Notes From My Desk is a series I share four times a year—a place to pause after a season and reflect on what stood out. Honest observations, plus a quiet check-in on what feels supportive moving forward—toward more flow (and less friction), simpler rhythms, and a more easeful way of being.

A Spring Reflection

As I looked back over this spring season (April, May, and most of June), the weeks were filled with fairly ordinary things: making product batches, shipping orders, preparing for spring markets, and spending more time outdoors as the gardens came back to life. There was plenty of rain, which meant plenty of weeds to pull, plus time spent just wandering through the gardens noticing what was changing.

Spring brought a few changes inside the house too. I painted, rearranged rooms, finally made space for a dining table, and made a clearer separation between work and living areas. Nothing dramatic—just a handful of thoughtful changes that helped the house feel calmer, more welcoming, and more like home.

More than anything, though, the garden is what I kept coming back to.

People who garden, especially with perennials and natives, know this feeling: the first few years require an enormous amount of faith. You prepare the space. You plant tiny things. You water. You weed. You wait. Sometimes nothing survives. Sometimes what you imagined doesn't quite work. Gardening is always part planning, part experiment, and part hope.

Then, one spring, you can finally see things knitting together. The spaces between plants disappear. Birds, bees, insects, butterflies, and countless unseen organisms begin making a home there too. The garden starts feeling less like a collection of individual plants, and more like an abundant, living ecosystem.

And that's what this spring felt like for me. Something quietly shifted. More than once I wandered outside and caught myself thinking, delightedly, It's working. My neighbor even joked that my yard had become "a freaking Disney movie" after I sent him a video of a newborn fawn and a squirrel sharing a quiet moment in the front garden.

Looking back, I realized that what I was appreciating wasn't the garden itself. It was the seven previous seasons of effort, care, and learning that had gone into it.

Preparing spaces.

Planting tiny things.

Watering. Weeding. Waiting.

Letting nature do her thing (and fully accepting that she is the teacher and I am the student).

None of my efforts felt especially remarkable in the moment. But season after season, the quiet work of turning lawn into a place alive with birds, pollinators, and native plants created something I could never have rushed.

I think that's true of more than gardens.

So much of what matters in life is built this way—not through one big effort, but through countless ordinary ones. We don't notice it while it's happening. We only see it later, when we look around and suddenly realize we're standing inside something that didn't exist a few years ago.

Maybe that's what I needed to notice this season. Not every chapter feels remarkable while you're living it. Sometimes you only see what's been taking shape when you pause long enough to look back.

Maybe that's one of the gifts of reflection—to notice what you've been growing all along.

As you look back on the last few months of your own life, I'm curious...

What small, everyday choices are beginning to add up to something bigger for you?

And where in your life might you already be able to say, It's working.

Love & gratitude,