At one point Wolfie came out and stopped for a second when he saw all of us sitting there together. His Mimi and Bapa. His Nona and Nono. Aunt RoRo. Uncle Steve. Aunt Judy.

The look on his face was extraordinary.

Not excitement exactly. Something deeper than that. The kind of delight small children have when they suddenly realize all the people they love most in the world are gathered together in one place, safe and close and fully theirs for the moment.

Then he ran off into the backyard to play baseball with his Dada and his Bapa while the rest of us kept talking.

The conversation drifted into the future in the way conversations often do now. Water. Energy. Land. Growth. Technology. What kind of world we are building. What kind of world we are leaving behind.

Around the table were people who spend a great deal of time thinking about infrastructure, systems, business, and the pace of change happening all around us. There were also people who care deeply about watersheds, farmland, ecosystems, wildlife, and what happens when human beings forget that we are still part of the living world.

At one point I looked around and realized something important.

Nobody there was wrong.

The people building and shaping the future understand something real. Human life is changing rapidly. The scale of that change is difficult to fully comprehend sometimes, and many of the people working closest to it are trying to solve extraordinarily difficult problems under immense pressure.

But the people worried about the land and water are not wrong either.

You cannot spend your mornings feeding chickens, tending gardens, watching pollinators move through squash blossoms, planting potatoes with grandchildren, paying attention to weather patterns, lake temperatures, birds returning, or the subtle shifts in seasonal rhythms without understanding something else that is equally real.

Human beings do not stand outside nature.

We belong to it.

Living near the Great Lakes makes that feel tangible. Water stops being abstract here. You feel its presence. Its importance. Farmers understand this. Gardeners understand this. Herbalists understand this. Anyone who has depended on healthy soil understands this.

And I think that is the deeper conversation quietly trying to emerge underneath all the noise.

Not progress versus preservation.

Not growth versus stewardship.

Something more mature than that.

The real question is whether we are wise enough to build powerful systems without severing ourselves from the things that make life possible in the first place.

Personally, I think we are capable of it.

Human beings are extraordinarily creative when we choose to be. We solve difficult problems. We adapt. We innovate. We build remarkable things. Healthy businesses matter. Infrastructure matters. Human progress matters.

But stewardship matters too.

The older I get, the more I think stewardship may actually be one of the highest forms of intelligence.

Nothing living survives long by taking endlessly without giving something back. Forests do not survive that way. Neither do watersheds. Neither do healthy farms, thriving ecosystems, or enduring communities.

Nature has never worked that way.

Maybe that is part of what humanity is being asked to learn now as our systems become more powerful and our ability to alter the world around us accelerates faster than our wisdom sometimes does.

Not how to stop advancing.

But how to advance without losing relationship to one another, to the living world, or to ourselves in the process.

The interesting thing is that sitting there on my brother’s back porch, nobody sounded ideological about any of it. Nobody was trying to win.

Everyone sitting there wanted the same thing in the end.

A future where children like Wolfie inherit a world that is livable, beautiful, connected, and alive.

Maybe we need more conversations that sound like people sitting together before dinner while a little boy plays baseball in the backyard surrounded by people who love him completely.

Standing there that evening listening to Wolfie and his Bapa laughing out in the yard, I remember thinking that this may be the real work ahead of us now.

Not choosing between progress and the living world.

Learning whether we are wise enough to protect both.

Everything rewards vigilance instead.

I notice it sometimes before I even get out of bed in the morning. The reach for the phone. The quick scan of headlines. The low-grade sense that somewhere, something is happening that requires attention immediately. Every platform seems designed to keep the body slightly mobilized, slightly alert, slightly prepared for impact. After a while you stop noticing the feeling altogether. You begin assuming this is simply what being an informed, caring, responsible person feels like.

I understand that impulse deeply because vigilance was already familiar territory to me long before smartphones and twenty-four-hour news cycles arrived.

I grew up in an environment where paying attention mattered. I learned early how to read a room before anyone spoke. I learned how to feel tension moving underneath conversation. I learned how to detect emotional weather before the storm actually arrived. Children adapt to the environments they are given, and eventually those adaptations stop feeling like adaptations at all. They simply become who you think you are.

Years later, I went to work in my family business, which turned out to be almost perfectly suited for someone whose body already knew how to live inside pressure.

I can still remember mornings sitting in the parking lot for one extra moment before opening the car door, already scanning internally before I even walked inside. You could feel when something was off almost immediately. A certain silence. A certain tone. The energy of people speaking too carefully. I used to know things were wrong before anyone actually said they were wrong.

There were always problems to solve. Fires to put out. Someone upset. Something unstable. Something requiring immediate attention.

I was very good at it.

At the time, I thought what I was feeling was competence.

Part of it was.

Still, I think some forms of competence are also forms of chronic vigilance that happen to be socially rewarded. People admire the person who can carry enormous pressure without falling apart. They praise the one who stays calm during chaos, who absorbs complexity, who anticipates problems before they happen. Nobody asks what it costs a body to remain internally braced for decades at a time.

About twenty years ago, right after I closed the business, I remember sitting down to have my blood pressure taken. I can still see the numbers in my mind. I remember staring at them feeling something close to disbelief move through me.

They were dangerously high, triple digits up and down.

What I remember most clearly was the strange feeling of my body finally saying out loud what my mind had spent years overriding.

At the same time, I was moving through menopause, which now feels almost symbolic looking back on it. Hormones shifting. Stress accumulating. A body that had spent decades adapting quietly finally losing its ability to compensate so gracefully.

The body keeps telling the truth eventually.

There were years where remaining vigilant was not dysfunction. It was love.

The long seasons of caring for aging parents. Medical scares. Surgeries. Recovery. Watching people you love move through vulnerability while trying to remain steady yourself. My body learned vigilance honestly.

That period changed me more than I understood at the time. It is part of what eventually led me toward becoming board certified as a health coach and functional medicine nutrition counselor. I wanted to understand what chronic stress actually does to a person over time. I wanted to understand inflammation, cortisol, adaptation, recovery. Not academically. Personally.

I suspect many of us are carrying far more physiological exhaustion than we realize.

The interesting thing is that my life now is actually very beautiful.

In the mornings I walk outside and feed the chickens. There are horses again. Gardens. Books stacked beside chairs with pages folded over from rereading passages I want to think about longer. There is usually dirt somewhere under my fingernails now. My grandson runs through the yard hunting for salamanders and caterpillars as though he has personally discovered them for the first time in human history.

There is slowness here that did not exist in earlier decades of my life. There is enough here.

Jim is doing work now that feels deeply aligned with who he is, and there is something profoundly moving about watching someone you love build work that gives energy back instead of only consuming it. After years of pressure and responsibility and constant motion, there is softness in our life now that once would have felt almost unfamiliar to both of us.

Still, sometimes I notice my body behaving as though danger may arrive at any moment. A delayed text message. An unexpected phone call. A sudden shift in tone.

The reaction arrives before thought does.

I suspect I am not alone in this.

I think there are many people walking around with bodies trained for survival, adaptation, endurance, hyper-awareness, and emotional preparedness while trying to live inside lives that no longer fully require those settings.

The difficult thing about caring deeply is that eventually you can start confusing vigilance with moral goodness. You begin believing that staying emotionally mobilized proves you are paying attention. That remaining worried proves you have not become complacent. That if you soften too much, rest too deeply, or stop scanning constantly, perhaps you are abandoning something important.

The world certainly gives us endless reasons to remain activated right now. There is always another outrage. Another emergency. Another crisis demanding attention.

Still, lately I find myself wondering something I never would have allowed myself to wonder years ago.

What if remaining physiologically at war all the time is not actually helping as much as we think it is?

What if some of the deepest forms of contribution look quieter than we have been taught?

Not disengagement.

Not apathy.

Not pretending the world is simple or safe.

But steadiness. Presence. Groundedness. The ability to remain human without allowing fear and urgency to organize every internal response.

Lately I have found myself coming full circle back to horses again, which feels strangely fitting now that I think about it.

Horse people understand these things in ways that are difficult to explain unless you have lived around them. Horses notice tension before words. They respond to presence more than performance. You cannot fake steadiness around them. Your body tells the truth long before your mind does.

A horse knows when someone is internally braced even if they are smiling beautifully on the outside.

There is something deeply regulating about being around animals that require congruence instead of performance. Chickens still need feeding whether the news cycle is catastrophic or not. Horses still need water. Gardens still need tending. Living things pull you back toward rhythms that are older and far less interested in urgency.

Twenty years ago I might have dismissed this kind of life as too small.

Now I find myself standing at the kitchen sink early in the morning listening to the kettle heat while the house is still quiet, and I can actually feel something inside my body unclench before the day begins.

That feels important.

The older I get, the more I suspect these things are not distractions from meaningful life.

I think they ARE meaningful life.

Civilizations survive because somewhere, even during difficult times, people continue feeding living things. People continue gathering around tables. People continue loving children tenderly. People continue planting gardens, caring for animals, making soup, repairing fences, and creating spaces where another human being can finally exhale for a little while.

Maybe that matters more than we realize and maybe tenderness is not weakness at all.

Maybe tenderness is what allows human beings to remain human during difficult times.

The world is still noisy this morning. The headlines are still waiting. There are still endless reasons to brace.

Still, outside the kitchen window, the chickens are already moving through the grass waiting for breakfast, entirely unconcerned with the internet’s sense of urgency. I’ll be spending time with the horses this afternoon. The garden still needs tending. Wolfie will almost certainly come inside with muddy boots.

More and more, I am beginning to think these small rhythms are not distractions from life.

I think they may be the thing trying to save us from forgetting how to live it.

The children were soaked. Their boots slipped in the mud, their gloves were wet through, and nobody appeared remotely interested in going inside. One little girl proudly carried what looked to me like an ordinary stick, though in her mind it was clearly something extraordinary. Another child had collected stones into the pocket of a raincoat already sagging under the weight. Wolfie looked up only briefly when I called his name, gave me a grin that contained equal parts joy and mischief, then disappeared back into the business of being exactly where he was.

It was wonderful.

No one had asked them to sit still. No one had handed them a worksheet or explained the objective of the morning. The teachers stood nearby, paying close attention while allowing the children the dignity of their own experience. The whole thing felt gloriously untamed. Not careless, not chaotic, but alive in a way modern childhood often is not.

I found myself thinking how strange it is that we have slowly built a world where children rarely get to be children in the oldest sense of the word. We supervise them constantly, schedule their days, cushion every edge, narrate every interaction, and then wonder why anxiety seems to bloom earlier with every passing generation. We have mistaken control for care often enough that many of us no longer recognise the difference.

My son’s childhood held far more freedom than many children experience now. There were long stretches of outdoor play, scraped knees, improvised adventures, and the ordinary small risks that teach a child where their own edges are. Looking back, I think some of the healthiest parts of growing up happen when adults are present enough for safety but distant enough to allow discovery. Children need room to negotiate the world for themselves before adulthood arrives demanding that they already know how.

What Wolfie experiences in that forest school feels oddly close to that older way of growing up. Not identical, of course. There are teachers nearby and boundaries in place. Still, there is something deeply important happening there that extends far beyond education. The children are learning that the world belongs to them too. They are learning competence instead of constant caution. They are learning how to trust themselves.

The phrase “free-range children” makes some people uncomfortable. The word “feral” makes them even more so. It conjures images of disorder, irresponsibility, a lack of civilisation itself. Yet watching those children in the freezing rain, I found myself wondering whether a little more feral energy might be exactly what this generation needs.

The world they are inheriting is not stable. It is not orderly. It does not reward obedience in the way the industrial world once did. Schools, for all the good they still provide, were designed largely to prepare children for predictability. Show up on time. Follow instructions. Memorise information. Stay within the lines. Those skills made sense in a world built around factories, offices, and fixed careers.

That world is disappearing really quickly and in plain sight.

The children growing up now will need something different from us. They will need adaptability, resilience, curiosity, discernment, emotional steadiness, and the ability to function in uncertainty without collapsing under its weight. They will need imagination. They will need the confidence to try things without immediate mastery and the capacity to recover when things go wrong. Most of all, they will need a grounded sense of themselves that does not depend entirely on external validation.

