

And I think if she were sitting beside me now, she would probably help me turn the lens again.

Instead of worrying so much about what I am leaving behind, she might ask me to consider what I could do with the next 20 years.

I wish I had her confidence in knowing. Her ability to stand back from something and see it clearly. Her unapologetic understanding that our creative gifts are meant to be shared with the world.

She always seemed so much wiser than I feel now.

Maybe I simply want to remember what Robin already seemed to know—that I have something worth sharing.

Her pastel flowers are going to hang beside the desk where I am working now—the desk from which I am trying to traverse this next phase of my creative life.

Her photograph came with me from the classroom.

And somehow, her artwork found me here.

Nine years ago, I tried to draw the empty vessels grief leaves behind.

Maybe it’s time to return to those sketches.

Only this time, I don’t think I want to create solely from the emptiness.

I want to create from what remains.

The wisdom.

The beauty.

The confidence Robin shared so freely.

The understanding that acceptance doesn’t require us to give up pieces of ourselves as our lives change. Sometimes we simply have to change the lens long enough to recognize that we have been the same person all along.

An artist. A mother. A teacher. A creator of things and ideas and relationships and lives.

And perhaps the greatest creative gift Robin gave me was permission to live mine for myself—and to trust that whatever I create from that life is enough

.

I’m having a bit of an identity crisis.

While my mental health has quietly improved over the last six months, I have been attempting to plug my ears to a very loud question:

What do you want your life to look like?

And the truth is, I think I want mine to look pretty different from what it has been.

You see, in addition to teaching, I have spent the last 13 years learning how to homestead in my free time—and by free time, I mean approximately 99.5% of it.

This November will mark 15 years since I lost our first baby and found myself desperately searching for a way to prevent such a loss from ever happening again. I was 18 weeks along when we learned the devastating news.

Grief does strange things, and apparently mine wanted to go to a dairy farm.

When we pulled out of the hospital parking lot, instead of asking my husband to take me home, I asked him to drive more than an hour out of our way to a raw milk dairy I had recently learned about. I can’t remember exactly what I thought I would find there. Maybe I just needed somewhere to go that wasn’t home. Somewhere that, for a few hours, wasn’t filled with what we had just lost.

A small boy, no older than three and dressed for farm chores, met us at the barn. We spent the afternoon listening to his young father talk passionately about his cows and their way of life. They sent us home with a quart of warm milk and, perhaps without realizing it, had given us something else too.

For an afternoon, something other than grief had our attention.

I didn’t know it then, but that afternoon would change the direction of my life.

It sent me on a journey to understand food—how it was grown, how animals were raised, and what effect those choices might have on our bodies. It was really the first time I had even heard the label “organic.”

I read books and watched documentaries, following one question into another and learning everything I could. The more I learned, the more difficult it became to shop the way I always had. We started small, with organic dairy. Then came fruits and vegetables, followed by meat and pantry staples. Pretty soon, it was nearly all we bought.

Unfortunately, as my knowledge grew, so did the total at the bottom of the receipt.

Each change added a little more to our grocery bill, and those little increases kept building. I wanted to continue making the choices I had come to believe in, but buying everything organic came with a price tag we couldn’t ignore.

So I started wondering how much of it I could grow myself.

A garden came first. Then, somewhere along the way, growing food also became raising animals. Raising animals became learning skills. And those skills became a way of life.

This farm has heard the buzz of bees, the baa of sheep, the moo of cows, and the squeals of piglets bellied up to the milk bar. We dug and planted rows of vegetables, learning what would grow and what absolutely would not. Eventually, we added a high tunnel to extend the growing season. We planted trees and tended perennials, and the land showered us with wild edibles.

The woods and fields fed us, too, providing wild game for our table. They offered plants, bark, fibers, and pigments that found their way into my art. And, occasionally, they took a little back. We witnessed the brilliance of a crow and the slyness of a fox, both clever enough to steal chickens and eggs when given the chance.

Over the years, this little piece of land became far more than the place where we lived. It became the place where I learned just how much could be grown, gathered, raised, made, and created with my own two hands.

It taught us how to work hard. How to fail. How to forgive. How to nurture. How to persevere.

And it taught me what is possible with time.

