Four and a half years ago, my husband and I had the extraordinary good fortune of acquiring 72 acres of Northern Allegheny Plateau with a viable house, close to town but feeling like the middle of nowhere. We meant to move up there but family health issues intervened. For four years, we rented it out so we could afford to keep it, and this year we decided to move up here at Thanksgiving break. But then we all got Covid, so we decided to move at Christmas, but then we all got influenza. Then we were going to move in January but had a well issue to resolve. Then this week of school break — but another family health issue said nope. Today I’m sitting in the cloud that has enveloped our ridge all day, looking at the dark trees rising from the snow and I can almost hear the sap stirring inside them.

For four and half years, then, I’ve been hungering for more time in the woods, and we’ve been up here whenever we can and doing what we can to address invasive species in the woods; leasing our hunting rights to check the deer overpopulation; working with a private forester to develop a land management plan; and eventually securing an EQIP (Environmental Quality Improvement) grant that starts this year. We’re deeply excited about it. I’ve spent this time learning as much as I can about forest management and non-timber forest products and ecological stewardship and perhaps most importantly: land justice.

Land justice is an idea that braids together social, racial, and ecological healing; it acknowledges that 98% of privately-owned land in this country is in White hands with deeds that began with land theft from its original inhabitants. Land justice attempts to protect land from extraction and degradation; to regenerate and improve the health of the land; to boost equity in land stewardship, ownership, and access. There are many ways into this work, including land back/rematriation; conservation land trusts and conservation easements; community land trusts and cultural easements; co-stewardship and co-management; community forests…

There’s also a niche in this work that centers peer-to-peer learning and network-weaving, which is drawing my attention lately. These approaches recognize that most of us are better persuaded by neighbors we trust than by articles, and we’re more likely to do things if others around us are doing them. So calling a Forester for advice may seen daunting, but calling a friend who is a Master Forest Owner (an Extension-facilitated peer-learning program creating a corps of volunteer forest advisors) seems easier.

As I dive deeper into all of this agroforestry work (which includes some of my consulting practice now and also a time-intensive Agroforestry Apprenticeship Training Program I’m doing through Extension), I’m collecting models of these peer learning and networked approaches and figured I would share them here in case others find it valuable…and please share others you know about! What they have in common is a commitment to the value of relationships for learning, for action, and for a sense of shared purpose. In these times of division, that’s well worth celebrating.

1. Master Forest Owners — like Master Gardeners, MFOs receive training and then are expected to serve as volunteers, visiting others’ woods when invited to help them think about what’s there and how the owners might want to work with it.
2. Cold Hollow to Canada Woodlots Program — “CHC Woodlots Program engages a group of landowners from a town with contiguous or nearly contiguous forested properties, focusing their management activities on a landscape scale. The neighbor-to-neighbor collaboration results in a cumulative impact which is more significant compared to the effect one property owner can have on their own.”
3. Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay Woodland Stewardship Network — “Woodland Stewardship Networks are designed to connect and provide resources to neighboring, forest landowners who work together towards sustainably managing their forests.”
4. Kinzua Quality Deer Collective — “The Kinzua Quality Deer Cooperative (KQDC) was formed in 2000 by a group of deer hunters, sportsmen and women, landowners and conservation agency employees to sustain quality hunting in quality habitat for quality deer.  A partnership of forest landowners, forest managers, biologists, hunters, and local businesses, conducts this program on 74,000 forested acres in northwestern PA. Scientific research has been part of the KQDC program since the beginning, and this research has documented long-term improvements to deer, wildlife and forest habitat.”
5. Community Forests — a fascinating practice where land is owned by a municipality, land trust, nonprofit or private landowner, but it is explicitly co-managed by community members for community access and mutual benefit.

Here in Central New York, a group of agroforestry enthusiasts/practitioners/scholars met in March 2025 to envision the CNY Agroforestry Network. It’s a low-bar-to-entry google group listserv that is intended to make space for people of any level of expertise to share resources, ask questions, seek or offer support. In an environment rich with agroforestry activity and expertise, we’re hoping this can engage more people who don’t see themselves as experts but who are curious about how we can better care for the land while helping it care for us.

Some of my favorite programs aren’t quite formal — the young family who lost access to their maple trees who will come tap ours instead, or Ed Neuhauser’s fabulous Firewood Club, where 5 or 6 local families join him for breakfast and then they all harvest firewood as a process of timber stand improvement. Being together helps remind us that the woods belong to all of us and we to them. Plus, the efficiency of it is elegant: 1-2 acres of timber stand improvement helps advance the timber crop and yields enough firewood for those families for a year.

In short, I guess I’m drawn to the biomimicry of agroforestry: not just where the first rule of tinkering is to keep all the parts (Wendell Berry) but where forests nurture themselves through their social and communal practices. Some segments of this country seem pretty out of practice in that commitment to mutual thriving, but I have hope the forests can lead us back.

In facilitation circles, we often use this phrase: “stepping up and stepping back.” We offer it as an invitation to self-awareness, so that the reclusive among us might share their gifts by stepping up, and the extroverts might make space for others by stepping back. It’s a mild form of communal balancing, very useful for the ways it helps us to engage with “we” as a real entity we co-create.