A child standing in the rain turning over rocks with cold fingers may be learning far more than we realise.

His other school is excellent and he loves it there as well. Still, there is a different quality in him when he talks about the forest. His stories become expansive and detailed. He speaks with ownership rather than performance. There is dirt under his nails and excitement in his voice. He comes home tired in the healthiest possible way, the sort of tiredness that belongs to a fully inhabited day.

I suspect children are starved for this kind of experience far more than we understand and I’m fairly sure that many adults are too.

At sixty-six, my own life has a settled quality to it. There is structure and stability I deeply appreciate. Still, I cannot help noticing that the moments which remain most alive in memory are rarely the carefully managed ones. They are the wild moments. The unscripted moments. The muddy, inconvenient, unpredictable moments where something real pushed through.

Watching Wolfie disappear into the woods with the rain pouring down around him, I realised that what looked from the outside like play might actually be preparation of the deepest kind. Not preparation for a specific profession or pathway, but preparation for being fully human in a world that is going to ask far more of him than memorisation and compliance.

Perhaps that is the real task before us now.

Not raising perfectly managed children, but raising capable ones.

Not children who fear the world, but children who know how to meet it as it is.

Not children protected from every discomfort, but children who understand that discomfort is survivable and often transformative.

Not children who only know how to follow the map, but children confident enough to walk into the forest while the rain pours down around them and discover something for themselves.

Wolfie will grow into a future I can only partially imagine. I will not be here for all of it, though I intend to be here for as much as I can. The question of what we are leaving these children remains with me daily now. What comforts me, strangely enough, is the growing sense that the answer may not lie entirely in building tighter systems or smarter structures.

Children were never meant to grow only inside walls.

They were meant to climb things. To get wet and cold and muddy. To wander more than a little. To discover what their own hands and minds are capable of without every moment being managed, measured, or corrected. They were meant to build relationships not only with information, but with the physical world itself. Dirt. Water. Trees. Weather. Risk. Wonder.

Perhaps what looks “feral” to modern eyes is sometimes simply human.

I think about Wolfie out there in the pouring rain, entirely absorbed in the search for salamanders while the adults stood shivering nearby under hoods and jackets. He was not preparing for a test. He was not building a résumé. He was not optimising for future success.

He was learning the world.

There is something deeply reassuring in that for me.

For all our technology, our systems, our predictions, and our attempts to engineer certainty, human beings still grow the same way we always have. Through experience. Through relationship. Through curiosity. Through small acts of independence that slowly become confidence.

The future these children are inheriting will ask extraordinary things of them. It will change faster than ours did. It will likely confuse them at times in ways we cannot yet anticipate. I suspect the children who navigate it best will not necessarily be the ones who were managed most carefully. They may be the ones who learned early that the world is not something to fear.

They may be the children allowed to become a little wild first.

The other night my sister sent me a post about the massive lay-offs at Disney, artists, and AI. It was one of those pieces that’s everywhere right now, the kind that lands quickly and leaves a feeling behind. For her, it wasn’t just another story in the feed. She’s a painter, and it touched something much closer to home.

She told me she’s exhausted from trying to figure out what’s real anymore. That constant sorting, what’s true, what’s not, what’s been stretched or amplified. As we kept talking, it became clear that wasn’t the only thing. There was something deeper in it, a sense that people themselves are starting to feel expendable, and that something essential, the spark she feels when she paints, could get lost in all of this.

We didn’t stay on the post for very long. The conversation moved into how this moment feels on a broader level. Everything is faster, louder, harder to orient to. There’s a kind of instability to it, like the ground is shifting just enough that you notice it, even if you can’t quite explain why.

As I thought through my responses I remembered something Jim said that has stayed with me. He doesn’t see AI as creating this feeling so much as amplifying something that’s already been there. We’ve been navigating questions of what’s real and what isn’t for a long time. What’s changed is the speed and the scale. It’s all arriving at once now, and there’s no real space to process it before the next thing hits.

That didn’t make the feeling go away, but it shifted how I was looking at it. If this isn’t only about technology, then it’s also about the way we’ve been doing things for a while. The pace we’ve accepted, the way value gets defined, what gets prioritized and what quietly falls to the side. All of that becomes much more visible under this kind of pressure.

What’s interesting is that my own relationship with AI has been shifting at the same time. I resisted it at first. It felt intrusive, maybe even a little threatening in ways I couldn’t quite articulate. But over time, through conversations with Jim and the people he works with, I started to see it differently. It wasn’t going away, and it wasn’t as simple as I had made it in my mind.

I began to get curious about how it might actually be used well.

For me, that’s shown up in very ordinary, very real ways. I’ve used it to map out my gardens, to think through planting cycles, to understand what’s actually happening here in Northeast Ohio, where the seasons don’t feel as predictable as they once did. Snow one week, warm soil the next, and a constant sense that something has shifted. AI has helped me make sense of that, pulling together real data in a way that allows me to see more clearly and make better decisions.

It’s not doing the work for me. It’s helping me see.

And I’ve noticed something else. The quality of what I get from it depends entirely on how I engage with it. A simple question brings a simple answer. A more thoughtful question opens up something deeper. There’s something unexpectedly beautiful in that, a kind of clarity that comes from interacting with something that isn’t reacting emotionally, but simply responding to what’s being asked.

That doesn’t replace anything human. It changes how I approach what I’m doing.

At the same time, I see another set of conversations happening that don’t show up in posts like I saw last night. In Jim’s work, and the leaders he spends time with, there’s currently a real effort to step back and ask a different question. Not how to move faster or replace more, but how to use this in a way that doesn’t lose what matters, and how to bring more of it forward with dignity and humanity. Those conversations take time. They don’t translate easily into headlines or Tik Tok videos, but they are happening.

I keep coming back to what my sister said, that instinct to hold onto what matters. It doesn’t feel like resistance to me. It feels more like orientation. A way of staying connected to something real while everything else is shifting so quickly, and maybe that’s what this moment is asking of us. Not to pull back from it, and not to rush blindly forward, but to stay present enough to decide what we carry with us as things change.

There is still a hand on the brush. There is still a heart in the garden, noticing the soil, paying attention to the weather, choosing what to plant and when. There is still the quiet, steady work of making something real in a world that is moving faster than it knows how to understand itself.

Nothing about that is expendable, and if anything, it is quickly becoming more valuable.

So maybe the work now is not to fight for relevance in a system that keeps shifting its definition, but to stay rooted in the things that have always made us human. To keep choosing attention over noise, care over speed, presence over reaction. To keep making things that carry the weight of being made by a real person, in a real moment, with real hands.

May you trust what is yours to keep.

May you recognize the difference between what is loud and what is true.

May you stay close to the work that asks something of you, and gives something back.

And may you never forget that the spark you carry is not something that can be replicated, scaled, or replaced. It can only be lived.

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If this kind of thinking feels like a place you can exhale for a moment, come closer.

I write about gardens, work, change, and the quiet decisions that shape a life in the middle of it all. Some of it is practical. Some of it is personal. All of it is real.

You can read for free, or step into the paid side where I go deeper, share more, and build something a little more rooted together.

The ramps are among the first.

This year, I didn’t go into the woods alone. Yesterday I had a three-year-old beside me, muddy boots already damp from wherever he had decided to step, a stick in one hand, and Tom Petty being sung at full volume with absolutely no concern for pitch, rhythm, or remembering the actual words. “Free Fallin’’ and “A Higher Place” mostly—though it drifted now and then into something that might have been “You Wreck Me” echoing through the trees in that way only a child can manage, which, in fairness, is probably exactly how Tom Petty is meant to be sung in the woods.

We weren’t foraging in the way adults tend to mean it. There was no hurry to gather, no sense of task or outcome, only the slow unfolding of one thing after another as we moved through the trees together. And somewhere between showing him how to recognize the first leaves pushing through the forest floor and watching him decide, very seriously, how many he might eat before his stomach objected, it became clear that this was never really about food. It was about relationship—about the land, about attention, about knowing when to take and when to stop.

That last part matters more than people realize, because when you come across a patch of ramps, especially a good one, it can feel like abundance has simply been laid out in front of you, as though the forest has decided to be generous that day. But that isn’t quite true. Ramps take time—years, sometimes—to establish themselves, and what looks like plenty can be undone far more quickly than most people imagine. So you learn, over time, to move differently, to take a leaf instead of the whole plant when you can, to leave enough that the patch still looks as though you were never there, to step lightly not just with your feet but with your choices, until you begin to understand that you are not gathering from the land so much as participating in it.

And part of that way of moving includes knowing that not everything that looks right is safe, and not everything that grows is ours to take. Early spring woods are filled with plants that can be easily mistaken for one another—lily of the valley, false hellebore, autumn crocus, even bluebead lily—and some of them are not meant for us at all. These are the moments where attention matters most, where you slow down instead of hurrying forward. Ramps will always tell you what they are if you pause long enough to listen. You crush a leaf, bring it to your nose, and that unmistakable scent—onion, garlic, something sharp and alive—will be there. If it isn’t, you leave it where it is, no second guessing, no hoping you’re right, just a quiet respect for what the land is showing you. And even when you are certain, you take only what you need—a leaf here, another there—enough to carry home, but never so much that the place feels emptied by your presence, the patch left behind as though you had only passed through.

There is something else in all of this that feels more important with every passing year, and that is how we teach our children. Not just what to gather, but how to see. Every spring, I hear from mothers who are worried about what is growing in their yards, plants appearing almost overnight, some harmless, some not, and the instinct is to pull them out, to clear them away, to make everything safe by removing what feels uncertain. And of course, there is reason for care. There is a difference between poison hemlock and Queen Anne’s lace, a difference between ramps and lily of the valley, and these are not small distinctions. But I have come to believe that the answer is not to remove everything we do not yet understand. It is to learn it, and to teach it.

Because one day, they will be out in the woods without us, and what they carry with them will matter—not a rule or a warning, but a kind of knowing, the ability to pause, to recognize, to say quietly, no, that one isn’t for me, and just as importantly, to know what is. To recognize what can be gathered, what can be trusted, what belongs to them and what does not. And when we choose to learn rather than remove, we leave the world more intact—the berries that are not for us remain for the birds, the plants we do not eat continue to grow where they belong, and the land is not stripped back to what feels safe, but allowed to remain whole. We are not separate from that system; we are part of it. And when we teach our children this way—how to recognize, how to respect, how to take only what is theirs to take—we are giving them something far more valuable than information. We are giving them a way to live in the world without damaging what sustains it, and perhaps, one day, the quiet confidence of knowing how to feed themselves, not from fear, but from familiarity.

What struck me most, walking there beside him, was how naturally he understood something many adults forget. He didn’t rush. He didn’t take more than he needed. He gathered one, maybe two, and then he was off again, drawn to a patch of mud, a stick that needed to be carried, something else that had caught his attention. And in that rhythm, there was something right—not extraction, but participation, a way of moving through the world that feels both lighter and more true.

Ramps, when you bring them home, are strong in a way that reminds you they are still wild—sharp, bright, unmistakable—and he loves them, though he has already learned, through his own small experiments, that eating too many at once is not the best idea. There is a lesson in that as well. You don’t need to take everything. You don’t need to maximize every moment. You just need enough.

Because in the end, this was never really about the ramps. You can buy them at the farmers markets if you want, or read about them, or memorize what to look for, but none of that replaces standing in the woods with someone small and curious beside you, realizing that what you are passing on is not information, but a way of seeing, a way of moving, a way of taking without taking too much. And if we approached more of life that way—curious, attentive, delighted, and just a little bit muddy—we might find ourselves getting more things right than we expected.

And when we come home with what we have gathered, this is almost always the first thing I make.

A simple ramp pesto

Nothing complicated, just something that lets their flavor stay exactly what it is. A handful of chopped ramps—leaves mostly, maybe a bulb or two if you’ve taken them—a good olive or avocado oil, a small handful of pistachios, a bit of parmesan, a squeeze of lemon, and salt. I usually make it in a mortar and pestle, or simply chop everything finely and bring it together slowly in a bowl, pressing and stirring until it becomes something you like, not too smooth, not too rough, adding oil if it needs it, tasting as you go, letting it be a little different each time.

