Before We Plant
It’s a sunny winter morning in Kentucky. My ten-day forecast is seducing me with highs in the sixties and the promise of thawing the ice I’ve been staring at for fifteen days now.
I’m becoming an avid gardener. Every January, I comb through gardening books and seed catalogs. I can scroll for hours, transfixed by promises of larger harvests, stunning blooms, and easy yields that require only five minutes a day. It all sounds so lovely. There’s something about the short, barren days of January that makes me daydream about warmth, growth, and summer abundance.
Experience, however, has taught me something different.
I’ve had several harvests now, and my January dreams have never been my August reality. Yes, there are beautiful flowers filling my home and produce shared with friends and tucked into the freezer. But that comes with battling pests, failed plants, disease, and hauling water down the back hill for hours in the summer heat. It’s always hard work. It’s always slow growth stretched over months. And it’s always more demanding than my winter imagination anticipates.
I’ve also learned that you cannot rush gardening. Out of a desire for productivity and efficiency, I’ve started plants too early, trying to force growth before the soil and weather were ready. Those plants always struggle—more vulnerable to disease, pests, and stress.
This mirrors our own lives more than we might like to admit. Rushing ahead rarely produces the transformation we long for. More often, it leaves us fragile, depleted, and discouraged.
The first entries on this blog this year have been about preparing the soil of our lives for change. This series isn’t about quick fixes or productivity hacks. It’s about creating the internal conditions where real, lasting growth can take root. In a culture that rewards speed and performance, slowing down can feel counterintuitive. Yet without it, change rarely holds.
Any process of growth must begin with preparation. Just as winter soil work determines the health of a summer harvest, the internal environment we cultivate shapes what grows in our lives. The condition of the soil always matters.
When the nervous system remains activated, reflection and connection become nearly impossible. Slowing down isn’t disengagement—it’s regulation. It creates the space needed for clarity, discernment, and healing.
Throughout this series, we’ve explored how growth actually happens. Not through dramatic breakthroughs, but through small, consistent shifts over time. Growth is relational and responsive. Much of it unfolds quietly, long before anything visible appears. Seeds break open and establish roots underground before they ever push through the surface.
We then turned toward curiosity as a mechanism for change. Many of us learned to motivate ourselves through judgment, pressure, or urgency. Curiosity offers another way—one that keeps us engaged rather than shut down. When we ask, “What’s happening here?” instead of “What’s wrong with me?”, we create space for insight without shame.
Most recently, we focused on listening to the body. Stress, anxiety, and burnout often register physically before we can name them cognitively. Tightness, fatigue, and restlessness are not failures; they are signals. Learning to notice them allows for earlier, gentler course corrections—before exhaustion or disconnection take hold.
Taken together, these themes point to a shared truth.
Transformation begins with preparation, and it cannot be rushed.
This kind of attention doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Many people were never taught how to notice their inner world without immediately fixing, minimizing, or overriding it. Preparing the soil means slowing that impulse long enough to understand what’s actually happening beneath the surface.
And this is where we pause.
Because once the ground is prepared, the next question becomes: What’s shaping our thinking?
In the coming entries, we’ll begin exploring the role of the mind. How our thoughts influence emotions, behaviors, and relationships. Not to overanalyze, but to bring the same curiosity and steadiness we’ve been practicing all along.
For now, the invitation is simple: notice what has shifted. Not what you’ve mastered, but what you’re more aware of. Awareness is often the first sign that the soil is ready.
