Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree

It is October now, though you wouldn’t know it from the mercury rising the past week. The maples are rapidly growing bare and the leaves are crisp beneath our boots, yet the air hums with a misplaced summer heat. For days now, the warmth has lingered heavy, uninvited, strange. The bees are restless, spilling from their hives past twilight, agitated and uncertain of the season or their aims. The full moon hasn’t helped their confusion, nor mine. It has cast its silver light through the boughs and across the fields, waking the nocturnal; foxes, skunk, and deer wandering through the flower field and closer to the house than I would like.

The children, too, have been taken by the moon.

They beg to stay up late, to join in whatever quiet work remains before bed. This is fine. The heat lends itself to frustration in us older people, but tonight my little girl carried tools down the hill to me, barefoot and beaming her headlamp despite the moonlight, ferrying a hammer, a ruler, some nails while I mended a loose board in the honey house.

There is a strange paradox to this season: one foot in autumn, the other stubbornly trying to reanimate summer. The leaves have fallen and turned to tinder underfoot, perfect for jumping and tossing into the air, yet standing in the old flower field I can hear the faint laughter of swimmers down the hill at the lake in the village, as if July had clawed its way from some autumnal burial mound.

It is disorienting when a season will not stay dead.

It confuses the senses and makes time feel off, wrong somehow. Still, around every home, the same good green pattern continues: the swing of the maul and the stacking of wood, the scent of honey warm in the hive, the anxious hammering of boards to outbuildings before winter’s inevitable claim. It is a strange thing to sweat under a sun that should have softened weeks ago, to labor in the yard or forest with heat on your neck while knowing frost is crouched in the hedgerows, waiting to waylay the tomatoes on the vine. The small jobs about the property and home regenerate endlessly, almost as if they are urged on unnaturally by the heat.

Then we see the children in the yard though, gathering leaves and stones into little piles or pretending to help us carry kindling and suddenly the heat no longer confuses and disorients, the muscles no longer ache.

The children root us when we are unmoored by strange skies.

They sanctify the toil and redeem it into vocation.

Today the heat finally broke. Rain came in the early morning, soft and steady, and our little corner of the world exhaled. The sky turned a muted gray and the light, filtered through the patchy clouds, glowed with a gloaming calm. The bees quieted at last, huddled in their hives, and the forest smelled again of damp leaves and good sodden loam. It is the kind of weather that invites stillness, that whispers rest, rest, rest. Rest is a luxury not yet earned however. There is still wood to stack, honey to bottle and sell, another repair on the chicken coop before the cold finds its way in.

Meanwhile, the children’s laughter is a ringing bell through it all, putting the reanimated summer finally to rest.

They play in the new puddles we tell them to avoid, of course, and when we turn to scold we stop short. Their joy redeems the drudgery. Their play answers every unspoken question about why we keep going when the body aches and the mind frays.

Even now, as the days shorten and the warmth feels misplaced, we are reminded what all this labor is for. The work, the worry, the stings and small fixes. They are for the children who chase chickens and puddles and dreams under an autumn sun that doesn’t know what month it is. They are the quiet covenant that binds us to our place and to the rhythm of work and of rest, of breaking and of mending, of toil and of joy. The skies may turn strange, the seasons may blur, the cracks in our walls may show but still, we keep going.

We must.

When the muscles tremble, when the hands blister, when the spirit grows weary and wonders if it can go on, we look to them and remember.

For them, we labor.

Through them, the work becomes hallowed.

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You’re well on the march to winter now. The solstice came and went back in June and your days became imperceptibly shorter. Lammas came and went quietly with the early harvest. Now the equinox is behind you and there is no denying that summer in all its good green glory has performed its function. Everything good grew, bloomed, and went to seed.

Purpose and achievement realized, made manifest.

A culmination of green and gold, of seed and loam.

We could learn from all the trees and flowers this time of year, of all the seed sowers and bulb growers. Our days are marked by endless pings and alerts, of calendar reminders and notifications. You are approaching the fourth quarter of the business year—that most hatefully efficient quadrisecting delineation of your time—and, if you are a white collar worker who spends more time behind a keyboard than a shovel, you are likely facing some sort of “Q4 performance review.”

If so, God help you.

Your good green heart was meant for more than this.

You will be asked—either by your job or by our wounded culture at large—how you plan to grow in the coming quarter, in the time before the turn of another year.

This is neither fair nor is it natural.

When we lost touch with our agrarian roots, when we left the fields and forests for the factories and offices, we sacrificed a certain attunement with the seasons and cycles. We forgot how this time of year was instructing us in favor of steady work, a long endless metallic drone instead of a cyclical organic rhythm.

We forgot to recognize our victories. We forgot to realize when we had won and when to rest.

The good news is that creation, the loam, the good green pattern churning beneath all know better. The forest knows better. Ask any gardener or beekeeper or orchardist and they will tell you now is the season to take stock. You pull the last of the garden from the dirt, you collect the honey you’ve been waiting on since May, you take your apples to the cider press. There are few thoughts now about producing more, about endless striving. Now all thoughts turn to a heavy sigh of relief and culmination—the fruit is in the basket, the crop is in the barn, the bees are heavy with stores and the wood pile is teetering dangerously high.

It is no small thing to come to the end of a cycle and realize you have made, grown, created enough. That you worked, yes, and labored, but now you can gather. We were not meant to produce endlessly, to grow constantly, to urge and urge and urge.

This is the rhythm our ancestors trusted. This is the rhythm that kept them sane. The ability to stop and say: it is finished.

You should allow yourself the same.

Perhaps you are not a farmer. Perhaps you have no harvest in a literal sense. Still, you have planted and tended something this year. Maybe you raised children through another summer of scraped knees and wild berries. Maybe you launched a project that is finally reaching its natural close. Maybe you simply endured and held on when things were difficult in your heart. That too is a kind of harvest and worth acknowledging.

Instead of asking “what next?” ask “what now?”

What is here? What is complete? What is good?