We use it on everything for a while—spread over warm bread, stirred into pasta, spooned over eggs—until it’s gone, a small way of carrying the woods back into the kitchen.

And for the record, there is something about hearing “A Higher Place” drifting through the trees—slightly off-key, half-remembered—while you stand there with a handful of wild leeks that feels very close to perfect.

May you walk slowly enough to notice what is returning, and may there always be something green, just beginning, waiting for you when you step outside.

May your hands be full, but never too full, and may you know, quietly and without doubt, what is yours to gather and what is meant to remain.

May there always be muddy boots by your door and a song half-sung in the trees, small hands learning what is safe and what is not, and growing steady in that knowing.

May the woods remain generous because you have been gentle within them, and may your table hold what you have gathered with care, while the land you gathered from remains whole, so that what is given can continue, season after season, long after you have passed through.

I was making my way towards the door when a woman I had been speaking with stepped beside me. There was a slight pause before she spoke, the kind that often carries the weight of what is about to be asked.

“You mentioned you’re a health coach,” she said.

I nodded. “Yes.”

She drew a small breath. “I have a friend. She’s just finished chemo, and now she’s having trouble with her heart. It’s been damaged. I wondered… would you speak with her?”

It was a generous question, asked with so much love and care.

Before I had quite realised it, I found myself asking how her friend ate.

The woman hesitated, just for a moment, and then answered quietly. “Not well.”

I told her, as gently as I could, that herbs are a kind of medicine in themselves, but they do not stand alone. Food is the foundation. Food is everything. I smiled and said that the most elegant prescription is often found at the end of one’s fork, and perhaps, if one is fortunate, at the end of one’s spade as well.

I said I would be glad to speak with her friend. I can never quite resist a conversation like that. I also shared that unless someone is willing to nourish their body well, there is no herb that can carry that burden on its own.

We spoke a little longer, and then the evening drew to its natural close. Still, the conversation remained with me.

I was reminded of something I have come to understand over time, not through study so much as through watching how people come to care for one another.

Most people do not begin learning herbalism because they set out to become herbalists. They begin because someone they love needs care. A child with a cough, a restless night, a body that needs warmth or calm or gentle support, and so they begin to reach for plants.

This is how herbal knowledge has always lived, not first in institutions or textbooks, but in kitchens, around tables, and in gardens, passed quietly from one person to another through lived experience. If you look closely, you may already have the beginnings of an apothecary in your own kitchen.

It stayed with me, not because the answer was complicated, but because it wasn’t. I hadn’t needed to think it through or piece anything together. It was simply clear. Food always comes first. In a moment like that, there is no searching for the right thing to say. You find yourself speaking what you already know.

Later, I found myself considering how often we reach first for what is complex. The tincture, the supplement, the carefully arranged protocol, the next thing that might mend what feels broken. There is something in us that looks outward when we are seeking healing, something that hopes the answer might be contained in a bottle or a plan that can be followed.

Yet long before any of these things existed, there was something simpler, and perhaps more faithful. People ate what came from the earth, moved because life required it, breathed the air around them, and slept as the light receded. Their days were shaped by rhythms that, while not always gentle, were closely aligned with what the body understands. These were not practices set apart from life, but life itself.

Somewhere along the way, that foundation loosened. Food became something produced at a distance. Movement became something to schedule. Rest became something to negotiate rather than honour. When something begins to falter, it is perhaps no surprise that we look for something to correct it, something to intervene and restore what feels out of place.

Still, the body has not forgotten, and continues to speak as it always has.

It asks for nourishment. It asks for rest. It asks for movement and for breath. It asks, in its quiet and persistent way, to be cared for.

There is something both simple and quietly profound in returning to these things. Eating well. Moving with some regularity. Breathing deeply enough to notice it. Not as a programme to be followed, but as a way of living that tends to the body over time.

It is not complicated.

It does, however, ask for attention.

Attention asks us to slow, to notice what is being taken in, to consider how we are living rather than only what we are adding. It asks us to return, in small and ordinary ways, to the kind of knowing that once lived easily in kitchens and gardens, passed along without the need for explanation.

A pot of soup set to simmer. Garden soil turned by hand. The quiet sense that care begins not with intervention, but with what is tended each day.

I have a great fondness for herbs. They are subtle, powerful, and deeply tied to the wider rhythms of the natural world.

They are not, however, the first medicine.

Food, rest and movement always comes first.

The way we live each day becomes the ground in which everything else either takes hold or quietly fails.

There is a line from the English poet Wordsworth that has stayed with me over the years: “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”

The body is not asking for anything extraordinary. It is asking for what has always sustained it. Real food. Rest. Movement. Air. Care.

When we return to these things, not perfectly but with some sincerity, we are not experimenting or searching in the dark. We are remembering something that has been known for a long while.

That sort of remembering does not announce itself. It tends to return quietly, almost unnoticed at first, in small choices made day after day. A meal prepared with care. A walk taken without urgency. A body listened to rather than managed.

Over time, something begins to settle. Not all at once, and not perfectly, but enough to be felt. A steadiness. A sense that perhaps the body was never asking for as much as we thought, only for what it has always known.

And there is a certain comfort in that, a quiet reassurance that we are not as far from what we need as we sometimes imagine.

My own days unfold in a different landscape.

I am a storyteller. A writer. A gardener. A grandma.

Professionally I spent most of my life working in marketing. More recently, my husband dragged me out of retirement to handle the marketing and branding for his eleventh startup. The work itself is familiar territory for me. At its heart it is simply helping people understand who they are and how their work moves through the world.

But personally, and much more passionately, my life is shaped by gardens, labyrinths, and kitchen tables.

It is a world where herbs dry in small bundles near the window, where chickens announce themselves loudly when the back door opens, and where bread rises quietly on the counter while the kettle warms the afternoon. It is a quieter world than the one Jim inhabits, but it has always been deeply concerned with how human beings learn to notice things.

For many years that noticing happened through homeschooling. Books would spread across the kitchen table while my son followed questions that rarely arrived neatly inside lesson plans. Learning unfolded slowly across long mornings. Curiosity was allowed to wander wherever it needed to go.

The truth is, we didn’t simply homeschool. At some point someone handed me a book about unschooling, and when I read it I recognized our life immediately. The idea was simple. Trust curiosity. Trust the way children naturally move toward the things they want to understand. Allow learning to unfold through experience and exploration rather than forcing it through rigid structures.

This was sometime back in the 1990s, and at the time I knew one thing very clearly. The one gift I truly wanted to give the world was a child who could think critically.

So that was the path we followed.

Our house was full of books, of course, but it was also full of guitars and music. There were marine biology experiments happening in unexpected corners of the house, aquariums bubbling quietly in the background, snakes, and long days spent outside exploring the natural world.

More than once I found myself chasing after my son through the woods or along a riverbank while he asked questions about everything he saw. Learning happened in motion. It happened through curiosity, through observation, through the simple act of paying attention to the world around us.

Was it always easy? Of course not. Raising thoughtful human beings rarely is.

But looking back now, I would not do it any other way. Today I see the results of those years in the man my son has become. Capable, thoughtful, and deeply engaged with the world.

Now, in this new season of life, I watch my grandson discovering the world in much the same way. A ladybug on a leaf can still occupy an entire morning. A small question can expand into a long conversation. Childhood still has a way of reminding us that attention is one of the most powerful tools we possess.

The other day Jim mentioned something that stayed with me.

His good friend Joe had commented on a LinkedIn post Jim shared about keeping our children safe in this new age of artificial intelligence. Joe wrote something simple but striking.

“One could argue this may be the defining conversation of the coming years in the world of AI and its capabilities.”

The sentence lingered with me long after Jim finished telling the story.

Not because I worry about artificial intelligence in the way many people do. I do not see it as something ominous or dark. In many ways I find the technology remarkable.

Artificial intelligence feels less like a threat to me and more like a new language humanity is learning to speak.

And like any language, there are different ways people approach it. Some learn just enough to get by. A few useful phrases and prompts, a basic understanding, enough to move comfortably through the systems around them.

Others become more fluent. They begin to understand how the language is constructed, how meaning forms inside it, and how it shapes the conversations taking place around them.

In our house we have always been curious about how things work. When a new language begins to appear in the world, our instinct is usually to learn it well enough to understand what it is really doing.

And yet Joe’s comment has had me thinking about children. About my grandson. About the friends he will grow up alongside. About the generation of children who will inherit a world where artificial intelligence is not a novelty or a tool but simply part of the environment around them.

They will encounter it the way earlier generations encountered libraries or search engines. Quietly, constantly, woven into the background of daily life. Information will appear instantly. Systems will answer questions conversationally. The landscape in which children learn to think is already changing.

For most of human history, information itself was difficult to find. Knowledge lived in books, in teachers, in libraries, and in elders who had spent years learning the patterns of the world.

But in this emerging age of artificial intelligence, information is no longer the scarce thing.

Answers arrive instantly now. Questions typed into a small glowing screen can produce explanations, summaries, opinions, and advice in seconds. The raw material of knowledge is everywhere.

Which means the real challenge is no longer finding information.

The real challenge is learning what to do with it.

Because when you spend years watching children learn, as mothers, teachers, and now grandparents, you begin to recognize something about the nature of thinking itself.

Thinking grows slowly. It grows through curiosity, through trial and error, through questions that take time to unfold. It grows in conversations that circle around an idea until it begins to make sense. It grows at the kitchen table and it grows in the garden, when someone notices how the mint returns faithfully each spring or why the chickens seem to sense a storm before the clouds arrive.

Those habits of mind are very old. Older than computers. Older than electricity. Older even than the written page, and lately I find myself wondering whether those ancient practices of thinking may become even more valuable in a world where answers arrive instantly.

Lately I have also been thinking about what it means to prepare a child for the world he is growing into.

My grandson is still small and his world is made up of simple things. Mud on his boots, chickens wandering too close to the garden beds, the deep seriousness that comes over a small boy when he is handed an important task.

But even at that age you begin to feel the quiet responsibility of passing things along so I have started teaching him some of the things that matter in our house.

How to bake a loaf of bread. How flour and water come together slowly on the counter, how dough changes under patient hands, how the kitchen fills with that warm and familiar scent when the loaf finally comes out of the oven.

How to notice what grows in the garden. How mint returns faithfully each spring underneath the blackberries. How tomatoes ask for patience and sunlight. How food does not begin in a grocery store but in soil and seasons and careful tending.

His father takes him fishing sometimes, which teaches a different kind of lesson. Fishing asks for stillness. It asks for patience. It asks you to sit beside the water long enough to notice the world around you.

None of these things feel extraordinary, because they are simply the small practices of living.

The simple truth is that the world our children are inheriting is not the same one we grew up in. The climate itself is changing. The oceans are warming. Weather patterns that once followed familiar rhythms are becoming less predictable.

Children growing up today are stepping into a world shaped by forces larger and more complex than anything previous generations had to navigate.

You can feel it in subtle ways if you are paying attention. The seasons shift slightly. Storms arrive differently than they once did. Systems that once felt stable now move in ways that are harder to predict and when the world becomes more uncertain, the simplest human skills begin to matter even more.

How to grow food. How to make something nourishing with your hands. How to sit beside another person and talk, really talk, without a screen between you.

In our own small corner of the world we keep returning to those simple things. Bread on the counter. Seeds in the garden. Time spent sitting beside someone instead of scrolling past them.

Of course children will grow up using technology. Tablets and computers will be part of their lives, and they will speak the language of digital systems in ways that feel completely natural.

But there is a difference between using technology and allowing it to quietly shape the way we think and that is why I keep returning to the idea that artificial intelligence is not simply a technology, it plainly is a language.

Like any language, we have a choice. We can learn a few phrases and move through the systems around us without thinking too much about how they work, or we can become fluent enough to understand the structure of the language itself and use it wisely.