Because it also taught me how to heal.

Maybe that is why I have been thinking so much about the phrase time is a thief.

I understand the sentiment more now than I ever have before. Time takes things quietly. Children grow. Parents age. Bodies change. Seasons end. The ordinary moments we barely notice become the ones we would give almost anything to step inside again.

There are things time has taken from me that I cannot get back.

But standing here, nearly 15 years after that afternoon at a little raw milk dairy, I’m beginning to wonder if I have been giving time an unfair reputation.

Because time didn’t just take.

It gave me this farm.

It gave me skills I didn’t know I could learn. Animals to care for. Food to grow. Mistakes to make and another season to try again. It gave me two little girls to raise here. And it gave me the chance to become someone I could not have imagined being when I climbed into that car with a quart of warm milk and an aching heart.

Slowly, it gave me healing.

For a long time, I think I assumed that because this way of life had given me so much, I had to keep choosing it. That walking away from any part of it might meant abandoning something that had become part of who I am.

But lately, I’ve been wondering if that’s true.

What if something can be exactly what you needed for a season without needing to last forever?

What if the years I spent building this life weren’t meant to bind me to it, but simply became part of who I needed to be before deciding what comes next?

Because when I ask myself that question again—What do you want your life to look like?—I don’t immediately picture another garden bed that needs weeding or another project waiting in the barn.

I picture adventures.

I picture having enough freedom to follow my curiosity simply because something sounds interesting. I picture going places we haven’t been, trying things I don’t already know how to do, and discovering parts of myself that may have been waiting patiently while I was busy tending everything here.

And that is difficult to admit.

This farm has been part of my identity for so long that I don’t quite know who I am without constantly working toward the next harvest, the next animal, or the next improvement.

Maybe that’s the identity crisis.

For years, this farm helped me find myself.

And now I find myself wondering whether I am ready to set parts of it down for a while and go find out who else I might be.

So yes, time can be a thief.

But it can be many other things, too.

It can heal.

It can teach.

It can give us enough distance to see that becoming someone new doesn’t require us to abandon who we have been.

And maybe that is what I’m finally beginning to understand.

Seasons aren’t meant to last forever.

Maybe this way of life isn’t meant to either

.

Subscribe now

We would be fine, but it didn’t stop my mind from playing an endless reel of catastrophic scenarios. Every wave felt bigger than the last. Every gust of wind carried another possibility. Fear has a funny way of convincing us that imagination is reality.

Beside me, my husband remained calm and collected. One hand rested lightly on the steering wheel, the other on the throttle. His eyes never left the water ahead as he quietly maneuvered a path forward. I stood gripping the windshield, my knees absorbing the shock of each wave as the boat pounded against Lake Michigan.

The trust I have in him has been present from the very beginning. He has always been stoic in moments of uncertainty, sending out tendrils of calm that I have gladly clung to over the past nineteen years. He is brave. He is confident. He has a way of making difficult things seem manageable.

What surprised me wasn’t that I trusted him.

It was how little I trusted myself.

Nothing about the disparity I had created in my mind was new, but this time it made me angry.

Angry at myself.

Angry that I had allowed a limiting belief to live inside me for so long.

There were aspects of my previous career that slowly chipped away at my confidence. They made me question my value until, somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that if being treated that way was acceptable, then perhaps it must also be true. Survival has a way of teaching lessons that continue long after they’re needed.

The frustrating part is that the evidence says otherwise.

I left a career that had sustained our family for fifteen years, despite the uncertainty that came with walking away. I threw myself into learning entirely new skills in an effort to build something of my own. I’ve worked multiple jobs. Started over. Adapted. Learned. Grown.

I am brave.

So why is it still easier to believe in someone else’s confidence than my own?

Perhaps because failing feels different when you have a family.

It’s one thing to disappoint yourself. Sometimes I think that’s easier than we’d like to admit. Letting down the people you love feels heavier. The decisions no longer belong only to you.

But as I stood there watching the shoreline draw closer, another thought quietly surfaced.

Would failing really mean I made the wrong choice?

I don’t think so.

Maybe failure is simply one of the ways we discover where we’re meant to belong next.

That realization felt strangely familiar. Looking back over our lives together, the moments that shaped us most rarely came with certainty attached to them.