The trees do not grow new leaves in September. They are not so foolish as to try. They know it is time to let go, to blaze out in one final show of color, to cast seed into the ground and trust the future to take care of itself.

They celebrate by ceasing.

They culminate by closing the cycle.

Do not let the tyranny of quarterly goals, year-end reviews, and other modern inventions of productivity rob you of the deep peace that is due to you in this season. Do not let our culture of relentless progress steal away the chance to enjoy what you have already accomplished.

Some will tell you that rest or idleness now is a sort of failure. The truth is that rest is the crown of the work.

The meadow in September is not anxious. The field after harvest is not ashamed. They have given what they can give. That is enough.

Now is the time to gather your own community, however small, to mark this time following the equinox. Invite friends for a meal. Bake bread, press cider, roast whatever your hands have brought in from the summer. If you have no literal harvest of your own, take stock of what you have done, all the good you have wrought and celebrate it. Buy a pumpkin, light a candle, let the children run until they fall into sleep. You are allowed to live as if the world is not only spreadsheets and headlines you know.

Celebration is a kind of rebellion. Through it, you proclaim: I will not let the anxious cultural ills dictate my pace, I will not let the endless noise drown out the truth of the season. The truth is that you have accomplished something. The truth is that you have made it this far. The truth is that you can rest in that knowledge.

First you need to take your victory lap, though.

The frost is here. The days will shorten further. The long rest of winter will arrive in its time. Not today though. Not yet. Today is for culmination and for you to take some kind of stock of your good verdant victory.

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We are deeply unbalanced, off-kilter, ready to fall. Take a look at any headlines and no matter your politics or lack thereof, you will likely conclude our entire world is teetering on the edge of a blade, at risk of falling into cataclysmic disorder. This coming Sunday however contains a heavenly convergence that is worthy of your reflection and may offer some solace; it is both a new moon and the autumn equinox. This is significant not because of some spurious astrology but rather the real, tangible ways your world will change and some innate symbolism that natural world offers.

On the equinox your days and your nights will be more or less equal. Twelve hours of light. Twelve hours of darkness. This is good. In such unstable times, it is well that we are not also enduring the long dark-cold or losing ourselves in the bacchanalian joy of the two extremes, the solstices. This equinox is marked too by the invitation to start over offered by the new moon. Something about new moons always feels like an opportunity to begin again. When you take these two celestial events in tandem—the balance of the equinox and the opportunity of the new moon—it feels as though you are being invited by the natural world to step forward and reclaim some semblance of stability, to make a fresh start and regain your footing, to try again.

I walked with my now toddling daughter (13 months old) around our meadow this evening wondering what to tell you about this equinox, about how to become balanced again in such an unbalanced world. Would I speak of the adaptability of trees changing? The succession of flowers again? Migratory patterns? As I hemmed and hawed, contemplated and reflected there in the meadow, my little girl pointed to a small sunflower. I carried her to it, placed her down, and continued my ruminating. She tugged at the flower, realized she could not pull it from its root, and crawled to my lap. She did not fuss as I picked her up and carried her in my arms to the forest in search of more insight. It was there however, that I realized she had already given us everything we needed to know to keep our balance in this unbalanced world.

The Flower

As we walked around the field, my daughter spied a small sunflower from some distance and pointed to it, directing me to bring her there. When I placed her on the ground, she was not distracted by a butterfly nearby nor the approaching cat; she walked to the flower confidently and began to pull.

She knew what she wanted and she went for it.

As we are considering how to reclaim our balance in these uncertain days of grim headlines and constant alarm, it is wise to be like the very young child who sees what she wants and strides to it with an unwavering focus. Identify your goal and do not lose sight of it, ask those who support you to help you arrive to your desired location, approach, and seize what you desire.

The Familiar

When my daughter decided pulling the flower was in vain, she did not fuss. She realized uprooting it was beyond her and she crawled toward me and settled into my lap. One might expect an easy lesson here in the importance of asking for help, but that did not occur. My daughter—though very young—knows how to ask for things including assistance. She did not do that with her flower. Instead, realizing it was beyond her, that its roots were stuck fast, that it willed itself to remain planted, she returned to me and therein lies her second lesson for you:

When we fail, it is good to retreat to familiar ground.

Remember though (and this is very important) that she did not crawl to me crying or wailing, distraught at her defeat. She accepted what was and returned to what she knew. As the world becomes increasingly complex and unstable, things just won’t work sometimes. As my friend and fellow father Joe Norman at Applied Complexity Science likes to remind me, “complex systems are fragile systems.” This will only become increasingly true as our world becomes increasingly complex and many institutions, efforts, and logistical networks will break down. Failure abounds.

This sounds scary but it is fine as long as you have the familiar to which you may return.

Perhaps it is not a physical place like your father’s lap. Perhaps it is your faith or ethos or code of morality. Perhaps it is a person. Perhaps it is a book or tradition or biome. Whatever the case may be, if you have a touchstone, something to moor yourself to when the sea of life becomes too choppy, you will be able to regain your footing and try again.

Trust

After my daughter crawled into my lap and I stood and started walking away from her desired flower, she did not whine. We walked from the flower meadow to the edge of the forest. There, we spotted a flock of wild turkeys emerge in the far corner of the field to the south. The woodline curves there like the gentle arc of the sun over the western ridge this time of year, providing multiple opportunities for escape for a cunning wild bird. A fine and safe boreal cove in which to sun and rest. We stood there, listening to the scratchy call of a hen to her flock, watching the wild turkeys sun themselves in the curving corner of the field. The September sun was warm and there were no biting insects to distract us from watching the funny turkeys slowly waddle back into the forest, from reflecting on safety, from witnessing a moment of tranquility.

Although my daughter did not obtain what she initially sought, she was rewarded with something else. She trusted where I was bringing her and gained something good.