The goal is not to reject the technology, and it certainly is not to surrender ourselves to it. The goal is simply to understand it well enough that we remain the ones doing the thinking.

And perhaps that is what children need most as they grow into a world none of us can fully predict: not certainty, but roots.

These days, when my grandson stands beside me pressing his small hands into bread dough, or when I watch him follow his father and grandpa down toward the river with a fishing pole in hand, I am reminded of something simple.

The world may change in ways we cannot fully foresee, but the work of learning how to live in it, how to care for one another, and how to think clearly about the world around us will always begin the same way. With attention. With curiosity and often with something very small.

May we teach our children to think slowly in a world that moves quickly.

May they learn to ask meaningful questions, to notice the small details others overlook, and to care for the living world that sustains them.

May they know the patience of a garden and the quiet attention of a riverbank. May they learn the language of technology well enough to use it wisely, without ever forgetting the deeper language of the earth.

And may they grow with strong minds, open hearts, and roots that reach deep into the soil of ordinary life, remembering that wisdom rarely arrives in a rush, but grows slowly, like a garden in spring or a loaf of bread rising on the counter.

We live in a house with fireplaces that no longer work. They were built in another time, when coal still warmed homes through long Midwestern winters. You can see it in the shape of the hearths themselves, shallower than wood-burning fireplaces, and in the small iron coal chute still visible in the basement wall. At some point many years ago, trucks would have backed up beside the house and poured coal down that narrow opening into a bin below. From there someone carried it upstairs in a metal scuttle and fed the grates by hand.

It was not romantic work. Coal leaves dust in the air and ash that must be cleared away again and again. But it did what it was meant to do, and for many winters it kept this old house warm.

Over time coal disappeared, chimneys aged, and building codes changed. To make those fireplaces fully functional again would mean rebuilding the chimneys from the inside out, so the hearths remain now as something closer to architectural memory than working fire. We placed a small electric wood stove into one of them, and it is honestly beautiful. It gives off real heat and sits exactly where a fire should sit, so the room naturally arranges itself around it. Until you come quite close, you hardly question it. It feels right in the space.

And yet, for reasons I could never quite name, it never felt entirely complete.

Recently Jim bought us a new television, one so clear and luminous it almost feels like another window in the room. Television has never been especially important to me. I grew up reading, and quiet evenings usually meant books rather than screens. These days the news feels like volunteering to tighten every muscle in the body. Even when you are sitting perfectly still, the urgency of it all keeps you on alert.

One evening, instead of opening the world, I searched for something else. What I found was a twelve-hour recording of a real fire. Not an animation or a looping image, but an actual burn: logs shifting slowly as they settled, sparks lifting and disappearing, smoke rising in soft ribbons, the uneven crackle that only real fire makes.

I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and settled onto the couch. Within minutes the cats appeared and arranged themselves the way they do when they sense that stillness is genuine. One pressed comfortably against my leg. Another curled into the crook of my arm. The room dimmed, the electric stove hummed quietly in the background, and the fire on the screen began its slow work of burning.

I realized after a while that I did not want to move. I didn’t reach for my phone or search for something more productive to do. I simply stayed where I was and watched the flames rise and fall.

At first it felt slightly disorienting. My body kept searching for the next task, the next alert, the next small demand for attention. But nothing arrived. There was only the fire continuing to burn, and gradually something inside me softened in a way that felt both simple and unfamiliar.

For most of human history, when a fire was lit inside the home it meant something very specific. It meant the day’s work was finished and the darkness outside no longer mattered quite so much. It meant the perimeter was held, food could cook, and people could gather close enough to tell stories and let their bodies rest. The fire kept watch while the house exhaled.

Our nervous systems were shaped in that world, and they still recognize it.

The electric stove is lovely and I am grateful for it. But watching a real fire, even through a screen, is different. Flames move unpredictably. Sparks lift and vanish. Smoke thins and disappears as though it has a will of its own. It behaves like something living, and my body seemed to understand that immediately.

What began as a quiet sense of calm slowly deepened into something steadier. I could feel how tightly I had been holding myself without realizing it, and how much effort had been going into staying subtly prepared for whatever might come next. Sitting there in the dim room, with the cats asleep beside me and the fire burning softly on the screen, my shoulders lowered and my breathing slowed.

It felt, in a way, almost like a kind of somatic therapy — the body remembering something ancient without needing words for it. The flicker of flame, the steady crackle of wood, the soft circle of light in a darkened room were signals older than language itself. Somewhere deep in the nervous system, a message seemed to arrive: you are safe now, the day is finished, you may rest.

The constant internal scanning that hums beneath modern life began to grow quiet.

There was no great revelation, no dramatic insight, just a clean and gentle sense of relief. We live in a world where most threats are conceptual and most work happens in abstraction. We carry information instead of coal. We absorb urgency instead of soot. Even inside our own homes, many of us rarely feel fully at rest.

Yet fire is older than all of that.

And apparently it does not matter whether it comes through a chimney or through a screen. If it moves like fire, sounds like fire, and holds the room the way fire always has, the body recognizes it.

Before I sat down that evening, I dimmed all the lights so the fire would be the brightest thing in the room. The walls softened. The brick caught the glow. The cats’ fur turned amber at the edges, as though they had wandered straight out of some old painting of a winter hearth.

For a while that small circle of light was enough.

When I finally stood up and turned the television off, the room stayed warm. Not just from the stove, but from the way my body felt inside it. I went to bed without the usual tightness humming beneath my ribs.

Sometimes the oldest things still know exactly what we need.

Sometimes all we have to do is turn the lights down low and let them work.

The other day I came across a line that made me stop in the middle of scrolling. It asked a simple question that stayed with me longer than I expected: Who decided that transcendence was the goal of spirituality?

It wasn’t dismissing meditation or contemplation—those have their own deep beauty—but it gently wondered why so much of our spiritual language points upward and away from life. Ascend. Rise above. Leave the body behind. Seek enlightenment somewhere beyond this messy, complicated world.

As I sat with that question, I found myself thinking about how much of that language was shaped in monasteries, churches, mosques and temples, places where men stepped away from ordinary life in order to search for truth. Those traditions gave us profound insights about stillness, awareness, and the mysterious workings of the mind. Silence has its own kind of holiness.

But the thought kept turning in me, because for most of human history women’s spiritual lives didn’t unfold in those spaces. .

They unfolded in kitchens and gardens and fields, in the rhythm of preparing food and the quiet passing of stories from one generation to the next. They lived in the small sacred acts of tending children, caring for elders, mending what was torn, and making sure everyone had something warm to eat at the end of the day.

In the kneading of bread dough on a wooden counter, in gathering eggs from the coop in the early morning light, in feeding animals before the sun is fully up, in stirring soup while someone sits nearby telling you about their day.

Not transcending life, exactly, but tending to it, and when you look closely, those acts sit inside something even larger—the great cycles that hold human life together. Birthing children. Raising them. Feeding people. Caring for the sick. Sitting beside the dying. Remembering those who came before us while quietly preparing the world for those who will come after.

For thousands of years these weren’t simply domestic tasks. They were the biological and emotional infrastructure of civilization. Every culture survives because someone shows up to do this work.

Somewhere along the way, though, spiritual prestige drifted toward the people who stepped away from those cycles rather than the ones who remained inside them. The monk leaves the village to contemplate the meaning of existence, while the midwife stays in the village helping new life arrive.

Both are facing the same mystery, one through silence and transcendence and the other through participation.

I saw a post recently that made me smile. It said that for our grandparents, protein powder was a steak, electrolytes were milk from a cow, red light therapy was going outside, sleep hacking meant going to bed early, and a group chat was the front porch.

Maybe they had it right all along.

Because somewhere along the way we began treating ordinary life as something to optimize instead of something to inhabit. Yet the older rhythms—working outside, tending animals, cooking real food, sitting together at the end of the day quietly held a kind of wisdom we are only now rediscovering.

Often online I’ll see images of an old cottage somewhere in the countryside. Rain tapping softly against the windows. Smoke curling from a chimney. A wooden table set with vegetables from the garden, soup simmering gently on the stove, candles burning as evening settles into the room.

Chickens wandering through the garden. A kettle steaming beside a wood stove. Someone pouring tea by the window while the garden breathes quietly outside.

And whenever I see scenes like that, I always feel the same quiet recognition—that we were meant to live like this.

Not because every life should unfold in a stone cottage somewhere, but because something in us recognizes the rhythm immediately.

Shelter. Food. Fire. Community.

The small, human-scale systems that have sustained our species for thousands of years.

If you look at the oldest layers of human culture, the sacred was rarely something separate from the world. It was woven into cycles: the turning of the seasons, the planting and harvesting of food, the mystery of birth, the tenderness of raising children, the quiet dignity of aging, and the gentle vigil beside someone nearing the end of their life.

The holy lived inside the ordinary.

I think about that sometimes when I see my grandson pushing a wheelbarrow across the yard, determined to help with whatever work needs doing. Or when the dog curls up beside the fire at the end of the day and the whole house grows quiet.

There is something sacred in those moments too.

Somewhere in the middle of all this thinking, two images came to me that I can’t quite shake.

The monastery and the kitchen table.

Two very different spiritual spaces.

The monastery holds silence and contemplation. It invites us to step back from the noise of the world and listen deeply, to notice the movements of the mind and the quiet presence that sits beneath them.

But the kitchen table holds something else entirely.

It is where life gathers.

It’s where children learn who they are. Where stories are told and retold until they become family memory. Where bread is passed, soup is ladled into bowls, and people sit a little longer than they meant to because the conversation has become meaningful.

Sometimes the bread was baked that morning. Sometimes the eggs came from the chickens out back. Sometimes the soup is made from whatever the garden happened to give that season.

It’s ordinary life, yes.

But it is also the quiet place where humans have nourished one another for thousands of years.

For a very long time our culture treated the monastery as the higher path.

But I’m not sure that’s the whole story.

Because the kitchen table is where humanity actually happens.

It’s where life is sustained day after day through small acts of care that rarely get called spiritual. Feeding people. Holding babies. Listening to someone’s worries. Sitting beside a hospital bed. Gathering everyone back together after grief has passed through.

These things may look ordinary.

But they are also the quiet work that allows the human story to continue.

And perhaps that, too, is a form of spiritual practice.

Maybe the deepest wisdom isn’t choosing between transcendence and presence.

Maybe it’s remembering that both have something to teach us.

The monastery reminds us to listen for the eternal.

But the hearth—the table, the garden, the animals, the children learning to help—reminds us that eternity has always been hiding inside ordinary life.

And if that’s true, then one of the holiest places on earth may not be a mountaintop or a temple at all.

It might simply be the place where we gather at the end of the day, pass the bread, tell our stories, and remember that being alive together—through birth, love, loss, gardens, animals, fires, and all the seasons between—is already a kind of miracle.

Perhaps the sacred has been waiting for us in the ordinary all along.

History has a way of doing that. It arrives whether we are ready for it or not, and suddenly we realize we are living inside a chapter that future generations will read about.

This morning, while the tea was still warm and the house was quiet, a quote from Tolkien crossed my feed and made me stop for a moment. I sat there longer than I meant to, rereading it a few times.

Frodo says, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

And Gandalf replies, “So do I… and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

I’ve been carrying that line with me all day. Because none of us really gets to choose the era we are born into. The world unfolds, history moves forward, and we simply find ourselves here—living our ordinary lives inside extraordinary times.

But Gandalf is right about something. We do get to decide what we do with the time that is given to us.

And the older I get, the more I notice that those choices rarely look dramatic. They are usually much quieter than that. They show up in the way we care for the people in front of us, in the way we try to bring patience and steadiness into rooms that feel rushed or uncertain, in the way we keep tending the small, life-giving things even when the wider world feels unsettled.

Cooking a meal and gathering people around the table. Listening carefully to someone who needs to be heard. Teaching a child how to help with the work of the day.

For a long time we’ve been told that wisdom lives somewhere far away—on mountaintops, or in quiet places set apart from ordinary life. And there is wisdom there. But there is another kind of wisdom that lives much closer to home, in gardens and backyards, in bread rising slowly on the counter, in animals being fed before the sun comes up, and in the quiet rhythm of caring for one another through the ordinary days that make up a life.