Nineteen years ago we promised to build a life together.

Since then we’ve weathered losses I wouldn’t wish on anyone, including two pregnancies that ended far too soon. We took a leap of faith by leaving Illinois and moving back home after college because something in us knew it was time. I had been working multiple jobs just to make ends meet and felt pulled toward whatever opportunities might be waiting back in Michigan. After sending out only a handful of applications, doors began opening. My husband accepted a less-than-ideal position simply so we could be together, only to be offered a work-from-home role when he gave his notice.

Looking back, the best decisions in our lives haven’t felt forced.

They’ve felt like following a current instead of swimming against it.

Maybe that’s what trust looks like.

As we approached the dock, the roles quietly shifted.

He handed me the truck keys.

He always does.

There was no discussion about whether I could back the trailer into the water. No instructions. No hesitation. Just quiet confidence that I could do what needed to be done.

And I did.

It didn’t require much thought.

Maybe that’s part of the problem.

When I know I can do something, I simply do it. It’s only when I have time to overthink that doubt begins negotiating with confidence.

It struck me then that while I had spent the entire boat ride trusting him to get us safely back to shore, he had apparently been trusting me all along.

Perhaps that’s one of the greatest gifts nineteen years of marriage can offer.

Not simply having someone who believes in you.

But allowing yourself to finally see what they’ve been seeing all along.

Marriage isn’t grand gestures nearly as often as it’s small, ordinary moments repeated over thousands of days. It’s warming the car on a bitter winter morning before the other person leaves for work. It’s building barns, fences, hay sheds, and high tunnels because someone else’s dream has become your own. It’s picking up baby chicks from the post office. Raising children as a team. Asking, “What do you think?” because the answer genuinely matters. Trying to make each other laugh when life feels heavy. Holding one another through grief. Giving space when it’s needed and support when it’s asked for.

It’s growing so much as individuals that the word “we” begins to feel more natural than “me.”

And eventually, if you’re lucky, “we” grows again into “them.”

Today marks nineteen years of marriage.

As much as I hope my daughters find someone who believes in them the way my husband has always believed in me, I hope they learn something else even sooner.

I hope they trust themselves enough to accept the keys when they’re handed to them

Share

.

Waking as the morning light trickled through my bedroom window while the roosters greeted the day.

Do you have any idea what a novel experience that is for me?

Mind you, it was only until 6:30, but that’s late in my world.

I lay there for a few moments, slowly stretching the sleep from my muscles and blinking away the last bit of fog. Eventually I wandered into the kitchen to start the coffee, already feeling that familiar pressure in the pit of my stomach.

I had a blog post to write.

The problem was, I didn’t feel inspired.

Or so I thought.

I haven’t been sleeping much lately. I go to bed at my normal time, but somewhere between three and five in the morning, my eyes open and I’m wide awake.

The line between anxiety and excitement can be surprisingly blurry.

At first glance, they can look almost identical. Your heart is racing. Your mind won’t slow down. Sleep feels impossible.

So how do I know this isn’t anxiety?

Because almost every night, the last thought I have before drifting off is, I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow and keep working.

And when I do wake, that’s exactly what I want to do.

My mind immediately returns to whatever I was building the day before. Maybe it’s reorganizing a learning experience. Maybe it’s improving an onboarding system. Maybe it’s refining another piece of my learning system methodology or my creative practice framework. Sometimes it’s curriculum. Sometimes it’s instructional design. Sometimes it’s simply trying to answer the question, How can this be easier for someone else to learn?

Ideas have become difficult to turn off.

The challenge isn’t finding motivation anymore.

The challenge is remembering to stop.

I have to remind myself to keep balance.

Casey, eat some breakfast.

Casey, everyone else is awake. Go spend some time with your family.

Casey, move your body.

Casey, it’s time to milk the cow.

Casey, the weeds aren’t going to pull themselves.

Creative flow has always had a way of swallowing time for me. When I’m completely immersed in solving a problem or building something meaningful, the rest of the world fades into the background. It takes real effort to step away.

Six months ago, that wasn’t true.

Six months ago, I was waking up just as early, but for entirely different reasons.