I will not tell you in what to put your trust. That is too personal and only for you to decide. There will be times when you feel as though nothing is going right however, when the imbalance has turned to a free fall. In these moments, trust in what you have sown before this time: the relationships you have fostered, the insurances you have set, the skills you have honed, all the good you have wrought. Perhaps this looks like reaching out to a friend, in leaning into your faith, in cashing in on some social program you have spent your life paying into. Whatever the case may be, you likely have more of a safety net that you realize, something solid in which you can trust.

As the equinox and new moon converge this Sunday, attempt to focus your mind less on grand systems or headlines and more on that small sunflower in the field, the little girl tugging at its rooted stalk, returning to her father’s lap, and later watching wild turkeys at ease in their woodland cove.

Focus on what these anecdotes symbolize.

Pursuing what you desire with clarity, returning to the familiar when you cannot uproot what will not yield, trusting that the path still offers good things—these three movements are enough to steady us when the world feels increasingly unbalanced.

You cannot control the whole earth teetering on a knife’s edge. You can walk toward the flower, rest again in the familiar when it will not come loose, and trust the hand that carries you toward what you do not yet see.

You can reclaim your balance.

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It is late August and the northern places have begun to transform with quiet, unassuming grace. The nights grow cool in the hills and a walk down the road, through the forest, or past a tangled hedgerow will reveal autumn’s early, subtle gains. Apples have begun to tumble from branches, splitting open in ditches and their bruised, tart-sweet perfume mingles with the crisp air. Sumac has begun to blush along the edges of the field as if the bees told it a risky joke. Goldenrod reigns over every field. The light has sharpened, no longer softened by June’s hazy gauze but instead casting crisp edges on leaves, stones, and weathered fences. The sky feels closer to November’s stark clarity than midsummer’s languid glow now. A faint browning creeps into the green, signaling the year’s inevitable turn toward more balanced days after summer’s wild sunlit bender. This is late August’s arrival, subtle and without ceremony, leaving most of us to ask “Where has the time gone?” It is a good question and we seem to remark on it often. People will tell you that time keeps speeding up for them as they age, that the days are long but the years are short. They ask “How did my children grow so big?” The days are so full, the weeks just float away and there is the ever-present lament of “I need more time.” They are common complaints and questions. Rarely do you hear that we can slow the turning of that old grindstone, however.

It seems to be a secret well kept, hiding in plain sight.

We can slow our perception of time. It is not arcane or difficult, but it does require practice that, like all good practices, eventually forms into a benevolent habit. The secret to slowing time is twofold: first in deliberate attention, in actively attempting to simply notice what is changing before you. Most people rush past the season’s signs, distracted by screens or lamenting summer’s end, only to find themselves at Labor Day or Halloween, asking, “Where did the time go?” Time can be stretched however, made to linger and burn slow like a well-tended fire, by noticing the small shifts that mark the turn. This, in part, is why it becomes important to attune yourself to a place, to stay there for a long time and become intimately familiar with its seasons and its signs. Do you know the birds at your feeder, the weeds in your ditch, where the moon rises over the ridge this time of year? Here in Vermont, late August has many little omens and signs: goldenrod fills the fields while asters bubble up from the ditches and roadsides, their purple and yellow blooms complimenting the fading green. Corn in the fiend stands tall, tassels dry and rustling, while dairy barns glow with the soft light of evening routines. We have lost over an hour of daylight since the summer solstice and those lights are now necessary. In the woods, the understory shifts; wood nettle fades, jewelweed scatters seeds, and birch leaves curl on the forest floor. Along roadsides milkweed pods are just beginning to split open, their silken threads catching the wind. Each day offers a detail, a small slow secret to anchor the moment if you but pause to gather it.

The second element you need to slow time may sound ironic. It is filling your days with good work. Imagine each day as a wooden chest placed on the riverbank. The river is time, always flowing, always pushing, apathetic to what it carries off. The chest is your days. A chest left empty is light; it is carried off easily, swept downstream before you have even marked its presence. That is how whole months can vanish unnoticed, how years slip past with the haunting sense that you never truly lived them. A chest that is filled with the weight of good work, of perennial tasks, of hours well-spent building, making, growing for your family cannot be rushed away. It settles into place, anchored by what you have placed inside with care. The day remains regardless of the rising river and its rushing insistence. You can prove this for yourself. Work a property hard for a single year on evenings, weekends, whenever the light allows, and by the following autumn it will feel as though you have been there for decades, even generations. The soil will know your hand, the fences your hammer, the animals your presence. This good work does not mean frantic busyness, nor endless striving, but rather keeping with the good green pattern of the world: tending bees, stacking wood, pruning apple trees, raising children. In the city you may achieve this as well, though it may not feel as intuitive. Instead of splitting wood, you may have more agency around the relationships you build or the initiatives you take to improve commonly held spaces like parks, or the old rituals of your faith you steward. Whatever the case may be, you place good weight in the chest through these acts. They belong to the perennial cycle, the tasks that root you in a place and in a rhythm beyond yourself.

Fill enough chests this way, and the river of time still flows, but you are no longer at its mercy.

The days remain along the bank, solid, waiting, part of a lasting pattern. The chest of each day is so full, so well-weighted with effort and care, that time itself seems to lengthen around you, yielding to and flowing around the chests you placed and filled. This is the gift of good work. It thickens life with a welcomed heaviness, a vigor that cannot be pushed and pulled by the whims of culture or time.

The modern world thrives on distraction, urging acceleration and feeding on the despair of time slipping away. It prefers you scroll rather than watch the moon rise over a quiet hill, count emails instead of fireflies flickering in the twilight, fight instead of love. This rush erodes the river bank while simultaneously causing you to forget to fill your chest, leaving it weightless. To slow down time is to resist this current, to live as though each day carries intrinsic value, as though the good green pattern of the world and its cycles of growth and decay, its fleeting moments of beauty, were drawn out for you to witness and build upon.

You can start simply.