Some wisdom arrives through reflection. And some wisdom grows out of the simple work of tending life.

Perhaps the question Gandalf asks isn’t only about surviving difficult times. Perhaps it is also about how we choose to live inside them—what we grow, what we care for, and what kind of presence we bring into the rooms we enter. Because the way we live our ordinary days is how the future is slowly built.

Sometimes wisdom arrives in the most unexpected places. Even in a Tolkien quote that appears on a quiet morning and stays with you long after the tea has gone cold.

And sometimes it reminds us of something simple and old and true:

Perhaps the sacred was already here the whole time, just like these first spring snowdrops that the littlest Hobbit and I discovered on our walk this morning in our small part of the Shire.

A dear friend wrote to me this week after seeing my pictures of Wolfie at the barn. She said she would have loved to have me as a grandmother. She wrote about children who grow up smelling like horses and sunshine, about rolling in the grass, tending gardens, gathering eggs, milking cows. She said that what Wolfie and I share would be a tonic for the whole country if people could drink it.

I was so completely touched and I’ve revisited that text so many times in the last couple of days. It was the biggest hug in such an uncertain world.

When she wrote, I could still smell the barn on Wolfie’s jacket. Sweet hay. Warm leather. That unmistakable softness that clings to you after an evening spent near animals. There is something about that scent that feels like a thread running through generations.

Because she wasn’t admiring a photograph. She was naming a way of being in the world.

The kind of life where children know the feel of soil between their fingers. Where animals are not distant. Where food is not abstract. Where nourishment requires care and presence.

Barns are their own kind of cathedral. Moonlight slipping through wooden slats and high windows. Hooves shifting gently against straw. The steady, contented sound of horses munching hay. You do not need stained glass when you have that kind of light.

She wrote to me about the her church tends. https://teterorganicfarm.com/csa/ Acres of apple trees and riverbank woods. Honey. Tens of thousands of servings of fresh food shared with people who need it. I so believe in land tended for the good of a community. I believe in neighbors growing food side by side. I can’t wait to visit this beautiful place.

There is something about working soil together that softens people. When you are planting seeds, you are not arguing ideology. You are hoping for rain. You are watching for bees. You are bending toward the same light.

I was already working on this piece last night when I went to bed, and then I woke up to the news that we were once again dropping bombs somewhere in the world.

It is no secret to anyone that I am not in favor of war, but it is also true that I understand humanity well enough to know that conflict has always been part of our story. We are capable of beauty and destruction in the same breath.

But on raw mornings like this one, one question rises in me.

Who do I want to be anyway?

While governments posture and armies mobilize, who am I becoming in my own small corner of the earth? What am I tending? What am I teaching?

The news made this piece feel more important to my heart, not less. Not urgent in a frantic way. Urgent in a rooted way. If there is destruction in the world, there must also be cultivation. If there are bombs, there must also be seeds.

There is a rhythm to tending that steadies the nervous system. Feed. Water. Sweep. Check the fence. Pull a weed. Watch for bees. It is ordinary work, but it rearranges something inside you. The body relaxes when it knows its place in a cycle.

I cannot control geopolitics but I can decide whether Wolfie learns to recognize the hum of a bee as something precious. I can decide whether he grows up pressing his cheek into a horse’s neck and understanding that strength can be gentle. I can decide whether our days include soil and sun and the steady rhythm of care.

What we are really passing down is not just skill, but posture. A way of meeting the world. Kneeling instead of conquering. Listening instead of extracting. Staying long enough to see what blooms.

This is how we teach.

Not with speeches, but with dirt under our fingernails. With seeds pressed into small palms. With berries staining our hands. With time spent in barns and gardens and shared fields.

If you are unhappy with the way the world is unfolding, make your phone calls. Write your letters. Participate in the civic process. Use your voice.

And then go into the garden.

Because stewardship is not only protest. It is practice.

At the end of the day, when the barn quiets and the owls begin to hoot in the trees beyond the fence line, I think about the kind of world I want him to inherit. It will not be perfect. None ever have been. But if he knows how to tend something living, he will never be entirely lost.

I know who I want to be in this world.

I want to be someone who tends.

One backyard. One barn aisle. One shared garden at a time.

There is a particular kind of life I find myself wanting more of as I get older. It is not flashy, and it does not run on urgency. It smells faintly of soil and sun-warmed tomato leaves, and it requires you to participate.

It is the kind of life where you build slowly. Where you learn how to feed yourself in more ways than one. Where you stay long enough in one place to understand the angle of the light in June and the way frost settles in October. Where the skills you value are not impressive on paper but make a household steadier.

I spend so much time with Wolfie in the garden. It feels familiar in my bones because it is the same way I once spent time with my father in his garden, watching things grow and watching things die without flinching. Later, it was time with my own son on our farm, moving through full seasons together, feeling the rhythm of planting and harvest and rest. The settings change. The soil changes. The hands change. The cycle does not.

My mother was not the least bit surprised the first time she met Jim. She looked at him and said, “You always wanted to marry a farmer.” She was right. Jim comes from a long line of farmers. He grew up on big farms where the horizon matters and the weather is not theoretical. He can tell what the sky is about to do simply by lifting his head and looking. He knows where he is, no matter where he is. I sometimes joke that he has a due north chip in his brain, but the truth is that sensibility has never left him. He carries it wherever he goes.

So when we stand in the garden together, it is not a hobby. It is history, alive in the present.

We have buried chickens together in this ground. We have harvested tomatoes straight from the vine and eaten breakfast standing in the dirt, handfuls of warm tomatoes and blackberries and fresh basil leaves before they ever make it inside. There is no abstraction in that moment. Only sun, juice, and the fact that we are alive inside a system that does not revolve around us.

Gardening refuses acceleration. You cannot argue a tomato into ripening. You cannot negotiate with rain. You cannot optimize your way out of a late frost. The work is repetitive and ordinary. You water. You weed. You stake the tomatoes before they collapse under their own ambition. You show up again the next day and do it once more.

A garden teaches proportion. Growth happens in cycles, not in sprints. Roots form in the dark long before fruit appears in the light. The soil responds to what you actually do, not what you meant to do. Attention matters more than intention.

And slowly, your sense of time lengthens.

When you plant beside a child, you are not planting only for this season. You are passing along posture. You are teaching how to look closely. How to notice when leaves curl. How to feel the difference between dry soil and damp. How to accept loss without drama and abundance without greed.

Wolfie understands this in his own young way. He sees the garden wilt in the fall and disappear under snow. He sees it look finished. And then he watches it return in the spring. He knows that what looks dead is not always gone.

He notices when one of the chickens is no longer there. I kneel beside him and tell him something simple and true. She wasn’t strong enough to live this season. That happens sometimes. It’s sad, and it’s still part of how life works. He sees the hawks circle overhead. He knows we protect the chickens from the hawks because that is our job. He also knows the hawks have to eat. We do not call them evil. We do not pretend the world is safer than it is. We tend what is ours to tend.

These are steady lessons. Life feeds on life. Some seasons are generous. Some are lean. You protect what you can. You accept what you cannot control. You keep showing up.

The modern world runs on reaction and speed. A garden runs on attention and patience. It rewards steadiness rather than intensity. It teaches you that what you do this season shapes the next one.

This is not about aesthetic. It is about stewardship. It is about living in such a way that, if someone traces their life back through yours, they find evidence of care.

Kindness. Resilience. Sustainability. The ability to look at the world and wonder instead of immediately consuming it. The habit of caring not just for the soil, but for the people standing in it. Just like plants, we are all different. Some need more sun. Some need more shade. The work is not to make everything the same. The work is to learn what allows each thing to flourish.

He will not remember every tomato or every chicken, but he will remember the pattern of tending.

And that feels like enough.

The best endings are the ones where you set the watering can down, look over what is growing, and walk inside while there is still light in the sky, trusting the work you have done will hold until morning.

© 2026 Beth Gehring. All rights reserved.

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”

— Ernest Hemingway

A dear friend shared this quote recently, and it stayed with me. It did not feel like an idea so much as a recognition. The kind that settles into the body and waits there, asking to be tended.

Almost immediately, I thought of kintsugi.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold or other precious metals. Instead of hiding the cracks, the repair makes them visible. The break is not erased. It becomes part of the story. The piece is not returned to what it once was. It becomes something else, shaped by what it has endured, often stronger and more beautiful because of where it broke.

I first learned about kintsugi as a child. My family often hosted foreign students, and one of them became like a brother to me. His name was Hisashi. He later married a wonderful woman named Kazuko. They were the first people who ever spoke to me about kintsugi, the first ones who showed it to me. I remember being a little girl and holding a piece of pottery that had been broken and repaired, its cracks traced with gold, and feeling something lodge itself deep inside me.

What struck me even then was how differently the object was treated.It was not thrown away. It was not hidden or dismissed as ruined. It was looked at closely, even reverently. The break itself was seen as meaningful, not as a failure. That way of seeing stayed with me long before I had language for why it mattered.

Later in life, and by later I mean in my early twenties, I found myself working in my family’s jewelry and gift business. I spent my days surrounded by beautiful things. Porcelain, pottery, glass, objects chosen to mark moments and carry meaning. Without realizing it at first, that early lesson in kintsugi surfaced again.

I was always drawn to pieces that showed the hand of time. Subtle irregularities. Small imperfections. Objects that felt lived with rather than pristine. Even in a world that prized shine and newness, I was more interested in what had depth, what could hold a story. Gold was not just decoration to me. It was material with memory.

Gold, in kintsugi, is not accidental. It is chosen. Someone decides that what broke is worth mending, that the repair should be visible, and that care itself has value.

That choice feels especially relevant now. We are living in a time when so much feels fractured. Trust has thinned. Certainty has cracked. Long held assumptions about safety, fairness, and stability have broken open. It would be easy to look at our culture and decide that the damage is too great, that the cracks mean something has failed beyond repair.

But kintsugi offers a different way of seeing.

It suggests that breaking is not the opposite of becoming. It suggests that what is revealed at the fracture line matters. That how we respond to what has broken is more important than whether we can pretend it never happened.

I think about this often now, both personally and collectively. We are taught, early on, that healing means returning to who we were before. Before the loss. Before the reckoning. Before the moment that changed everything. But life does not work that way. We do not go back. We move forward, carrying what we have lived through in our bodies, in our hearts, in our ways of seeing.

Strength does not come from being unbroken. It comes from being willing to be shaped.

Kintsugi teaches patience. It teaches reverence for what has been damaged. It asks us to slow down and look closely, to decide how we will mend and with what materials. Some repairs are meant to be invisible. Others deserve to be honored.

In this later chapter of life, I understand this in my bones. Age has a way of clarifying what matters. The beauty now is quieter, less performative, but deeper. There is less interest in perfection and more interest in wholeness. Less urgency to discard what is flawed and more willingness to tend what remains.

I no longer believe that brokenness is something to fear. I believe it is something to approach with care.

The breaks are not the end of the story. They are the seams where the gold goes.

May we learn to look more slowly at what has broken.May we resist the urge to discard what still carries life. May we choose our materials for repair with care and intention.May we remember that strength does not come from being untouched, but from being tended with honesty and love and when we come upon the cracks in ourselves, in each other and in the world we share, may we know where to place the gold.

Stay warm and cozy,

Beth

I used to be the kind of person who went into the streets. I organized. I showed up. I believed that if something mattered, you met it head-on, loudly and in public. Silence felt like betrayal. Stepping back felt like giving ground. I knew how to be that person, and for a long time, it fit.

That person isn’t the one holding a three-year-old every day.

The world outside feels sharp and complicated right now. The streets are full of grief and urgency, and I feel all of it. I don’t look away. But I can’t meet this moment the way I once did. There is a small human whose nervous system I am shaping every day, whether I mean to or not. He matters more than my opinions. He matters more than my need to be visible.

For a long time, that felt like loss.