Sunday nights had become something I dreaded. Panic attacks weren’t uncommon. I’d wake long before my alarm, my mind desperately trying to solve problems I had very little control over. I was exhausted before the day even began. I was short-tempered, distracted, overwhelmed, and constantly carrying the weight of things that felt impossible to fix.

No part of me looked forward to the morning.

What I’m experiencing now couldn’t be more different.

Looking back, I think I’ve finally stumbled into work that feels like an extension of who I already am instead of trying to force myself into someone I’m not.

I’ve always been a systems thinker.

I’m the person who notices patterns before individual details. I naturally look for connections, ask why things work the way they do, and wonder how they could work better. I enjoy untangling complexity and rebuilding it into something that feels clear, intuitive, and purposeful.

I have the curiosity of a scientist, the analytical mind of an engineer, and the imagination of an artist.

Years of teaching taught me how people learn. Designing curriculum taught me how ideas connect. Burnout taught me what happens when systems fail the people they’re meant to support.

Now those experiences are coming together in ways I never expected.

Helping organizations build better learning systems.

Designing onboarding that actually makes sense.

Creating curriculum that reduces confusion instead of adding to it.

Building a creative practice framework that helps people think more clearly, solve problems more confidently, and continue learning long after the instruction ends.

For the first time in a long time, my work feels deeply aligned with the way my mind naturally works.

Maybe that’s why I wake up excited.

Maybe that’s why sleep has become harder to find.

Not because I’m worried about tomorrow.

Because I can’t wait to get there.

So inspiration came.

Maybe not from where I expected it to, but it came.

Still tightly woven into the journey I’m on, but viewed through a slightly warmer lens—like the morning light spilling through my window today.

Hope quietly calling my name as the roosters greet the sun

Share

.

“The red cool car.”

That was what my little sister called it.

To the rest of the family, it was my pappy’s “midlife crisis.”

It was sometime in the nineties. My grandmother—my memmy—had taken her own life just a few years earlier. My pappy, a traditionally reserved Pennsylvania Dutch man and former dairy farmer, suddenly showed up with a bright red sports car.

As children, we thought it was hilarious.

A little ridiculous.

And if we’re being honest...we were all a little jealous.

I don’t remember riding in it. I don’t remember what kind of car it was. What I do remember is my pappy’s pride. He drove that thing every chance he got, and from my perspective as a child, he seemed happier.

Looking back now, I wonder if we called it a midlife crisis because that was easier than saying he was grieving.

Maybe buying the car didn’t heal anything.

Maybe it was simply a Band-Aid over a wound that could never fully close.

Maybe he bought it because, for an hour on a country road with the windows down, he could remember what it felt like to be light again.

Maybe none of those things are true.

I never asked.

But maybe the reason he bought the car isn’t really the point.

The point is that somewhere along the way, he gave himself permission to choose something that brought him joy.

And this morning I found myself wondering...

Why does grief so often become the catalyst for that?

Why do so many of us wait until we’ve lost someone—or lost ourselves—before we begin asking what makes us feel alive?

People often say you spend your childhood figuring out who you are. If they’re generous, they’ll include your twenties.

For me, it’s taken considerably longer.

Maybe I’m just a late bloomer.

Or maybe I wasn’t actually figuring out who I was.

Maybe I was figuring out who I needed to be.

As a kid, I learned how to be agreeable. I hated conflict and would bend myself into whatever shape seemed least likely to disappoint someone. I was an achiever, but that part wasn’t really for anyone else. I genuinely loved discovering what I was capable of. The people-pleasing, though—that was for everyone around me.

My twenties and thirties were spent building what I thought a good life looked like.

Teaching felt responsible. It was meaningful work. It gave me stability. It allowed me to raise my girls while doing something that mattered.

I don’t regret choosing it.

Not for a second.

But somewhere along the way, responsibility quietly became obligation.

As a wife, I believed love meant sacrifice.

As a mother, I believed love meant putting everyone else first.

As a teacher, I believed saying yes was simply part of the job.

So I said yes.

Again.

And again.

Until one day, about ten years into teaching, something inside me quietly whispered,

“This isn’t sustainable.”

I kept going for several more years anyway.

Because that’s what responsible people do.

Or at least that’s what I believed.