Just over a year ago, I stepped back from my formal, full-time career, and with trepidation stepped into a whole new set of commitments. I’m trying, as a consultant, to step up for a range of organizations who need the kinds of skills I offer but can’t hire a whole “me.” My in-laws are navigating some health issues and I can step up to be there for them more. My family and I steward a forest now — 72 acres of Northern Allegheny Plateau, rife with gorgeousness and complexity and all the typical challenges of deer-overbrowse, invasive species, and succession planning. I’ve stepped up my commitment to writing, to poetry in particular (though I will also have a piece coming out about writing and ecological stewardship — sense a theme? — in a new volume on the humanities in public life). I’ve made an effort to step into my sons’ lives more consistently, even though the elder is now too teenaged to hug and the younger is obsessed with things I am hard-pressed to care about. Most importantly, maybe, I’m stepping into a life that feels ever more precious, and I’m trying to live it with intention.

It’s all too easy to end up on the conveyor belt, focused on meeting felt needs and pushing to be who we imagine ourselves to be. It’s harder, at least for me, to ask who I really am, to own the privileges that enable this kind of shift, to try and live into the possibilities it opens. In this next stage of life, and of this blog, I am centering living systems — forests and poems and the practices that help us nurture them.

I have been wondering, for a while, what it would take to get me writing again.

Apparently, the collapse of democracy.

The rise of a government that pursues agendas that are unconstitutional in spirit and in letter has caused a parallel rise from the people, and from me.

Today I read about a seven-year-old boy who hasn’t seen his father in three years because his family are refugees and he and his mom were relocated to the US while his father remained in Sweden. This week, his father was finally freed to rejoin his family, and visa in hand, he boarded a plane for the USA. And was detained upon landing and barred from seeing his lawyers. And Customs and Immigration told the lawyers the only person they could call was through President Trump. Is this democracy? Is this humanity? Is this anything other than criminal incompetence, xenophobic hatefulness, and a raw desire to burn down the system that should serve us all?

I understand the extent to which some people may say that a blog like mine, mostly devoted to the experience of living a good life, is not a place for political posts, but I think it is exactly the place. I cannot live a good life if my neighbors are suffering, if my world is being polluted and drowned, if my daily choices have consequences opposite to my own values. If I am silent, I am consenting in my government’s horrific acts against humanity, and I’ve been ducking that truth for far too long.

So now it’s the long slog: marching where we can; making phone calls; sending emails and letters; showing up at representatives’ offices when we can. And organizing. Organizing to beat the band, because this whole hateful rodeo depends primarily on the silence and disunity of the people. So we read and we honor those who have walked this road before us and we find hope wherever we can — and these posts will be about that, also. About how my husband’s photographic-quality printer has been churning out Shep Fairey’s “We the People” posters for whoever wants them. About the cold rally in the snow we will attend downtown this afternoon to speak up for immigrant and refugee rights. About friends and family who have always been private finding that their silence, too, is complicit, and asking on Facebook how they can get involved. About deep, honest conversations among people with deep differences that nonetheless can end in respect and newfound common ground.

Because hope is possible, but only in the rising up.

I’ve never been good at letting go, but I do tend to excel at digging in, which can have much the same effect. Today is a good case in point.

Monday I was feeling the hurt of missing our home in Maine; today, I’m starting to feel at home here at last. My dear angel-friend Marcia had agreed to share some plants with me, so I went to her house this afternoon. When I left, there was nowhere in my SUV to stuff another plant. And the smell! It was a tiny moving room full of spring. I couldn’t stop grinning the whole way home.

Allium, hellebore, anemone, lungwort, daylilies,turtlehead, iris, solomon’s seal, siberian bugloss, comfrey, lamb’s ears, wild ginger, ostrich ferns, lamium…so much goodness. And all this accompanies the rudbeckia, echinacea, dicentra, alchemilla, and tarragon that my stepmother brought me earlier, and the snow-in-summer, mint, and more lamb’s ears from another dear old friend…my garden is a physical demonstration of love.

It began to rain as I drove home, but lightly enough that the boys wanted to help me offload the plants in the driveway. And I shoveled a barrow of compost to help me transplant, and then I went to work. An hour and a half later, I’m soaked and dripping, muddy to the elbows, and happier than I’ve been in years. There’s something uncomplicatedly joyful about new plants.

I couldn’t get to all of them before bedtime reading, so there are still grocery bags full of comfrey, turtlehead, allium, and lamb’s ears adorning my yard, but they should make it through this damp night just fine and we’ll settle them into new homes come morning.

I am aware, as I write this, of my worries for all transplants, vegetable and animal: will their roots find the anchor they need, the sustenance and support? Even if I was too lazy to get enough compost from the pile? Will they get enough light? Is there enough mulch to keep them moist and stable but not so much as to smother them or encourage rot? Are they in the company of friends they like, who bring out the best in each other? Marcia tossed her head at my concerns — these plants are tough, she said. They will be fine.