Watch as the sky’s evening slides from gold to pink to gray, stars emerging one by one. Invite a neighbor over. Listen to the crickets. Remember an old tradition from your childhood, however mundane or sacred. Learn the smells of the season: cut grass cooling in the evening, apples softening in ditches, their ferment a promise of autumn. Notice a child’s laughter carrying across a field or the weight of their hand in yours. Keep a journal, even just a line, to note the first asters frothing up in the low places, the morning mist coiled in the valley, or a fox darting across your path. Writing these moments anchors the day, adding a little weight to the chest you keep at the river’s banks. Do this and you will not look back in November, startled, wondering where the season, the very year went. Instead when you fill each day’s chest with timeless things and good work you ensure it sits heavy in your memory, not lost to the flotsam and detritus of distraction. The practice of noticing is one of quiet rebellion, a choice to dwell in the present rather than race down the river toward the next milestone, to believe that each day matters.

The temptation this time of year is to grieve summer’s fading ease or allow the current to sweep you toward autumn’s glory, but the wiser path is to dwell here, in the thick and forgotten briar of the present, considering each day with intention. Walk the roadside and taste the tart bite of a wild apple. Cut a bouquet of whatever wildflowers remain for your table. Watch for small shifts: the first red leaf, the slant of light across a barn that was not there a week ago, the cool breath of evening. Let these acts ground you. They require no great effort, yet they imbue the days with an endurance otherwise lost.

Ul…

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Author’s Note: this essay is part of the Reports from the High Wood series, a weekly premium report from our homestead that offers enduring lessons for living well in a wounded world. If you're drawn to green paths, perennial values, and timeless beauty that resists the modern glare, you're in the right place.

Normally these Sunday posts are for paid subscribers only, but the nature of this essay makes it feel right that this post should be available to everyone.

Here are some of our past beekeeping posts that will give context if you are new here:

"You could charge for this, you know." The kind woman I did not know remarked as she cut a handful of zinnias and marigolds from our meadow. She was visiting from another state, staying with my friend and neighbor who I saw swimming earlier. I invited them to walk up to our home and cut flowers. Her comment caused me to reflect not only on the possibility of tourists cutting flowers and taking photos in our meadow for money, but the morality, authenticity, and general ethos of the idea. Two weeks ago, another friend walked up from the village with her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend. These beautiful teenagers spent one of their final evenings together before leaving for college by putting the flowers from our meadow into each other's hair. I smiled as they stood there in the field, looking like Oberon and Titania holding court, unaware of summer's fade. Could I ever bring myself to charge a stranger for such a thing? Would it be right? Would it be better to leave the meadow a secret for friends and friends of friends to come and leave with a bouquet for their table? What is even the purpose of the Humming Meadow?

We live in a time when everything is bent toward transaction. The smallest pleasures are weighed for their commercial potential, packaged, branded, and sold back to us as a curated experience. Even the flowers are not spared; wild bouquets and meadow walks appear on glossy flyers promising wellness, mindfulness, reconnection. To resist this “agri-tainment” not easy. We are told we must monetize the hours we spend, the skills we carry, even the beauty that happens to fall on our land. I am not immune to this. I write here, I keep bees, I tend a homestead that asks for both labor and investment. Yes, we care deeply about beekeeping, the land, and creating something good and perennial but there is also a practical wisdom in selling honey, in asking readers to support words worth writing.

Yet there is also a line that must be drawn if one hopes to live in alignment and equilibrium with the good green pattern.

Not every moment, not every experience, not every gift of place should be folded into the ledger. Our wounded modern world may need fewer things for sale and more things given freely, without calculation or branding, without the heaviness of an exchange. There must be some part of our lives—a table set for family, a forest path known only to neighbors, a good old ritual—that remains unpriced.

Perhaps this is because, while in the meadow this evening, I sensed we are actively living in “the good old days”. I know it in my bones when I watch my daughter chase after our black cat through the meadow with an armful of zinnias. I know it when I see my wife at dusk, standing barefoot in the grass, holding our youngest while moths relieve the butterflies’ watch over the meadow. I know it in the steady rhythm of the hives, in the sting and the sweetness that mark this work as ours. These days are fleeting, precious, lit with a kind of unselfconscious joy. The business is still small enough that it does not consume us, the children still young enough that they do not pull away. Even the meadow itself feels fragile, an ember of soil and seed that could easily be snuffed out by carelessness or greed. Were I to charge for entry, to make the flowers a product instead of a gift, I would lose something essential. I would no longer wave to a stranger who has wandered up the road from the village and mean it when I say, “Take some home with you.” I would no longer welcome a friend of a friend with scissors in hand and feel no need to count the stems. These are the years when such hospitality is still possible, when the gate is open, when we do not guard ourselves against loss because what we have feels abundant.

In time, this ease will change. The children will grow, the business may harden into necessary edges, the meadow will pass through its seasons and become something else. I do not fool myself that the wheel will pause here. The dandelion gives way to the clover, the clover to the goldenrod, the goldenrod to the asters. So too with us. What we hold today will be asked of us tomorrow, and if we are wise, we will give it gladly. To cling too tightly is to miss the gift of the season we are in. Better to live as the flowers do, spending themselves fully while the light is theirs, trusting the good green pattern to carry on. If we can live this way, even for a time, we will have left enough behind—honey in the jar, flowers in a stranger’s hands, memory pressed into the hearts of children—for something beautiful to grow after us.

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It is the middle of August and now we wander through our high summer haze toward the equinox, toward fall. It may feel cruel to speak of autumn as the children yet splash and shout in the swimming holes, as the berries burst on the vine, as the school bell still gathers dust, but walk now slowly along the ditches where the lilies and daisies once bloomed and you will know this is the truth. Those fair flowers of July have bowed gracefully into the loam making way for the bright, proud goldenrod and the asters frothing in the shade-low. We so often associate nature with regeneration; cut leaf or limb and expect it to grow back. We will acknowledge its cyclical nature too. Rarely however—and at our intellectual and spiritual impoverishment—we fail to recognize its lessons on sequence and inheritance, of succession. We know of this inherently, even if we do not think actively on it. We see the clover fade in the front yard while the Joe-Pye weed fluffs about at the roadside. We muse that we haven’t seen a dandelion in some time while the curious scalemail of milkwort catches our eye. We wander to the woodline seeking the blushing maidenpink only to find the arcadian blue vervain. These green things do not endure as marble and steel. They may not even regenerate as we romanticize they do. No. We understand inherently that everything in nature holds to the good green pattern, that everything eventually gives way for what next the season calls. The old wheel turns and something blooms anew.