The strange thing about spending decades becoming who everyone else needs you to be is that eventually you start losing track of who you are underneath all of it.

I won’t sugarcoat it.

There is an enormous amount of grief wrapped up in shedding old versions of yourself.

Grief for the years you spent trying so hard.

Grief for opportunities you never took.

Grief for relationships that changed when you stopped being endlessly available.

Grief for realizing that some people loved the version of you that constantly served them more than the person underneath.

For a while, that realization made me angry.

How much time had I spent carrying expectations that were never really mine?

But the longer I sit with it, the more another understanding has begun to emerge.

I had to live through every one of those versions of myself to become who I am today.

And for the first time in a very long time...

I genuinely like who that person is becoming.

I’ve also realized something else.

Many of my relationships felt shallow not because the people were shallow, but because they knew only the version of me that was trying to earn belonging.

It’s hard to feel deeply known when you’re only showing carefully selected pieces of yourself.

Even now, I still rehearse conversations that never happen.

I still imagine explaining myself.

Trying to convince people that I’m still a good person when I say no.

That setting boundaries doesn’t mean I love them any less.

That choosing myself isn’t the same thing as rejecting everyone else.

I want everyone to understand.

And maybe that’s part of why I write these thoughts down and release them into the internet.

But it’s not the main reason.

I write because it helps me untangle the knots.

Because it helps me heal.

Because sometimes the thoughts need somewhere to go besides the endless conversations I have with myself.

The beautiful thing is this:

The people who truly matter already understand.

They don’t make me audition for their acceptance.

They don’t require a detailed explanation every time I choose myself.

They simply love me.

And maybe that’s what love was supposed to feel like all along.

Lately, I’ve started asking myself a simple question.

Am I doing this because I genuinely want to...

Or because I’ve always believed I should?

It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer after forty years of living mostly by obligation.

Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable.

Sometimes it’s liberating.

Sometimes it’s both.

Quitting teaching was one version of my red cool car.

Choosing to build something that feels deeply aligned with who I am is another.

Writing these essays.

Growing food.

Making art.

Protecting quiet mornings.

Saying no without immediately writing a three-page explanation in my head.

Little by little, I’m learning to prioritize the person I’ve neglected for decades.

Me.

Maybe your red cool car isn’t a car at all.

Maybe it’s saying no.

Maybe it’s changing careers.

Maybe it’s planting trees you’ll never live long enough to harvest.

Maybe it’s getting another tattoo.

Maybe it’s writing the book everyone says will never make money.

Maybe it’s taking the trip you’ve been putting off.

Maybe it’s making art again.

Maybe it’s finally becoming someone no one else expected.

Maybe it’s simply choosing to live the adventure instead of only talking about it.

Whatever it is, I hope you don’t wait for grief to give you permission.

My pappy only enjoyed his red cool car for a few years in his sixties.

I hope it made him feel lighter every time he turned the key.

As for me...

I think I’ve finally found my own.

And if I’m lucky,

I’ll be driving it for the rest of my life.

Subscribe now

With a job like that, my mind tends to wander.

Wash. Rinse. Inspect.

I found myself setting aside the imperfect ones for us. The ones with unsightly stains, because sometimes eggs have those. The slightly misshapen ones laid by some of our older hens.

Who would want to buy that?

And there it was again.

For most of my life, I have wasted an immense amount of time thinking about how to make money.

As soon as I was old enough to work, I was consumed by how, where, and when I could bring money in.

Who else can I babysit for?

How many hours can I work in a day?

How many jobs can I juggle at once?

Where else can I sell my art?

What else can I make?

The questions changed a little when my family and I moved to our small farm, but they never really went away.

If I’m growing this food for myself, would others want to buy some too?

What should I grow?

What should I bake?

What should I make?

What will sell?

How can I make this work around my day job?

Ahhhhhhh!

The hours I have spent putting pressure on myself.

The energy I have used spreading myself entirely too thin.

And there I was, standing at the sink, sorting eggs into two piles while simultaneously designing an unmanned farm stand in my head so I could sell our abundance while I worked on other things.

Why?

I actually asked myself that.

Why am I worrying about this?

The truth is, I think I needed to hit the metaphorical wall of burnout before I could recognize what this constant need to produce was doing to me.

