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.