We celebrate steadfastness to a fault, don’t we? We laugh and remark that someone is as stubborn as a mule with a twinge of pride. To be unmovable, unmalleable, unyielding has become very much an admirable trait. When we think about succession, when we reflect at the roadside on the browning flowers of yesterday and the bright flowers yet to bloom, we may reap an uncomfortable conclusion, however. All that dogged determination to never be moved in our positions, even by convincing arguments is always directed outwardly; we resist with pride any influence that seeks to change our attitudes. We make this conscious choice to don our armor and decide we will not be moved by others. But what about ourselves? What do we lose by not allowing ourselves to be moved from within? We are but iterations in a long good pattern, not only in terms of our lineages, but also in terms of ourselves. We grow and change if we but allow ourselves to do so. Our politics, our faith or lack thereof, the weave of our moral filaments—the inheritance we give ourselves is the ability to shift these, to adapt to whatever spiritual, physical, or intellectual environment in which we find ourselves. You may find that the flowers that served your loam in one season no longer suit you. This is fine. Allow yourself to carve space for what comes next.

This call to inner adaptability extends to how we inhabit our own time, as flowers do theirs. If we accept that we are part of the same good green pattern as the flora of the meadows and hedgerows then we must also accept that we are made for the time, the good, long season, we inhabit. The Joe-Pye weed does not long for the dandelion days of spring, nor does the snowdrop waste itself in dreams of the goldenrod’s high summer glory. Each grows into what light and rain its season offers. We may romanticize the simpler past, its agrarian nature and straightforward morality. We may imagine the perfection of some future utopia where all will finally align into an abundant climax. This longing cannot root us here where we are needed however. The soil we stand in today is not the soil of yesterday, nor will it be tomorrow’s. What wisdom, beauty, or courage we have to offer can only bloom in the conditions we are given, under the particular angle of today’s sun. This does not mean we should “live for the moment” (a tired cliche of which we should all dispel ourselves) but rather recognize that we are well attuned to our own time, that what value and insight we can bring belongs here in these wounded days. We can make the dubious but inspiring claim that we were made for the challenges of our time but it may be more accurate to say we are simply well equipped for the challenges because they were forged in the environment in which we were raised. You may lament that you were born in this time as many do. Remember however that the wounds of the modern world are best addressed by you because you are what grew in their strange and unwelcome light. You are attuned to these days and therefore you are the one who is able to affect them.

Living fully in our season shapes not only us but the legacy we leave. We so often speak of legacy as if it were a monument—stone, immutable, meant to withstand the grinding of that old wheel. Nature’s bequest to you is not cold granite or august marble however. It is living soil, warm loam, dark earth. The flowers may reseed and we can point to this as their legacy; we see the continuity and celebrate its triumph. What about the quiet work it has done underground though? There is more than just the perpetuality and cycle. The flowers neither cling to their form nor demand to witness their work’s fruition; they merely enrich the earth for what comes next. Our own succession should mirror this. We leave not immortal monuments of ourselves but fertile ground, not rigid demands but space for growth, not expectations but opportunity. When we release the vision and expectation of what we will our legacies to be, we allow them instead to bloom in wild, unexpected ways, fostering a beauty we may never witness but can trust to flourish. How can it not if the inheritance we leave is such fertile ground? It is tempting to try to control the bloom that follows in our green wake, to demand that our successors mirror our shape and hue and purpose, but to leave good ground is to leave space for surprise and beauty we ourselves might never have imagined.

August's dying flowers teach us to embrace the good green pattern of succession. As daisies fade to feed goldenrod, we learn to release a desire for a different time, adapting to our own season’s light and rain, however strange it may be. By releasing control over ourselves, our beliefs, our legacies, we cultivate fertile ground for growth, trusting that what blooms next will carry forward in ways we cannot predict but can believe will be beautiful. In their quiet-fade, the flowers show us that true flourishing lies in preparing the soil for a beauty yet to come.

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Three Ways to Live a More Rooted Life

* Plant and Tend a Succession Garden: Start a small garden with flowers or herbs that thrive in different seasons, such as marigolds for summer and asters for fall. As each plant fades, enrich the soil with compost from its remains, mirroring nature’s succession and practicing adaptability by embracing what each season offers.

* Reflect and Adjust Personal Beliefs: Set aside time each month to journal about your current values, politics, or faith. Identify one belief that no longer serves you, and explore a new perspective, allowing yourself to grow like flowers shifting with the season’s light.

* Mentor with Open-Ended Guidance: Share your skills or wisdom with someone younger, perhaps a child or student, without dictating their path. Offer support and resources and encourage their unique growth, leaving fertile ground for their future bloom.

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The common milkweed stands tall along the roadsides and fencerows all summer, steadfast and unassuming in the ditches, the hedgerows, the border-places. To some, it is just a weed, coarse in its stalk and broad of leaf. To those with eyes to see however, it is the silent keeper of a secret, the host of a story older than any one of us, the tender of a cycle that endures without question or complaint. It is the keeper of old truths we can yet learn—old truths of what it means to be a parent.

If you were to look closely at the undersides of its leaves, you would find the light green, perfect eggs of the monarch butterfly. In time, these eggs will split open and the smallest of caterpillars will emerge, fragile, insistent, hungry. From the moment it is born, the caterpillar begins to eat the milkweed’s leaf. Bite after bite, day after day, until it has taken so much the limb bends under the absence of form. Make no mistake, however; this is not a parasitical relationship. The milkweed gives itself over without protest, giving of itself to nourish the green-life that comes next.