I had forgotten how to listen to my body.

Or maybe I had never really learned how.

For years, I have operated from a place of scarcity. I believed I needed to constantly be looking for the next opportunity, the next job, the next thing I could make or sell.

Because if I stop looking for the next way to make money, how will money ever find me?

That’s a scary question when you’ve spent most of your life believing security is something you have to chase.

But the truth is, sometimes opportunities show up when we least expect them.

Sometimes you just have to have a little faith.

Right now, we have an abundance of eggs.

Beautiful eggs.

Pale pinks, soft blues, and greens. Some covered in tiny spots. Some perfectly smooth. Some a little misshapen because our older hens are apparently no longer concerned with quality control.

Our chickens are so free range that collecting eggs every day feels less like a farm chore and more like an Easter egg hunt.

And my first instinct was to figure out how to sell them.

But what if I didn’t?

What if the value of our abundance wasn’t measured by how much money I could make from it?

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about community. About neighbors and friends. About the people who have given more to me over the past six months than they could ever possibly imagine.

There is something incredibly satisfying about handing those people food I lovingly labored over.

Food from our land.

Food from some of the healthiest, happiest free-range hens around.

Protein-packed food housed in its own uniquely colored, brilliantly designed little to-go container.

Giving the eggs away feels freeing.

I don’t have to inspect each one and wonder if someone would pay for it.

I don’t have to calculate a price.

I don’t have to build the farm stand.

I can simply put something good into the hands of someone I care about.

I talked about this in therapy recently.

I admitted that sometimes I feel guilty about the way I think about doing good things for people.

The truth is, I genuinely want to make others feel good.

But somewhere inside me, I also believe that if I put enough goodness into the world, maybe some of that goodness will eventually find its way back to me.

And I felt guilty for that.

My therapist asked me a very simple question.

Why is that a bad thing?

Why is it wrong to hope good things find their way to you?

That question has stuck with me.

Maybe I have spent so much of my life believing I have to earn everything that even hoping for goodness feels selfish.

Like I don’t deserve it unless I have worked hard enough, produced enough, or exhausted myself enough first.

I’m tired of that.

I’m tired of measuring every opportunity by its potential profit.

I’m tired of looking at abundance and immediately asking how I can monetize it.

I’m tired of believing that if I’m not constantly searching for the next opportunity, I’ll somehow miss it.

So, for now, I’m trying something different.

I’m choosing to put positive energy into the world.

Sometimes that might look profound.

Most of the time, I suspect it won’t.

Sometimes it might simply look like a carton filled with pale pink, blue, green, spotted, and slightly misshapen eggs.

If you find yourself the recipient of one of those cartons, just know that it’s me sending a little positive energy out into the universe.

And yes, I hope some of that goodness eventually finds its way back to me.

I’m finally starting to believe there’s nothing wrong with that.

I hope my daughters learn this lesson earlier than I did.

Work because you want to, not because you constantly feel like you have to.

And I don’t just mean your day job.

Create because you want to create.

Grow because you want to grow.

Make because you want to make.

Sometimes the value of sharing your abundance is worth far more than the money you could have earned from it.

Sometimes, you already have more than enough

.

I quit my job on Monday.

I followed the familiar route I had been driving for eight years. I pulled into the same parking lot, got out of my car, and approached the same door I had habitually entered. I swiped the keycard I knew I would no longer have in my possession when I left.

I was there to turn in my keys, hand over my letter of resignation, and gather the few personal things still sitting in my classroom.

My heart was beating so hard I could feel it rack my entire body.

I wasn’t scared to quit my job.

I was terrified of what came after.

Financial insecurity. Uncertainty. Not knowing exactly what I would call myself when someone asked what I did for a living.

For a long time, those fears had been enough to keep me walking through those doors.

Back in December, I was diagnosed with depression and clinical burnout related to my work environment. I wanted to sleep all the time. I lost the drive to do things I genuinely enjoyed. By the time I came home, I had almost nothing left to give my family.

Sunday evenings brought panic attacks as I anticipated walking through the harsh light of those halls the next morning.

I jumped at the sound of the school bell.

My mind and body had been screaming at me, and I had become incredibly skilled at looking the other way.