Most of my life, people have said some version of the same thing to me. “Well, of course you’re a witch.” I would laugh it off. “I never told you that,” I’d say. They’d shrug. “You didn’t need to.” And every time, underneath the humor, there was a flicker of fear. A feeling of being exposed. Of being seen in a way I hadn’t chosen. Given the history of that word, it wasn’t nothing. It carried weight. Consequence. Risk.

They never meant costumes or cauldrons, although, to be fair, I do have a lot of cauldrons. I just cook with them. I also tend to have more cats than is strictly necessary, which I used to think might be part of the evidence. What they were pointing at, though, was harder to name. The way I organize space. The way people seem to settle around me. The way I trust seasons, bodies, stories, and food more than systems. The way I work locally, relationally, without needing permission..

For a long time, I kept a little distance from that recognition. It felt safer not to claim it. Safer to stay legible. Safer to keep my edges unnamed.

But something has shifted.

Historically, women were called witches when their power didn’t run through sanctioned channels. When they healed, fed, remembered, and tended life outside approved structures. When their knowledge was embodied, local, and quietly influential. That kind of power has always made institutions nervous.

And in that sense, “witch” has always been political. Not partisan. Political in the way environment is political. In the way care shapes outcomes. In the way culture is formed long before anyone argues about it.

For me, that politics has always lived in the tangible world. In food grown close to home. In soil health and clean water. In seasons that don’t bend to ideology. In the living systems that actually shape us, rather than the abstract systems we argue about endlessly. I have more faith in gardens, kitchens, and watersheds than in the structures men build to prove authority. The planet teaches reciprocity whether we listen or not, and tending those relationships feels more honest to me than pledging allegiance to anything that forgets where life really comes from.

This season of my life has clarified that for me.

Activism, as I practiced it, was about pressure and visibility. About showing up where things were breaking and insisting on something better. That work still matters. But right now, my work is closer to the ground. It looks like slowing down. It looks like attention. It looks like raising a child who knows what it feels like to be met with patience and kindness.

Raising a child isn’t a retreat from the world. It’s an intervention in it. Every day, without speeches or slogans, I’m teaching something about how the world works. About whether it’s safe. About whether care is real.

That feels like witch work to me. Not spells. Not spectacle. But tending conditions. Shaping environments. Keeping things human.

And here’s the part that surprised me: the fear of that recognition has fallen away. There is no time now to be anything except who I truly am. No bandwidth left for shrinking or disguising or softening what has always been visible anyway. What once felt exposing now feels clarifying.

I’m no longer organizing against the world. I’m organizing for the kind of world a child can grow up in.

For those of us who once lived and loved the heat of the fight, this shift can feel disorienting, like we’ve gone quiet when things are still burning. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think many of us are being asked to move from fire to hearth. From confrontation to continuity. From urgency to endurance.

The world still needs people in the streets. And it also needs people tending the soil beneath them.

This is the work I’m doing now. It’s quieter than it used to be. And it feels, finally, like the truest kind of power.

For the road ahead……

May you trust the work that has come to you now, even if it looks different than the work you once did.

May you honor the seasons of your own life, without shame or comparison.

May you remember that tending, teaching, feeding, and noticing are not small acts, but foundational ones.

And may you know, deeply, that the quiet ways you shape the world still matter more than you can see.

In loving memory of Haas and LaWanna, two who always knew who and what I was and never let me forget it. .

I have been a political animal for as long as I can remember. Activism was not just something my family did; it was something we believed in. As a Jewish person born after the Second World War, it was an essential part of my identity. Politics was never abstract. History was never distant. What happened to other people could happen to us.

My mother said to me more than once, “Never forget, it could happen here.”

That sentence looped through my body. It explained why I paid attention, why I showed up, why silence was never neutral. It shaped a way of being in the world that was alert, engaged, and deeply serious about what was at stake.

I marched. I made the calls. I knocked on doors. I argued at dinner. I stayed informed. I stayed vigilant.

And I did all of it. Proudly. For decades.

So it has been deeply unsettling to find myself here, at sixty-six, exhausted in a way that does not respond to willpower. Not tired like I need a nap or a good night’s sleep. Tired in my bones. Tired in my nervous system. Tired in that old, animal part of the body that decides what is sustainable and what is not.

This feels like the wrong moment in history to be tired. That thought alone carries its own kind of shame. As if fatigue were a moral failure. As if rest were a betrayal.

What has been hardest, I think, is watching what is unfolding now and knowing my mother was right. It can happen here. That knowledge sharpens everything. It makes looking away feel dangerous. It makes stepping back feel like a risk not just to ideals, but to people.

I was recently suspended from Facebook, and while I cannot say exactly why, I suspect it may have been a strange kind of protection. I was not posting anything particularly inflammatory, though the temptation was constant. What I was doing was absorbing an endless stream of memes, videos, half-context truths, and emotional detonations. Not just from the right. From the left too. Rage travels well. Fear spreads faster than facts.

What many people do not fully realize is how the algorithm works. The more you click on something, the more of it you are shown. Click on anger and you will be fed more anger. Click on fear and your feed fills with fear. Over time, the world begins to look narrower, louder, and more dangerous than it actually is, which is especially unsettling given the very real instability in our world right now.

I did not understand how much my own view had been shaped by that narrow funnel until it disappeared. Facebook went away on December 1st, and for about a week my body did not know what to do with that. I kept reaching for my phone. I kept checking. I felt oddly unmoored, as if something essential were missing. It was an addiction, plain and simple, and it took time to loosen its grip.

Then something else happened. I became calmer, and almost immediately after that, the guilt arrived.

The calm felt suspicious. Indulgent. Irresponsible. How could I feel better when so much was happening in the world? How could I not be watching, reacting, bracing myself? It took me a while to recognize how deeply I had internalized the idea that constant outrage was the same thing as engagement.

To be clear, these things are happening. I still read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, PBS. I glance at the news every day, sometimes twice a day, to stay aware of what is unfolding. I am not turning away from reality. But there is a difference between staying informed and being continuously flooded. One builds capacity. The other erodes it.

What I see now is how much energy that constant vigilance took from the life directly in front of me. From the present moment. From the work my hands actually know how to do.

Right now, what matters most to me is helping raise my grandson. Helping my children raise a human being who can think critically, who can tolerate uncertainty, who can meet a complicated world without losing his curiosity or his kindness. A child growing up in a time of climate instability, political instability, and informational chaos will need more than slogans. He will need discernment. He will need grounding.

What matters to me is my garden and my small piece of land. Growing food feels like a political act to me. Quiet. Persistent. Embodied. It is a refusal to outsource survival entirely. It is a practice of attention. A vote cast with seeds and soil.

Everyone comes to activism in their own way. I have no criticism for those who are marching, organizing, wearing buttons, making noise. We need all of it. I simply cannot do it that way anymore. My body will not cooperate. And I am learning, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, to listen.

Today my niece Nicholle, who is a trauma therapist, said something to me that settled deep into my chest and stayed there. “Aunt Beth,” she said, “you are doing the work. You are healing, and you are helping others heal. You are helping raise your grandson. That looks good on you. The work you are doing is enough.”

Enough. That word still takes some getting used to.

I was raised to believe that if you could do more, you should. That rest was something you earned only after exhaustion. That stepping back meant letting something terrible happen on your watch.

But winter has its own wisdom. Nothing grows year-round. Fields lie fallow for a reason. Roots deepen underground. Energy pulls inward, not because the world does not matter, but because survival depends on cycles.

What I want now is to be available in a different way. I want to listen. I want to talk things through with people who are scared, overwhelmed, angry, or confused. I want to help others imagine what they actually want the world to look like, not just what they are fighting against. This is the work of a coach, yes, but it is also the work of an elder. Of someone who has been paying attention for a very long time.

I am still political. That has not changed. My politics now live in how I show up, how I care for land and people, how I refuse to let systems designed to inflame and exhaust me decide the shape of my days.

This is my wintering. Not a retreat from responsibility, but a recalibration of it. A decision to tend what is close, what is real, what I can actually nourish.

Spring will come when it comes. For now, this is the season I am in.

I don’t have answers. I have a season, a body, a child to help raise, an husband to cherish and a small piece of land that responds when I show up.

If you are tired too, I see you. If you are still fighting in louder ways, I honor that. If you are finding yourself called inward, there is nothing wrong with you.

We need people in the streets.

We also need people tending the roots.

This is where I am, for now.

Love,

Beth

This piece was originally published in 2022 on the Herb Society of America blog, and I’m grateful to be able to share it again here. It comes from seasons of my work that was deeply shaped by listening to plants, history, and the slower wisdom they invite. I’m reposting it on Substack for those who may have missed it the first time, or who might enjoy returning to it now, with a little more time and attention. Please visit the HSA Blog for some really wonderful herbal writing and if you’re so inspired join us at HSA!

“The house was bright that night, with candles lit in the windows, and bunches of holly and ivy fixed to the staircase and the doorposts. There were not so many pipers in the Highlands as there had been before Culloden, but one had been found, and a fiddler as well, and music floated up the stairwell, mixed with the heady scent of rum punch, plum cake, almond squirts, and Savoy biscuits…Something of the light of that Hogmanay feast lingered on his face, and I felt a small pang, seeing it.”
Diana Gabaldon – Voyager

In Scotland, December 26th marks the beginning of the week leading up to Hogmanay, a yearly celebration of farewell that takes place on December 31st. The history of Hogmanay is somewhat vague, with roots beginning in the 16th century. It’s an ancient celebration of the arrival of the New Year in a way that’s full of fire and ritual.

A contemporary New Year’s Eve celebration has never held much interest for me, so instead, for many years when we still lived on our farm in Burton, we would gather on December the 31st for a Hogmanay inspired celebration, fueled by really good single malt, folk music, celebratory bonfires, soup, roasted meats, and candlelight. I have always felt a deep affinity for anything and everything Scottish, and I married a man with a deeply Celtic soul, a family tartan, and a love of raucous gatherings.

Windesphere, our farm, was built in 1848 by a Scotsman named Samuel McBride, and our home was perched atop a hill lined with willow trees. It was a magical place to gather with my family for any holiday, but the quiet of New Year’s Eve after the hustle of the holidays was perfect.

Living on that small farm gave me a completely different connection to the natural world and it was easy for me to imagine what it must have been like in centuries past as the days got longer and colder and darker. I am completely sure that the attitude with which the New Year would have been greeted is one of absolute revelry.

Loving any excuse for continuing the wassailing and caroling, the week after Christmas would find me preparing for the New Year, making clove-studded oranges and lady apples to simmer in apple cider, red wine, more spices, rosemary, hops, honey, rum, and ale for my traditional New Year’s wassail bowl. In some parts of Scotland, wassailing is a still a traditional part of the Hogmanay celebrations, and in centuries past the farmers and their families would go out to their orchards, singing at the top of their lungs while drenching the trees with the delicious wassail and hanging wassail-soaked toast in the branches. This ritual would supposedly get rid of any evil spirits lingering, while blessing the trees so that the following year would bring an abundant harvest.

Every December 31st, after a very thorough house cleaning and smudging with a blend of sage, lavender, and pine, out would come the fragrant bayberry and beeswax tapers that I’d been saving for months. They would be lit, infused with our intentions for an abundant year. We’d then lift our glasses to toast the new year and “sain” the house, an old Hogmanay blessing custom from the Scottish Highlands. Years before I even knew what I was doing, I’d take a crystal pitcher and dunk it into the artesian spring by our barn, and then I’d bring the fresh water in to use for the blessing, sprinkling it all over the hearth, rugs, and beds, finishing with hugs and kisses all around. Traditionally in Scotland and in my home, “Auld Lang Syne” is sung to bid farewell to the old year at the stroke of midnight as the wheel turns to the new year.

One of the most well-known traditions of Hogmanay is called ‘first footing’. When the first visitor to a household in the new year appears, he will traditionally bring gifts that are thought to bring great fortune and luck to the house in the coming new year. The person who has the honor of first footing the household (hopefully a dark haired man for the best kind of luck!) gets a healthy dram of whisky, cookies, and plenty of kisses for his trouble!