This is the first truth about being a parent: you must be willing to be consumed. You must accept the quiet sacrifice, the nights without sleep, the years when your energy is parceled out in small, fleeting rations to someone who cannot yet stand alone. You will watch the body you knew lose its form to exhaustion, the routines you relied on collapse. You will face your own limitations in the small hours of morning-dark, measure your temper against physical and emotional fatigue. Like the milkweed, you will let yourself be consumed because you understand that all this giving is not loss but rather a gift that will carry your child into her full, beautiful strength.

In time, the caterpillar grows robust, full of vitality, its form and function fully realized. When it has eaten its fill, it crawls to the underside of the leaf and hangs there motionless. It is hidden from the wind, sheltered from the rain, shielded from the beating summer sun. The milkweed becomes not only a place of nourishment, but shelter. Its broad leaves a rampart against the elements, a quiet place for the next transformation to begin. There in the stillness of the leaf’s under-canopy, the caterpillar begins to change, weaving the bright green chrysalis that will hold it in perfect safety. It has consumed part of the milkweed, yes, but the plant is still steadfast and sure, it is still upright and a predictable, perfect haven for the would-be butterfly.

This is the second truth about being a parent: you are called to become a refuge. In the long seasons of childhood, you must be the place of safety, the place of certainty, the place where your child can press themselves against your steady love and find the courage to grow. You shelter them not only from cold and storm but from the flood of cheap influence, the blare of voices that would strip their innocence and identity for profit. Your arms become the walls that keep out what does not belong. Your words, the quiet assurance that some things will not change. In a time when so much is unrooted, you are the root. In a culture that demands more, faster, brighter, you are the calm shelter, the enduring green pattern that is always predictable, steadfast, sure.

When the time comes, the chrysalis splits. The butterfly emerges almost immediately strong and ready. Its wings dry in the July air. Soon, it lifts from the leaf, rises into the sky, and flutter-drifts across the fields. No matter how you wish to keep it close to admire its beauty, no matter how you long for more time, there is no staying its flight. It will go where it must go. To the far coasts, to the warm valleys of California or the mountains of Mexico, to the places you cannot follow. It must. The meadows of your quiet home cannot hold the monarch; indeed, they may well stifle it. The world waits for its arrival, and the milkweed can only watch it go.

This is the third truth about being a parent: you will let go. You will stand in the quiet field of your own making and watch what you have raised take wing. It will feel impossible. It will feel as if your own heart is carried away, fragile in the wind—an impossible pain. Yet there is a promise in this leaving.

The monarch always returns.

When summer comes again, the progeny of that first butterfly will drift back to the same patch of milkweed, drawn by something older than the memory of their own short lives. They, like us, are drawn to familiar ground by blood-memory. To place. They will settle in the fields where their lineage began. They will sip the nectar, carry the pollen, complete the cycle. What was once nourished by the milkweed returns to nourish it in kind.

This is the hope you are given: the work you have done is not lost. The sacrifice, the shelter, the letting go. All of it will return in time. The children you release into the world will come back in ways you cannot predict, cannot fathom. They will remember the lessons, the tenderness, the home you made with your good hands. They will tend it in their own season, carry it forward for another generation. In this there is no final ending—there is only the slow and certain continuity of the good work, of the pattern, of things well rooted and an understanding of place.

When you pass a stand of milkweed this summer, pause a while. Look beneath the leaves. Watch the caterpillars at their quiet work. Know that you are witnessing something old and good and true. Know that every parent, like every milkweed, has been asked to give, to shelter, to let go, and to trust that what flies away will someday return.

Know that this is not a lesson of loss, but a story of continuance, of love returned in its own time and season, of an old cycle yet unbroken.

Author’s Note: Normally, these Sunday essays are for paid subscribers only. This essay however will remain free forever so that it may bring hope, joy, or solace to any parent navigating the good, green pattern.

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Artificiality is now the norm. Screens can simulate nearly everything, images can be doctored, videos completely fabricated, words twisted, sounds engineered. There, as always, is hope however. In this wounded modern world, where so many things have become false or illusory, you always possess one pure conduit of truth: your sense of smell. In a sea of artificial reality where you cannot trust your own eyes, scent resists the modern manipulation. It is stubbornly real, a direct communion between the natural world and your own body, your mind. Indeed, as you are assaulted by the lies of your contemporary culture that tells you up is down, it may be the best means by which you stay grounded to reality.

When you walk a country road this time of year, you will notice the milkweed blooming along every roadside and pasture edge. Its flowers are a muted pink, shaped like little stars, and their scent drifts across the fields in waves of rose and honeysuckle. There is nothing quite like it, nothing synthetic that can replicate the way it hangs in the warm July air. Any attempt to manufacture a milkweed perfume would be folly. You could analyze, deconstruct, and place back together the exact chemical makeup of what makes a milkweed flower smell and you know in your heart of hearts a simple truth.

It just wouldn’t be right.

Just the way strawberry flavored ice cream never quite tastes like real strawberries, just the way you can tell when a dress is made with a polyester blend, just the way you can sense when someone’s tone is insincere; there is something in you that can perfectly sense when something is attempting to be what it is not, when its authenticity is compromised. In a time when so much is digitized and mediated and reduced, a single breath of milkweed is a reminder that reality still waits for you just beyond the screen, the threshold of your door. You cannot download this fragrance or bottle it. Even if you could, it can only be experienced perfectly in its natural environment; imagine for a moment the perfectly constructed milkweed perfume in the lobby of an urban apartment building. Are you tantalized or repelled?

As with all good things, you must be present to receive the aroma of milkweed. The sweetness there on the country roadside in early July is proof that not all beauty has been commercialized or rebooted or churned into a homogenous slurry. Some old truths are immune to such fleeting things. You must go outside, find a wild place, and remind yourself with a deep, deep breath what life is like away from all the rebooted, commercialized, hyper marketed grey-safe content being pumped at you. That's what so much of contemporary global culture has become, hasn't it? Grey-safe. A corporate, HR-approved gruel to keep you from the green.