All for the sake of a paycheck and familiarity.

Fear has a funny way of disguising itself as responsibility.

If I don’t take care of everything, who will?

That belief has followed me for a long time. My overindependence has convinced me that security is something I have to build, maintain, and protect entirely on my own. So I held myself to a standard I wouldn’t wish upon anyone I cared about.

My mindset didn’t begin to shift until a conversation with my therapist led me to think about my daughters.

What would I tell them if they came to me someday feeling the way I did?

Would I tell them to stay?

Would I tell them to ignore their bodies? Push through the panic attacks? Accept having no capacity left for the people they loved because at least the paycheck was predictable?

Of course I wouldn’t.

The thought that followed made me incredibly sad.

Why do I love my daughters more than I love myself?

I’m still unpacking that one.

I realized I had been asking myself to endure something I would never ask of them. I was allowing fear to control my decisions.

That isn’t who I am.

More importantly, it isn’t who I want my daughters to become.

So, with strength borrowed from a small group of friends, I walked through those doors.

I handed in my resignation.

My principal was incredibly understanding. She told me she respected my decision to put myself and my family first.

And when I pulled out of the parking lot, I felt immense relief.

It wasn’t the last time I would ever leave that parking lot.

It was just the last time I would leave it as an employee.

Thankfully, my therapy appointment happened to fall later that same day because, I won’t lie, I needed my hand held a little.

I needed to be reminded that everything I was feeling was okay.

I needed someone to tell me I didn’t have to figure out my entire life that afternoon.

One day at a time.

Stay in the present.

Don’t waste today contemplating every possible thing that could go wrong tomorrow.

Apparently, I needed to hear that because the next morning life offered me a very literal lesson in beginning again.

At 5:15 a.m., I walked toward the barn and noticed two tiny ears flickering above a bed of hay.

About thirty feet from the barn, nestled into the hay, was a tiny chocolate-brown calf. His fur was still wet. His eyes were wide from the ordeal he had just experienced.

Edna, our family milk cow, stood diligently over him.

Then I heard her low moo.

A wave of relief washed over me when I realized he was okay.

Anyone who has owned cattle knows that sometimes they aren’t.

I quietly approached and ran my hand along his side. I wiped the remaining fluid from his nose and watched him begin the enormous task of figuring out how to be alive.

His legs were wobbly.

He was nervous.

He cried.

And he had absolutely no idea where the milk bar was.

But he tried.

And tried.

And tried again.

He would push himself to his feet only to tumble back down. He exhausted himself with the effort of standing and nursing. My daughters and I spent the day offering guiding hands, gently showing him where he needed to go.

We couldn’t nurse for him.

We couldn’t make his legs stronger.

We couldn’t take over the process of learning.

But we could guide him toward the source.

By the end of the day, he showed us he could find it himself.

Standing there watching him, I realized more had been birthed that morning than a calf.

I have spent more than fifteen years calling myself a teacher.

Now I find myself stumbling through a collection of new words.

Instructional designer.

Education architect.

Consultant.

Artist.

Writer.

Teacher.

All of the above?

They’re a bit of a mouthful, and saying them out loud still feels strange.

But new things often do.

Maybe I just need to practice saying them.

Because the truth is, I am still a teacher. I’m just teaching in a slightly different capacity now.

The two days since I quit have been a whirlwind of calf checks, milking, PowerPoint accessibility, client work, job applications, coffee, excitement, and occasional overwhelm.

There have been no naps.

I would like the record to reflect that.

When the overwhelm creeps in, I find myself meditating. I remind myself to return to the present. I intentionally walk away from the screen and spend time with my family, the farm animals, and nature.

I listen.

I’m trying to give myself enough quiet to recognize the next right move.

Not the desperate move.

Not the move made because I’m afraid there won’t be another opportunity.

The aligned move.

And I am learning to listen for the guiding calls around me.

Sometimes they come from my family.

Sometimes from friends offering comfort, reassurance, connection, relatability, or affirmation.

Sometimes they come from my own intuition.

And sometimes, apparently, they sound like the low moo of a mother cow calling her calf back toward the source.

Some days we need a cheerleader.

Some days we need a reality check.

Some days we need a helping hand pointing us toward what we haven’t learned to find on our own yet.