Living as far out as we did, there weren’t a lot of dark handsome strangers roaming about, so instead, when my son and nephew were still very small, we would pretend that we were Vikings and build a large bonfire up on the back hill. Then we’d wander out into the pastures to look and listen for the first owls at midnight, a winter solstice and new year’s pastime we still call “owling”.

We’d walk through the back woods as quietly as we could, and if we were lucky we’d see deer as well as the occasional fox or raccoon. Suddenly, the three of us would be taken by surprise by a great span of wings overhead, powerful yet unearthly quiet. We’d stand very still, huddled warmly together, and we’d wait for the hoots to begin! It always felt like the very best kind of good fortune with which to begin the New Year!

In those shared moments, I learned that magic is truly possible when allowed to bubble away happily in the cauldron of your heart. We three had so much fun stalking the wild things ever so quietly under the New Year’s moonlight while splashing cups of wassail all about, tying pieces of wassail soaked toast onto our apple trees and hanging homemade pinecone ornaments of bird seed and peanut butter for the winter birds to enjoy!

Life is very good this year and I am most grateful for it all, especially my husband’s good health and my beautiful grandson.

As I write, my dog Malcolm is sleeping peacefully in the corner and my cats are curled up on the couch by the fire with not a care in the world, totally stoned on fresh catnip sent by a friend. I’m filled with the peace of another year gone swiftly by, making potato leek soup and watching the snow falling softly outside my kitchen window.

I wish all of you a warm and cheery Hogmanay, filled with love, peace, joy, and everything else that you could possibly desire and more. As they say in Scotland, “Lang may your lum reek.”

I feel so blessed to have all of you in my life. Thank you for reading my words and letting me know that they’ve touched you.

It means everything to me.

See you on the other side of 2025!

Beth’s Wassail recipe:

First things first! Make several pomanders using some of the smaller apples that you’ve picked as the base. You’ll do this by taking the apples and studding them with cloves in all manner of beautiful patterns. While you’re doing this, create patterns that you love and use them as a simple way to make a very good wish for a safe, abundant, and love filled New Year. Then do the same with several small seedless oranges and set them aside. Use as many cloves as you wish, because the fragrance will be absolutely intoxicating! When you’re ready to use them , slice the oranges in half. Remove the core from the apples and halve them as well.

Then in your favorite cauldron (I used to make this in a cast iron pot on top of my wood burning stove when I lived in the country) add one gallon of freshly pressed cider, two cups of honey, one tablespoon of fresh powdered cinnamon, about five large cinnamon sticks, one teaspoon of good vanilla extract and half a teaspoon of fresh nutmeg, five star anise pods, three tablespoons of dried or fresh rose petals for love (from your garden if you have them), one tablespoon of fresh rosemary for remembrance, about one cup of dried hops flowers for relaxation and fertility, and the pomanders.

Bring this all to a lovely rolling boil and then turn down the heat so it’s just simmering. Add one bottle of very good red wine, a couple of bottles of dry hard cider and about two and a half cups of dark spiced rum, and then stir in one stick of salted organic butter. You can add more honey if you’d like a bit more sweetness, or even brown sugar. Let it simmer for about 15 minutes then turn down the heat. Keep this hot but not boiling and serve it happily and carefully, as this is one potent brew!

Note: “Lang may your lum reek“ is a traditional Scottish blessing meaning “long may your chimney smoke,” wishing someone a long, healthy, and prosperous life, symbolizing a warm, well-fueled home and good fortune, often used for New Year’s (Hogmanay) or as a toast/farewell.

This space remains free because it’s meant to be shared. If you believe in that, you can support it by becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers keep the lights on—quite literally—but the stories, recipes, and field notes stay open to all. Most months, I send a private letter to say thank you and share what’s brewing behind the scenes.

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“I come into the peace of wild things … and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” — Wendell Berry

Some people brace themselves against winter, but I never have. Maybe it’s the Swede in me—some old inheritance that knows how to welcome the dark months instead of fearing them. Winter has never been an enemy. If anything, it feels like an old companion returning each year with its quiet teachings, showing me again how to live gently, attentively, and close to the bone.

In northeast Ohio, where the sky can hold shades of grey for days on end, I’ve learned to let the appearance of sun—even a brief flicker—reshape everything. I stop whatever I’m doing, sit by the window with tea, or step outside just to breathe the cold air. That first breath of winter light feels like a natural antidepressant, a small reset that reminds my spirit where my peace lives.

Winter teaches us to tend the light inside the house just as faithfully as we tend the cold outside it. I’ve always loved the glow of a fire or a wood stove, that soft radiant heat that seeps into the bones in a way modern vents never quite manage. This year I’ve fallen in love with candles that have wooden wicks—the ones that crackle like tiny fireplaces wherever you set them. Their little sparks sound like far-off embers, turning the room golden and alive. In the darkest months, that kind of light feels less like decoration and more like nourishment. It gathers people close the way fire always has, softening the air, softening the mood, and reminding us that the warmth we make is just as important as the warmth we seek.

One of my quiet joys of this season is threading soft white Christmas lights through every window in the house. It doesn’t take much — just a single strand here, a little glow there — but the effect is astonishing. When the world turns shadowed by late afternoon, those gentle lights lift the whole room, almost like a hearth made of stars. They warm the edges of the evening, soften the grey, and offer a kind of welcome that asks nothing of you except to sit, breathe, and let yourself be comforted.

The cold itself carries its own calm. I’m out several times a day tending the chickens, and winter turns that routine into something almost meditative. Breaking the ice on their water makes me laugh every time—the movement is identical to the years I cared for my horses, when every trough froze the same stubborn way. I warm their mash, tuck them into the coop, feel the cold settle into my gloves, and turn toward home through the bright resinous scent of pine. Sometimes I crush a handful of needles between my fingers just to inhale that sharp green aroma. It clears the mind like nothing else.

Stepping back into the house afterward always feels like crossing into another world.The warmth gathers around me, and the kitchen greets me first. This time of year, I almost always have something simmering—soup, stew, a long-slow something that carries comfort through the air. When my Instant Pot finally broke, I didn’t replace it. I realized what I’d missed was the steady, generous warmth of an old-fashioned Crock-Pot. An Instant Pot cooks quickly, yes, but a Crock-Pot seasons the air. It lets onions, garlic, herbs, broth, and winter vegetables drift into the walls hour by hour, softening the house from the inside out, plus the Crock-Pot is forgiving in a way pressure cooking never will be. You give it time, and it gives you back nourishment.

Over the years, I’ve settled into a rhythm of winter stews—simple, comforting, filled with fruit and vegetables, and deeply tied to the season. I don’t measure much. I don’t fuss. The beauty of a Crock-Pot is that it lets you cook the way winter asks you to live: gently, slowly, without hurry.

Here’s how I build almost all of them:

If I want deeper flavor, I brown the meat first.

Not required—just lovely. A little butter, a chopped onion, a quick sear. It adds caramelized edges and warmth to the whole pot.

Then everything else goes in:

– Vegetables layered at the bottom

– Fruit or dried fruit scattered on top

– Protein nestled in next

– Herbs, salt, and pepper dusted over

– And broth (or wine) poured around the edges until everything is halfway submerged

Halfway is the sweet spot.

Crock-Pots create their own liquid. Too much at the beginning makes things soupy; half gives you a true stew—braised below, steamed above.

LOW for 6–7 hours. HIGH for 4.

Stir gently. Taste. Adjust.

Winter cooking should feel like kindness, not labor.

Here are three versions that have become part of my winter rhythm:

Winter Orchard & Root Vegetable Stew

Cozy, slightly sweet, old-world comfort.

Carrots, parsnips, sweet potato, yellow potatoes, onion, celery, garlic, a firm apple, dried apricots or golden raisins, thyme, rosemary, bay leaf, broth.

The apple melts into silk.

The apricots soften into little pockets of warmth.

The whole stew tastes like something long remembered.

Rustic Beef & Red Wine Stew With Prunes and Rosemary

Deep, rich, fragrant—perfect for a long night.

Stew beef, pork, (or venison), onion, carrots, celery, mushrooms, garlic, prunes, cinnamon, red wine, beef broth, rosemary, bay leaf, black pepper.

The prunes disappear into the broth, giving depth rather than sweetness and they become velvet in a bowl.

Scandinavian Chicken, Barley & Winter Fruit Stew

Northern, quiet, comforting—my ancestral roots in a pot.

Chicken thighs, onion, leek, carrots, a little cabbage, barley, a chopped pear, dried cranberries, thyme, bay, white pepper, chicken broth.

The pear melts.

The barley thickens.

The cranberries lift everything without becoming tart.

All these stews really need is a warm loaf of bread still fragrant from the oven, herb butter melting into the crust, a soft wedge of Camembert or Brie brought to room temperature, a little winter salad, and a glass of wine or cider to gather it all together in the gentlest way.

Winter also draws us back toward the simple, tactile things that keep our hands busy and our hearts steady. My daughter-in-law knits and sews, building warmth one loop and one stitch at a time. I read and write — that’s my winter craft — losing myself in the quiet click of keys or the soft turning of a page.

Some evenings Jim and I drift onto the couch with our own little projects, or we curl up in Wolfie’s living room while he paints or shapes wild Play-Doh worlds. His parents sometimes join us, everyone settled in the same circle of lamplight, each doing something small and unhurried.

Those moments feel like winter’s best kind of closeness — the kind that grows when hands are working, voices soften, and the room gathers everyone into the same gentle rhythm. Screens don’t do that. But crafts, books, simple domestic tasks? They stitch a family together in a way nothing else can.

Winter doesn’t ask us to fight it, instead it asks us to inhabit it by moving more slowly and noticing more deeply. By letting the cold sharpen the senses and the warmth inside knit us closer to one another.

May this winter meet you gently — in your kitchen, at your windows, in the small rituals that warm the days. May your hands stay busy with good work, your home feel soft around the edges, and may the season show you its quiet abundance, one slow moment at a time.

Remember. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just yours.

This space remains free because it’s meant to be shared. If you believe in that, you can support it by becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers keep the lights on—quite literally—but the stories, recipes, and field notes stay open to all. Every month, I send a private letter to say thank you and share what’s brewing behind the scenes.

So this begins From the Windesphere Hearth: a monthly letter written from the farm, by hand and heart, for my paid subscribers. It’s a slower space—part reflection, part gratitude, part simple dispatch from whatever the season is teaching me. Nothing polished, just the scent of apples softening on the porch, frost finding the edges of the garden, the quiet hum that keeps the work alive.

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“Magic isn’t hidden in faraway places. It lives in the scent of apples and smoke, in the soft rustle of leaves underfoot, in the quiet generosity of the turning year. To gather these moments is to remember who we are.”

— Beth Schreibman Gehring, from Forage & Gather

Will you follow me? Yes, I know the woods are dark, but isn’t the smell intoxicating this time of year? The leaves are wet and seductively sour. Sweet, ripe apples still hang on the cool, bare branches, and the musky scent of deer lingers all around us in the still night forest.

The winds are stirring tonight, and if you listen carefully, they will tell you anything you need to know. Take a deep breath and notice the smells that come to you. Yes, we are in the deep woods, and there are the familiar sounds of animals curling in the brush and the musky, sweet smells of wet leaves, mushrooms, and windfall apples. An owl flies past, wings strong and silent, and suddenly the shriek of its prey breaks the still, dark night, yet another part of the great dance among the strands of the web of life.

Come gather with me around this friendly balefire. The flames smell absolutely wonderful, burning brightly with the magical woods of apple, oak, and ash and scented with fresh branches of lavender for peace, white sage for cleansing and purification, mugwort for protection, and rosemary for remembrance. It’s a beautiful evening, cool and crisp, and I’ve laid piles of fragrant fresh hay all around so we can sit.

I hope you’re hungry, because I’ve brought homebrewed hard cider infused with nutmeg, fresh honey, and apples. The cauldron is filled with steaming pumpkin soup, laced with golden sage, curry, and cumin, and the last of the season’s sweet corn is roasting by the edges of the fire, waiting to be drenched in melted butter flavored with black truffles, chilies from the garden, and salt.