Scent is an honest witness. It does not just guide your eyes to the beauty of a wildflower in full bloom, but also to decay.

If something has gone wrong, you will smell it before you see it. Your eyes can overlook details, your mind can rationalize them away, but your nose is harder to fool. Perhaps you notice the rancid odor drifting near the chicken coop on a warm afternoon. It is the kind of smell that triggers a subtle unease before you even fully register it. You follow the trail of sulfur and carrion fumes through the door to the bedding straw until you discover the culprit: a missed egg you must have overlooked days earlier has split open, spilling its contents into the straw and attracting a nest of maggots. That smell is not subtle. It does not invite debate or interpretation. It insists on attention, on intervention, on a clear acknowledgment that something has begun to rot.

Modern culture tends to mask its own corruption. Slogans, curated feeds, sniveling qualifiers. You learn to trust your senses because when someone is lying or when a system is rotting from within, you often feel it first in your gut, the same way your stomach tightens at the scent of something spoiled. You may even be told by the academically minded that disliking a putrid smell is merely a product of your western upbringing, identity, or status, that cultural influences—not your own good instinct—shape your perception of smell and it can simply be rationalized away if you were but a bit more enlightened. Ultimately though, you know when something is wrong and you act.

There is another side to this honesty, one that affirms rather than celebrates the bloom or warns of the rot. If you were to visit the bee yard with me now, the air itself smells like warm bread. The hives are in their most productive season, drawing comb and storing nectar that will become honey by summer’s end if not sooner. You can stand near the hives and breathe in the scent of progress, of abundance taking shape cell by hexagonal cell, of promise manifest.

It is a wordless assurance that some good work remains untouched by the counterfeit world beyond the hedgerow.

It is a smell that settles your spirit, a full-throated declaration that some work is still true and good and yet remains amid the decay. No algorithm can counterfeit this aroma, no influencer can monetize it, no unelected bureaucrat can tax it. When the bees are making honey, you can tell. The air changes. The world declares itself trustworthy in that small way, that wholly-good scent of honey ripening in the comb. Evidence to which you can point that the world may still be trusted in places where people have chosen to care. It is a reminder that there is still good work to be done, good work that will outlast you. Whatever your good work may be, whatever you do to make the world more beautiful, someday others will stand where you are standing and breathe in that same fragrance, feeling that same hope. Sawn wood, chiseled stone, tilled loam. It is all but evidence that the essential things—family, nature, tradition—remain unbroken. It is the necessary reminder that the ground beneath your feet is still real, and that truth, when you know how to sense it, still lingers in the air and it is something too fine to contain or corrupt.

All of this reminds you to keep your senses awake. Scent remains one of the last simple proofs that something is real, that something is working or failing, that something is worth your attention. In a time when illusions are easier to produce than ever before, the honest report of your nose is a gift. Milkweed blooming, a rotting egg, the smell of your own good craft: these are signs that the world still tells the truth if you care to step outside, bring it forth, and breathe it in.

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Three Actions to Live a More Grounded Life

1. Seek Out Unmistakable Scents in Their Natural PlaceThis week, take time to walk somewhere wild or uncultivated. Find a place where milkweed, clover, or wild roses grow without human arrangement. When you arrive, pause to close your eyes and simply breathe. Notice the fragrance exactly as it exists, untamed and imperfect. You cannot download this experience. You cannot simulate it.

2. Let Scent Be Your Early Warning SystemResolve to trust your nose when something feels “off.” If you catch the whiff of mildew, rancid eggs, or decay—literal or figurative—act on it without delay. Clean the coop, take out the trash, confront the problem. Likewise, when you sense moral or cultural rot, do not let polite convention convince you to look away. A culture of illusions depends on your willingness to ignore what your senses are telling you. Let your nose teach you that small problems grow worse when you pretend they do not exist.

3. Surround Yourself With the Aroma of Good WorkSpend part of this week making or tending something real. It might be baking bread, cutting fresh wood, harvesting herbs, or caring for an animal. As you work, notice …

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My baby does not want to sleep this week. She wants to stand. She wants to place her hands on my stomach, get her feet under her, and lean gently back. She wants to stand there in bed and show me she can wave her little hands. I resist the urge to be frustrated by this, the voice like television static in my brain that tells me she needs to sleep so I can go do things. Tidy the house, get the honey business in order, make more money. She of course, is simply embodying exactly what this season is for. She is nine months old and life pours from her: a deep spring that has no end. She is June manifest, all fullness and unfurling. The grass outside is tall and bending under its own weight, the hive boxes are heavy, the days are long and glowing and, like her, impossible to contain. Everything is blooming all at once, including her. June does not want to be managed and be put to sleep. It wants to spill over. My baby does not want to sleep because the season and life itself is rich, loud, and bright. We need to stop trying to get ahead of it and instead let ourselves be overwhelmed by the vitality of it all.

Now that the spring hunting season is over, the turkeys have returned. They march out of the forest and strut across the garden rows, royalty tossing mulch aside with their talons imperiously and pecking at anything that moves. It is annoying. It is also beautiful. There is something deeply comic in how proudly they move, something oddly triumphant in their reclaiming of the fields and trails. “I did not die. I am here.” Their presence is inconvenient, yes, but it is also a reminder that the woods are never empty; they are full of life, burgeoning, waiting to spill out when the pressure lifts. The turkeys that scratch through the newly tilled field are doing exactly as they should in June, in the time of abundance. When I see them scatter as I round the corner with a wheelbarrow or watch them sunning themselves in the long grass, I try not to shoo them. Their disregard for the boundaries is charming. They have survived the blasts and arrows of another spring and this is their reward.

