I recently wrote that we were right about the need for regeneration in our communities, but wrong about the first step. We thought we needed to build the container first—the center, the cooperative, the village.

What I am learning instead is that you cannot build the container until you have built the capacity of the people within it to hold it.

I did not expect life to test that idea this literally!!

On December 6, my mother passed away. On March 6, three months to the day, my wife’s mother passed too.

Since then, my wife and I have found ourselves in the displaced middle—between the life we are trying to help build in Newton, North Carolina, and the life in Florida that is now being folded into boxes.

I am not standing at the loading dock today. I am standing in a closet, looking at a row of blouses.

And in that closet, all the language of systems and cycles gets very thin.

Because you realize quickly that you are not just cleaning out a house. You are touching the textures of someone who is gone, making decisions with hands that do not feel ready to make them. Loss is not a single moment. It is a long unthreading of the familiar.

It is exhausting, y’all!

Part of me wants to be elsewhere. Building. Advancing the work. Moving the Newton project forward. Opportunities are opening. Doors are cracking. I feel the pull of responsibility.

But the truth is simpler than that. My energy pool is small right now. Every drawer, every blouse, every object carries weight. And every act of sorting asks something from a reserve that is already low.

For years, I have tried to move away from extractive models of leadership—the kind that pull value from a system without protecting its long-term health.

If I try to force the work forward right now, if I try to grind through grief in order to preserve momentum, I would be practicing extraction on myself. I would be mining a depleted reserve for productivity that is not there. I would be violating the very principles of regeneration I claim to believe in.

True stewardship has to include the fallow season.

In agriculture, fallow is not failure. It is not an absence. It is not wasted time. It is the period in which the soil recovers its ability to hold what comes next.

That is where I am.

The trial in front of me is not a business pilot. It is the emotional and physical labor of helping close one generation’s loop so the next can begin. And if I cannot meet this moment with honesty—if I cannot navigate this closet with some degree of presence—then I have no business pretending I am ready to help steward the rebirth of a town.

So this is the view from the loading dock for now. Not in Newton, but in Florida. Not strategic, but intimate. Not fast, but real.

To our partners and neighbors in Newton: the work still matters. The container we have been imagining is still needed. But I am learning that a steward who cannot honor his own limits cannot be trusted to honor the limits of a community.

I will return to the loading dock.

But today, I am honoring the smallness of my energy pool. I am trusting that this pause, too, is part of the work. Instead of disappearing, as I did before, I’m writing about it.