Motherhood, friendship, and teaching all have this in common.

Maybe life does too.

We need to know we aren’t alone.

We need to be reminded that an uncertain future doesn’t define us.

We need people who see our wobbly legs and don’t mistake them for an inability to stand.

As I sit here watching the sun come up and drinking my morning coffee, I wonder what this new day will bring for both of us.

I hope to fulfill my purpose.

I hope to push fear aside when uncertainty inevitably shows up.

I hope to gain a little confidence every day and continue learning new things.

I hope to embrace simple things.

I hope to be completely unabashed about my enthusiasm for the things I love.

I hope to become more vocal when I need something I do not have.

And I hope I learn to rest when my body tells me it needs to.

For now, my legs are still a little wobbly.

His are too.

But as we continue moving through life, our hesitant steps will gain confidence.

We will learn where the source is.

And tomorrow, we will stand a little stronger

.

Subscribe now

We had only been home from our family vacation for a few days when I could feel it creeping back in.

That familiar pressure.

The pressure to build something meaningful.
The pressure to become financially secure.
The pressure to make all of the pieces move forward at once.

One minute I was applying for remote positions to supplement our income. The next I was developing lessons and refining the Constructive Creativity Framework I’ve spent months building. In between, there were projects waiting on the homestead—gardens that needed tending, things that needed fixing, ideas that refused to wait.

Subscribe now

Every one of them felt important.

By the middle of the afternoon I was exhausted.

A nap sounded wonderful.

Instead, I wandered outside and very ungracefully climbed into my daughters’ web swing beneath the enormous maple tree that shades much of our yard. I stretched out, looked up through the canopy, and simply existed for a while.

The leaves moved gently overhead.

For the first time all day, nothing needed me.

I silently thanked Mother Nature for the breeze that had convinced at least some of our generous mosquito population to take a break from their usual enthusiasm.

Then I noticed movement.

About two feet above the ground, on the trunk of the maple, was the tiniest flash of bright green.

An inchworm.

At least that’s what I always called them growing up.

Later I learned it’s actually a cankerworm—a caterpillar common throughout northern forests. They spend their lives feeding on maple, oak, elm, and apple leaves.

I looked up.

The nearest leaves it wanted were easily thirty feet above where it had begun.

Thirty feet.

For a creature barely longer than my fingernail, it might as well have been a mountain.

It wasn’t moving quickly.

It certainly wasn’t moving gracefully.

Stretch.

Anchor.

Pull.

Repeat.

Over and over again.

It wasn’t stopping to wonder if the climb was worth it.

It wasn’t comparing itself to the birds that could simply fly to the canopy.

It wasn’t discouraged by how impossibly far away the leaves still were.

It simply continued climbing.

Watching that tiny creature, I couldn’t help but laugh.

Here I was worrying that my business wasn’t growing quickly enough.

Wondering if I should be farther along.

Questioning whether building a curriculum, creating resources, writing blog posts, applying for work, and growing a homestead all at once was even possible.

Meanwhile, this little caterpillar was quietly reminding me that progress has never depended on speed.

It depends on direction.

Building something worthwhile has never been about giant leaps.

It’s built one lesson at a time.

One conversation.

One blog post.

One application.

One client.

One small improvement that almost no one notices until, one day, they look back and realize they’ve climbed farther than they ever imagined.

The funny thing about building a business is that, from the outside, people often only notice when it finally reaches the leaves.

They don’t see the thousands of tiny movements made before anyone was watching.

The late nights.

The uncertainty.

The revisions.

The ideas that didn’t work.

The courage it takes to keep moving before there’s any evidence that you’ll succeed.

Making something from nothing requires a certain kind of fearlessness.

Not because you aren’t afraid.

Because you decide to keep climbing anyway.

I don’t know exactly where this business will take me.

I don’t know how many more revisions the curriculum will need before it’s ready.

I don’t know which remote opportunities will turn into meaningful work.

But I know this.

The inchworm isn’t worried about whether it will ever reach the canopy.

It just keeps reaching for the next piece of bark.

Maybe that’s all any of us can do.

Stretch.

Anchor.

Pull.

Repeat.

And trust that enough inches, taken with purpose, eventually become thirty feet.