And indeed they will.

There is clearly a metaphor waiting to happen in this title, and I’ll get there. At some point. But the thing that presses me to write right now is this:

THERE ARE SEEDLINGS IN MY BASEMENT.

Tiny green growing things. In the basement. (The one we spent tens of thousands of dollars to jack up and patch up and protect with new drainage. We’re still surprised it works.) It’s magic down there.

If you’ve never tried seed-starting, it’s not that complicated, but you do need more gear than you’d think. They need more light than you think, for starters, so you want proper grow lights (we use the $11 shop lights from Lowe’s with full-spectrum bulbs like the cheap ones they sell or the nicer ones from Agri-sun.). And they need more warmth than we have, so they want seed-starting mats (I use these, though I bought mine ages ago and for much cheaper). Then of course you need the trays (without holes, so you can water the seedlings from below and thus not drown them), the cells in which to start them, and a few of the clear domes to keep moisture in until things germinate. I also opted for a timer switch to keep my lights on a reasonable and self-managed schedule.

And you need some kind of rig to hold all this; we got a 5-tier wire shelf from Target (4′ long to match the shop lights we use), and we set two seed-mats end to end under each light on each shelf. This creates pretty huge capacity, which is good from where I sit, because I’m starting big new gardens and, let’s face it, making new friends in the neighborhood by giving away seedlings.

Then all you do is think about what you want to grow (I’m a huge fan of Fedco Seeds for inspiration and especially for purchasing), buy the seeds, check the timing of starting them, and go to it! Right now, we have various onions and leeks, broccoli and cauliflower and tiny Gonzalez cabbages; dahlias, marigolds, delphinium; parsley and fennel. And that uses up less than two of my flats! Thrilling. Up next are tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, echinacea, lavender, and a host of other goodnesses.

(Yes, I’ll do a proper post with pictures of our seed-starting rig; the most exciting thing is that the set-up cost only about $125, whereas the pre-made versions you can buy run up to over $800! And yes, I’ll do a proper post about the details of seed-starting, though surely you can find those elsewhere too…)

But NEW GARDENS. Did I mention? New gardens? Next steps include bulk delivery of compost, lots of cardboard, and a chainsaw…

It’s always a puzzlement to me that there are people who can see great inconsistency and shrug. “Well, that’s the way of the world.” “Ah, humans.”

I know. I get that. But I don’t really GET it. I don’t understand it, and I don’t respect it, at least not most of the time.

Here’s my thing: pick that values that you want to define you, and try to live them out.

If you value participation, then seek participation; seek to participate.

If you value humility, try to practice it. Know the difference between being humble and being a doormat.

If you value expertise, seek it. Try to practice it. Be rigorous in every way you can.

Most of all, recognize when you are in a leadership position (remembering there are many kinds of leadership, and many of the best do not feature high positions out front of a pack). Act like it.

Complex institutions (including families, businesses, communities) almost always contain degrees of hypocrisy, and that’s to be expected. But if we as individuals can’t live out our own theory and practice of integrity, what hope do our institutions have?

I’m doing this amazing creativity group with modest, wonderful people in a church downtown; it’s led by a friend and mentor of mine who is also doing the whole Parker Palmer Courage and Renewal thing. In short, it’s a whole lot of magic. And I try to make sense of it, to capture Lessons and to develop Practices, in the vain hope that I can transform my everyday if I just carry this with me…but I’m learning just to trust that it comes back.

There are always poems, for starters, which sets up the whole sacred space thing right off the bat. Poems read ALOUD. Poems about how we make space for ourselves, how we listen to the quiet, how we weave together the “ill-matched threads” of our lives (Rilke). And there is laughter (people were generous about my anguish: “WHY DON’T THE DAMN THREADS MATCH?”). But most of all, there is focus. For once in my life, I am encouraged to just BE there, to consider one thing at a time, to do one exercise or craft, to listen to the voices of our group, one at a time. And these people are so brave, so talented. This space becomes, for me, what I imagine church is for others…a time to be in company of one’s best self and one’s deepest truths, and to do so with others in curiosity and support. I only wish it were more than once a month, but I suspect its rarity is part of its magic.

Last week, as we drew to a close, we were invited into the sanctuary for a surprise.

It was dark in there, and empty, and the cold air stretched far above our heads. As we stepped carefully, quietly, toward the front pews, one of our group moved toward the grand piano. With calm confidence, she lifted the lid; the hinges did not squeak, but we could hear their conversation with the wood they bind. She propped up the top, the skin of her hands speaking with the glossy surface in all that stillness. And then she sat to play.

It was Schubert, she said, an impromptu, and she lifted her hands and the world poured out of her. Liquid light and dancing dust and all the interweavings of a flock in flight. I sat and breathed the aged air, eyes closed, and everything else wide open.

And the best part? Not even the transformation of those moments, the full-bodied memory I carry. Not even the closeness of that group to make and witness such a thing. The best part is knowing that this exists in the world, despite everything else. This exists and is just as real as all the chaos and brutality; what’s more, I wonder, perhaps the best way to work on that is this?