The other fields are being hayed now. The roar of the machines starts early, and by late afternoon the air is thick with the scent of cut grass. It is a smell that pulls on memory. Step into a barn, long unused, and note how it still holds the sweet green ghost of hay from a decade before. Life sticks around. It presses into wood, settles into rafters, soaks the air. The first cutting of hay is an old harvest, one that comes before the tomatoes or the squash, and one that always seems to sneak up on us. The fields do not ask whether we are ready. They give what they give when they give it! In the barns, in the bales, in the very beams of the old buildings, the evidence of this abundant generosity remains. It is tempting to try and schedule your joy, to plan for a slower season, to wait until things calm down. June will not wait though. June bursts forth. It leaves its mark. You will smell it years from now and remember, maybe with tears, how alive it all once was.

The bees too are swelling. Hives are booming, spilling over with new brood and bright pollen. I spoke with another beekeeper this week who had just added a second deep super to one of her hives. Without the space to grow, the bees will leave. The queen will abscond, taking her workers and their ambitions elsewhere in search of a roomier home. You must make space for growth or you will lose it. This is one of the central challenges of June: how to make space for all this life. It is tempting to try to maintain control, to keep things manageable, to keep the grass mowed and the fowl out of the garden. Life does not want to be manageable though. Life wants to fill every crevice. It wants to stand up in your bed and wave its hands when its time for sleep. The beekeeper adds a box. She expands the space. She allows for more. This is wisdom you too can learn from the bees about all this boundless June life: do not contain it. Make room. Say yes to the overflowing. When the good green pattern this time of year offers you more than you expected, do not flinch. Just make more room for it.

This is the truth of June: it is too much, and it is perfect. Everything is blooming, and there is no possible way to hold it all. So don’t. Let it spill. Let the baby stay awake and the bees keep growing and the turkeys walk all over your tidy plans. You will not regret having witnessed it. You will regret having missed it because you were trying to get ahead, however. What June offers is not efficiency. It is abundance. It is the fullness of the fields and the scent of old hay and the riotous growth of everything good. If you are lucky, it will knock the wind out of you. It will remind you that your job is not to master life, but to receive it.

Go ahead. Let it overwhelm you.

You will be ok.

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The urgency is real now. You feel it in the long stretch of daylight, the way everything grows all at once, in the good green pattern absolutely bursting forth now. Gentle May makes her exit ushering in heady June. The sun is up before you are and lingers long past supper yet somehow the days feel too short. Daylight runs close to fifteen hours now, and still it is just not enough to complete everything you want. The natural world is hurrying: bees rise earlier, the dandelions bloom and seed, trees race to fill their canopies, and we too are swept into the momentum. There’s planting to finish, wood to cut, children to chase through wet grass. You start early and end late and lie awake thinking of what you did not do. The season runs hard. The earth is moving fast and it is hard not to be moved by it. Amidst all the fervor and rampant work however, June extends an invitation to us with verdant hand to linger a moment.

It is an invitation we should accept

Even as nature rushes forward, it does so deliberately. The forest does not panic. The wildflowers do not fret about order or scheduling. They come in succession as they are called. The edible ramps are passing on, making way for lily-of-the-valley and her delicate ivory bells. The trillium bows out, and jack-in-the-pulpit springs up from the cool understory. The maples leaf out in a green so pale they glow. On the meadows’ edge, the violets now give way to buttercups, then chervil and red clover. In the low wet places, the skunk cabbage opens in a yellow riot. This is not frantic blooming however. It is the steady, ordered abundance of a world that knows how to wait its turn. The trees do not envy the grass. The bees fly when the sun allows. The bluebirds, still fresh from their long migration, do not rush to build; they settle in and they sing. There is a pace here, but it’s not the one we were taught. It is slower, wiser, and deeply beautiful.

The urgency we feel in our sinew and bone is not only from the natural world, it is from the systems we’ve built around it: calendars, commitments, summer programs, performance metrics. This is the time of year when everything shifts. There are forms to fill out, gear to find, bags to pack. If you let it, modern life will push you into a rhythm not of your own making. You’ll be swept along by deadlines and sign-ups and the subtle pressure to “make the most” of every summer moment. Ironically, this pressure leaves little room for savoring anything at all. Even rest becomes a checkbox. Even joy is scheduled. We are told to be efficient with our leisure, to optimize our days off, to always do more.

This is disordered in the most literal sense of the word. It is out of the good, true order of our being.

We rush through the season we longed for in the dark of February. The result? We miss the very thing we were trying to reach.

The wisdom of June does not lie in the productive rush, in the feverish sowing of seeds after work but before dinner. It is in the lingering. The garden doesn’t demand all of you in one day. The birds do not wake and worry about what they’ll sing. The lilacs bloom extravagantly and drop their petals with no apology. The natural world is not wasteful, but neither is it hurried. What if we were to match that pace? What if we asked not how much can we accomplish today, but how fully can we notice? Can we stop long enough to hear our daughter say, “He’s carrying his house,” when she finds a snail under the rhubarb leaves? Can we let the northern flickers sing us out of a task and into a pause, wondering if we will catch a glimpse of their majesty at the woodline? There is a different kind of success to be found here: not in achievement, but in attention. The world teaches us that productivity is the goal but creation tells a deeper story; belonging, slowness, and delight are the actual rewards.

June arrives. The season will turn whether you’ve kept pace or not. If you’ve rushed too hard however, you might miss what it offers. You might miss the tiny footprints in the mud beside the pond or the way the evening light catches in your child’s hair or the hush that falls between the first call of the hermit thrush and the last breeze across the clover. Have you stopped yet to wish on a dandelion that has puffed to seed? The rush is real but it is not the whole truth. Beneath it, beneath the dual din of the rampant growth and the neon hum of the modern world is the quiet, old, and true. A pace at which you can live, but only you choose it. Let the beans go in late. Let the to-do list wait just a little longer. Walk the meadow. Sit by a hive and listen.

You don’t have to keep up with the earth. You only have to witness it.

You don’t have to keep up with the world. You only have to endure it.

Allow yourself to linger a while this June.

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