August 2026
As I Sit in the Silience
A Transition Didn't Create the Story. It Simply Revealed It.
I've been discovering that silence has a way of revealing what activity quietly keeps hidden.
I didn't realize that until these past two months.
When our partnerships with St. Paul's Episcopal Church and Emmanuel Episcopal Church came to an end, life became noticeably quieter. For four years, those partnerships became the primary places where The Neighborhood Garden Project found expression. Hundreds of people encountered the gardens during those years. Some came for a single morning. Others stayed for seasons. By the time the partnerships ended, twenty-five households were still actively stewarding garden plots together.
I haven't shared this publicly until now because I wasn't ready. Not because I was trying to avoid the conversation, but because I've learned that if I write too quickly, I usually describe the event. If I wait, reality often reveals something much deeper. Those are rarely the same story.
So I waited.
And I sat in the silence.
At first, the silence simply felt unfamiliar. The meetings disappeared. The planning slowed. The phone rang less. The familiar rhythm that had quietly organized my days for years was suddenly gone. I assumed I was simply adjusting to a different season.
I was wrong.
The silence wasn't asking me to adjust.
It was asking me to listen.
As the weeks passed, only a handful of families reached out about cultivating gardens at home or continuing to walk together through ongoing accompaniment. Without realizing it, I began interpreting what their silence meant.
Maybe the work didn't matter as much as I believed.
The thought wasn't loud.
It didn't need to be.
Some of our oldest stories never raise their voice. They simply wait for life to become quiet enough to be heard.
I sat with that thought for days.
Maybe weeks.
The more I sat with it, the more I realized I wasn't wrestling with the partnerships nearly as much as I was wrestling with an old story that had quietly followed me for much of my life.
If people no longer need you...
...perhaps you never mattered as much as you thought.
That wasn't the silence speaking.
That was me.
The silence hadn't created that story.
It had uncovered it.
Looking back, I can now see that its roots reach much further back than these past four years. Like many of us, I first began making sense of myself as a child. Childhood is often where the foundations of our understanding begin to take shape. We learn what the world is like. We learn who we are. We learn how to navigate the environments we've been given.
Children are remarkably adaptive.
When those environments are less than optimal, we develop strategies that help us survive. We learn to read the room. We anticipate needs before they're spoken. We carry responsibility that may not belong to us. We become useful. Those strategies often make perfect sense for the realities we're living in. They aren't signs that something is wrong with the child. They're signs that the child is doing what children have always done.
They're adapting.
The challenge is that children become adults. The environments change, but the strategies often remain. Without realizing it, we continue responding to today's reality through assumptions that were formed decades earlier. What once helped us survive can quietly become the lens through which we interpret every new season of life.
As I continued sitting in the silence, I realized I've been cultivated by two very different teachers.
The garden has been one.
Less than optimal human environments have been the other.
Those two realities often coexist within me.
The garden has patiently taught me that healthy conditions cultivate life. It has taught me that stewardship creates capable people. That trust grows deeper roots than control. That transformation cannot be forced. That faithful presence often accomplishes far more than constant intervention.
Earlier environments taught me something different.
They taught me to quietly connect my value with my usefulness. To carry more than was mine to carry. To look for evidence that I mattered by looking for evidence that I was still needed.
Both have shaped me.
But they don't tell the same story.
What caught me completely off guard was realizing those two stories had quietly been living beside one another for years.
From the beginning, one of the deepest convictions shaping The Neighborhood Garden Project was that healthy stewardship creates capable people. We intentionally resisted becoming the center because we wanted others to become stewards themselves. Looking back, capability wasn't simply one of our goals.
It was woven into every filter.
And yet, at the very same time, I somehow believed that if people no longer needed me...
perhaps I no longer mattered.
I genuinely believed both.
I couldn't see the contradiction while life was full.
The silence made it visible.
I've spent much of my adult life moving toward the next responsibility. Building. Solving. Carrying. Responding. There was often good reason for it. But this season has been asking something different of me. Not another strategy. Not another plan. Just enough patience to remain present while reality finishes speaking.
I've thrown much of my life into this work. I don't think a life invested that deeply deserves a hurried interpretation simply because silence feels uncomfortable. It deserves enough patience for reality to separate what is true from what I've merely assumed to be true.
Perhaps I do too.
I'm beginning to wonder if that's one of the hidden gifts of transition. It doesn't simply change our circumstances. Sometimes it lovingly squeezes old assumptions to the surface where they can finally be seen. Not to shame us. Not to condemn us. But to invite us into a truer way of seeing ourselves, others, and reality itself.
So, for now, I'm choosing to remain here a little longer.
Not because silence has all the answers.
But because I'm beginning to trust what reality is able to reveal within it.