And while the soup simmers and the cider warms your hands, let’s roast a few pumpkin seeds, crisp, spicy, and kissed with maple and smoke, the way autumn should taste.

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds with Chili, Garlic, and Maple

Ingredients

• 1½ cups raw pumpkin seeds (rinsed and patted dry)

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• 1 tablespoon melted butter

• ½ teaspoon soy sauce

• 1 teaspoon chili powder (smoky ancho or your favorite blend)

• ½ teaspoon garlic powder or 1 small clove finely grated fresh garlic

• 1 teaspoon pure maple syrup (or honey)

• ½ teaspoon fine sea salt

• A few grinds of black pepper

• Optional: a pinch of smoked paprika or cayenne for a touch of heat

Instructions

1. Prepare the seeds: Rinse pumpkin seeds well, removing pulp and stringy bits. Pat them completely dry with a clean towel.

2. Mix the coating: In a medium bowl, whisk together olive oil, melted butter, soy sauce, maple syrup, chili powder, garlic, salt, and pepper.

3. Toss to coat: Add the pumpkin seeds and stir until every seed glistens.

4. Roast: Spread in a single layer on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Roast at 325°F (165°C) for 25–35 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes, until golden brown and fragrant.

5. Taste and finish: Taste while warm and adjust seasoning if needed.

Enjoy them warm by the fire, or save a jarful for later. They’re perfect sprinkled over soup, salad, or even a baked sweet potato.

The waning moon hangs by a silvery thread in the sky, and the woods are quiet except for the disconcerting sense that we are not alone. We’re probably not. It’s All Hallows’ Eve, or All Souls’ Night, the great Celtic feast of Samhain, the gateway between autumn and winter in the Northern Hemisphere that draws us into the darkest time of the year. This is the time when the veil between the worlds grows thin and the place where all souls can meet is easiest for us mere mortals to see. I love this season because I always feel so alive and connected to the wisdom of those who have walked before me.

“Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all of my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”

— Linda Hogan

Samhain is a special time for me because it’s a moment to stop for long, quiet reflection. Samhain, or Halloween as you may know it, is the Celtic New Year, and I am definitely all witch, or Rosewitch as my husband teasingly calls me. Don’t worry, I’m a good witch, to be sure. I really do believe in magic. Samhain is my time for deep reflection and divination, a time to honor endings and to cast new wishes and dreams for the year ahead.

Tonight, witches all over the world will look to the night sky while casting spells for peace and prosperity. We’ll bless and give thanks for our ancestors, for the earth, and for the green blessings that sustain us. Our creed is to harm none; we are the keepers of the earth’s oldest secrets. For centuries we’ve been the healers, the quiet herbalists who walk unnoticed among you. We tend the gardens. We mix and brew the teas that heal and the potions that make life just a bit more interesting. Our recipes are passed down to our children, hidden in our cookbooks and tucked into old hymnals with bits of pressed herbs and flowers.

We are the keepers of the older ways, the wiser ways. For years we’ve lived cloaked in secrecy, afraid to be known. No longer. The world is clamoring for our juicy green magic.

Sometimes I think people are afraid of us simply because our nature is so earthy. Magic, for me, is happiness, playfulness, and tenderness. It’s also about knowing that there are some things you can control and many you cannot. It’s about acceptance, about caring for others as you would want to be cared for yourself. It’s about living powerfully with all in the world, not being afraid to see everything it has to offer. It’s about tolerance. It’s about being at peace with the duality of creativity and destruction. It’s about creating your own reality instead of waiting for someone else to define it.

Our gardens do that naturally, year after year. Mother Nature is our greatest teacher. She understands the nature of magic inherently. She alone can show us how to evolve or die.

Am I truly a witch? I’ve known these things about myself all my life, since the first time I lay in the grass and watched magic unfold as I blew on the seeds of a dandelion. Am I a witch because I seek out the herbal knowledge that this fast-paced world seems to have forgotten? Because the change of seasons quickens my blood? Because I follow the rhythms of the earth and honor the turning of the year? Because I trust in the green recipes handed down by the wise women who came before me? Because I choose the old ways first? Because I will not forget the knowledge and wisdom of those who came before?

Here is what I know to be true: I am an herbalist who instinctively knows that, no matter how far medicine advances, there will always be a need for green magic in the healing process. I will always hold the space of the wise woman. I am the kitchen witch who loves nothing more than long days in my garden, tending the healing herbs, fruits, and vegetables; promoting wellness through herbalism, flower and gem essences, aromatherapy, and Reiki; and brewing delightful herbal potions to help keep you healthy, beautiful, and grounded, inside and out.

I dream of a world where we are fully connected again to the earth and to each other. I see it beginning, even amid the madness. Farmers markets are everywhere, gathering places for real food and conversation. Craft beers, meads, and distilleries flourish. I’ve started making my own cheese again, because everything I need is right here. We knit, we sew, we make. We keep chickens and bees. We make candles, soaps, herbal medicines, and perfumes. We plant backyard gardens and tend community plots. Every city I visit has its own delightful distillery and its own little patch of green.

What’s next? Maybe the return of the community bread and stew oven, and why not? One beautiful byproduct of the last twenty years is that so many of us are cooking again. My phone and inbox are full of questions about herbalism, Reiki, and natural healing. We’re hungry for the old knowledge, the slower, truer ways. There’s no better prescription for health and joy than the food on your fork, the water in your glass, and the rich brown soil beneath your feet.

If that’s not magic alive and well, I don’t know what is.

So come dance under the moon with me tonight. There’s a little witch in every woman, and here’s a copper mug filled with my favorite steaming brew to help you find yours. It’s made with almond milk, dark chocolate, raw honey, my homemade rose syrup for love and healing, allspice for good luck, cinnamon for health, chili to warm you, a touch of vanilla for creativity, and a generous shot of herb-infused amaro to help you see between the worlds. I’ve grated the last of my precious Tonka bean from Paris over the top because who couldn’t use a bit more love and prosperity in the New Year?

Sip it slowly. Savor its smoky aroma. Make a wish.

Now tell me, what spicy magic will you create this year?

It wouldn’t be Samhain without this beautiful photograph by Terri Foss!

A Note from the Hearth

Every year when Samhain arrives, I feel that same old spark — the quickening that happens when firelight meets cool air and the veil between worlds grows soft. It’s a time that invites reflection and renewal, a moment to remember that tending to our own magic is a kind of care for the world itself.

If you feel it too, I’d love to hear how you celebrate this turning of the year. Do you light candles for your ancestors, brew something warm and fragrant, or simply walk under the moon and listen?

You can reply to this letter and tell me. I read every word.

May your Samhain be filled with warmth, wonder, and the deep contentment of being part of this beautiful, breathing world.

— Beth

This space remains free because it’s meant to be shared. If you believe in that, you can support it by becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers keep the lights on—quite literally—but the stories, recipes, and field notes stay open to all. Every so often, I send a private letter to say thank you and share what’s brewing behind the scenes.

© 2025 Beth Schreibman Gehring. All rights reserved.

All text, photographs, and original artwork unless noted appearing in Forage & Gather are the intellectual property of the author and may not be reproduced, copied, or used in any form without written permission. Sharing the original Substack link is always welcome.

Welcome to The Windsphere Journal , a hearth for memory, nature, and the quiet kind of magic that lingers through the turning year. It’s where I return home to the hill that shaped me, to gather stories of wind, water, and belonging.

Many years ago, I lived on an old farm built in 1848, a place of stone foundations and timber beams, of horses in the pasture and water that ran pure and cold from an artesian spring that always had watercress growing in it. It was built by a man named Samuel McBride, whose family had lived on that hill for generations. Though time had softened its edges, the land still carried their memory, the whisper of their footsteps and the echo of their care.

When we moved there in 1982, I named it Windesphere .

Truly it was the only name that fit. The farm sat high on a rise where the wind never stopped moving, and from my kitchen window I could look down over the fields and watch the light change hour by hour. It was a place where the wind met the waters and the seasons spoke softly through the trees.

We were not alone there. The farmhouse had a gentle presence, a spirit we came to know as Lucy McBride, Samuel’s daughter-in-law, who had died there in childbirth generations before. Lucy was kind and protective, never frightening. Sometimes she lingered by the kitchen door or moved quietly through the barn where the horses slept. I always felt she loved that place as deeply as I did, still tending to it in her way. When I finally discovered who she was, I began bringing her pussy willows from the front pasture, setting them in a vase in the room where I felt her most, and whispering, “These are for you, because I know you love it here as much as I do.” Whether it was imagination or intuition, there was a true sense of connection between past and present, between her spirit and my own.

A minute down the road, tucked quietly in the woods, was the McBride family cemetery — a small clearing ringed by oaks, where the light always seemed to fall a little softer. After hours spent in the local library poring over records, I learned that the land where we lived had once been part of that family’s great homestead. That was how I came to know Lucy’s story, and of her stillborn son who rests beside her. It is a peaceful, beautiful place, blanketed in moss and memory. Each October, I still visit her grave. I bring small pumpkins and flowers — offerings of gratitude for sharing her beloved home with us, for watching over us with such quiet grace.

Windesphere was the kind of place that truly shaped you. My son grew up there, he knew every blackberry bush on that land, and they all fruited at different times. I can still see him in my mind, running from thicket to thicket as a toddler, his chubby hands and sweet face stained with berry juice, smiling like the sun itself. He learned to climb the old oaks and listen for the frogs by the pond. I never worried about him there, even when he was so little. He knew when the air would shift and bring the smell of rain. He knew which plants were for him and which plants were to be left alone. Those were the lessons the land taught us — patience, rhythm, belonging.

In February, when the sap began to rise, I would stand at the kitchen window and watch the silver light roll across the snow. From our hill, I could almost see down into the village of Burton, to the old maple cabin in the square where smoke rose from the chimney. I could smell the syrup before I even reached it, sweet and wood-fired, a sure sign that spring was on its way.

And in October, the farm came alive. We would build great bonfires in the back pasture and gather friends and family for hot, spicy cider and chili. We would go owling at night, walking through the dark woods with our lanterns, listening for the haunting calls that echoed through the trees. Sometimes, if we were lucky, we would see the owls swoop low across our path, their wings gliding silently through the cold autumn air. Those nights were full of magic, the kind that lives on long after the fire burns out.

We marked every season with its own kind of celebration. In spring, there were colts in the pasture and kittens everywhere. In summer, the hum of bees and the scent of hay drying in the sun. In autumn, the turning of leaves, the last pears falling golden from the trees, the smell of woodsmoke curling into the sky. And in winter, the stillness — deep and peaceful, the world wrapped in quiet, our sturdy Franklin wood stove keeping us warm all through the night.

Windsphere was a magical place to live and an even more magical place to raise a child. There, I learned to listen — to the wind, to the trees, to the quiet voice of the earth itself. That’s where the Windesphere Witch was born, not from legend or lore, but from the ordinary sacredness of a life lived close to nature. She was the woman who stirred soup by candlelight, gathered herbs by moonlight, and taught her child to know the names of things.

It has been more than twenty years since I lived there, but Windesphere has never left me. It hums beneath everything I write and lives on in the way I teach my grandson, Wolfie, how to listen for bees, how to tell which berries belong to the birds, and how to feel the season turning in the air.

Now, as autumn settles in once more, I find myself returning to that old rhythm. The mornings are cool and silver, the evenings scented with woodsmoke. The last pears have fallen from our tree, and the herbs are drying in the kitchen — sage, thyme, lemon verbena. Their fragrance fills the house, just as it once did in that white farmhouse on the hill, with its green barn and fieldstone foundation.

So this little corner of Forage and Gather — The Windesphere Journals — is a way of keeping that hearth warm. A place to gather stories, herbs, and small enchantments of the turning year. Each month, I’ll share something of the season: a bit of herbal wisdom, a reflection, a recipe, a ritual — gentle reminders that the magic we seek is already here, in the wind, the soil, and the care we give.

If Windesphere taught me anything, it’s that we carry our places with us.

They root in our bones and grow through our hands, whispering, “Remember.”

From my hearth to yours, with love,

Beth