” It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "The Little Prince"

Who is your rose? 

In “The Little Prince”, the lesson the fox teaches is that what we tend becomes precious because we have given our time and care to it. When you turn that lens inward, something important happens. You realize that the one life you have been tending all along is your own.

You have watered it with years of effort.

You have protected it through difficult seasons.

You have pruned parts of it that no longer fit.

That is tending the rose.

And it’s not selfish in the shallow sense people sometimes mean. It’s closer to stewardship. You are responsible for the small patch of life that is uniquely yours ~ your body, your mind, your land, your words, your days.

If I look at the life I’ve been shaping ~ the ridge, the cabins, the quiet mornings, the writing ~ it almost looks like a gardener who has finally chosen the right soil for her rose.

So yes.

You are your rose. 

And here’s the beautiful part.

When someone tends their own rose well, the garden around them begins to bloom, too.

People come to sit in that garden.

They breathe easier there.

They remember something about themselves.

That’s what places like your ridge can become.

A garden where other roses remember how to open.

And that quiet kind of magic is very much in the spirit of what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was pointing toward when he wrote “The Little Prince”.

Courage and Stupidity

Courage

is knowing it might hurt

and stepping forward anyway.

Stupidity

is much the same thing.

The body leans into the dark

with only a guess for a lantern,

and the ground ahead

is always uncertain.

Sometimes you walk into glory.

Sometimes into a wall.

But no one standing safely behind you

ever learns the difference.

So we step.

We bruise.

We laugh a little at ourselves.

And that—

more than wisdom—

is why life is hard.

The Long Journey to a Glass of Water

After more than a year of effort, the long project of bringing fresh water from the ground to the ridge is finally complete. Along the way I received a thorough education in geology, plumbing, persistence, and above all patience. 

When someone pours a glass of water at Sky View Ridge, it’s easy to assume it has just come from the well a few minutes ago.

In truth, the journey probably began long before the cabins were ever imagined.

Rain falls on the ridge and slips quietly into the ground. Instead of rushing away, much of it sinks into the thin soils of the Driftless hills and begins a slow descent through layers of limestone and sandstone beneath the land. This region was never flattened by the glaciers that shaped much of the Midwest, so the ancient rock beneath the ridge still lies close to the surface, full of fractures and tiny channels that allow water to move downward.

As it travels, the water is filtered naturally through rock and sand. Along the way it dissolves small amounts of minerals ~ calcium and bicarbonate from limestone ~ giving the water the balanced chemistry often found in classic natural spring waters. The same kinds of mineral profiles appear in famous spring regions of the Alps and parts of Belgium, where groundwater slowly gathers character as it moves through stone.

By the time the water settles into the aquifer beneath the ridge, it may have been underground for years, sometimes decades. Hydrogeologists can actually estimate this age using atmospheric isotopes and chemical fingerprints, tiny clocks dissolved in the water that reveal when the rain first fell.

Eventually that water makes its way to the well at Sky View Ridge, rising from about 320 feet below the surface. When it reaches the tap, it carries the quiet signature of its journey: moderate minerals, a slightly alkaline balance, and the clean clarity of water that has spent a long time filtering through the earth.

Coffee drinkers sometimes notice something else. Water with this kind of mineral balance tends to brew a cup that tastes rounder and smoother. Brewers and tea drinkers pay attention to the same thing. The minerals that shape the flavor of famous spring waters also influence the way water interacts with beans, leaves, and grains.

But long before any of that, the water was simply rain falling on the ridge.

Some of the rain, snow and ice that falls tonight may not reach a glass for many years. It will slip downward through soil and stone, joining the slow-moving aquifer beneath the hills.

The aquifer beneath the ridge is different from the vast reservoir-style aquifers that lie beneath much of the plains. In those regions, water often sits in enormous underground basins stored in deep layers of sand and gravel left behind by ancient seas and glaciers. Some of those aquifers contain water that fell as rain thousands of years ago and recharge only very slowly. Because large amounts are pumped for agriculture and cities, many of those reservoirs are gradually declining.

The groundwater beneath this ridge works differently. Here in the Driftless hills, rainwater moves through fractured limestone and sandstone, filtering slowly downward and continually replenishing the aquifer below. It is less like drawing from a buried reservoir and more like tapping into a quiet, ongoing circulation of water moving through the earth.

That natural recharge makes systems like this far more sustainable than the great plains reservoirs that are steadily being drawn down. The water beneath the ridge is part of a living cycle, renewed again and again by the same rain that falls on the land today. 

And one quiet morning in the future, someone will turn on the tap, pour a cup of coffee, and take the first sip without realizing that the water in the kettle began its journey decades earlier ~ somewhere in the clouds above the same ridge where they’re standing.  

The Value of Imperfect Love

In human attempts at love and honesty

imperfection is badly undervalued.

We wait for the right words,

the graceful gesture,

the perfect timing of the heart.

We admire the clean sentence,

the carefully chosen words,

the lover who knows exactly

when to speak

and when to be silent.

But love rarely arrives polished.

It arrives out of breath,

late to the moment,

carrying a handful of words

that were never meant

to be perfect.

It comes awkwardly.

A sentence that stumbles.

A truth that arrives late.

A hand extended

not quite knowing what it will find.

Someone tries to say

I care for you

and instead says something sideways.

Someone reaches

and their hand trembles.

Someone tells the truth

in pieces,

because the whole of it

is too fragile to hold at once.

Someone tries to explain themselves

and only half succeeds.

Someone says the wrong thing

while reaching for the right one.

Someone risks being seen

before they are ready.

And still

there is something sacred in the attempt.

The courage to show up

with a heart that is unfinished.

The willingness to speak

before the sentence is fully formed.

The quiet hope

that another human being

will hear the love

inside the clumsy words.

And if we are paying attention,

something shifts in us then.

We stop grading the performance.

We start listening for the effort.

And we begin recognizing devotion

in its most human form.

Perfection performs.

But imperfection

tries.

And trying

is where love

actually lives.

Finding the Others

I write because sometimes the way I see the world makes me feel a little alone.

Not dramatically alone. Not tragically alone. Just… slightly out of step. As though everyone else received a manual for how to move through the world and I somehow missed the meeting where it was handed out.

There are things I notice that other people don’t seem to talk about. Things I question that others seem perfectly comfortable accepting. There are moments when I feel the beauty of something so deeply it nearly hurts, and other moments when the noise of the world ~ the politics, the rushing, the endless arguments ~ makes me want to quietly step away from it all.

When you feel things like that often enough, you begin to assume you must simply be wired a little differently.

And maybe I am.

But I also know something else now.

When you write honestly about those feelings — without polishing them too much or trying to make them sound impressive ~ something interesting happens. Quietly, almost invisibly, people begin to appear.

Someone writes and says, “I thought I was the only one who felt this way.”

Another says, “You put into words something I’ve never quite been able to say.”

And slowly you realize that the isolation wasn’t quite what it seemed. The people who feel these things are out there. They’re just scattered. Living in their own corners of the world. Thinking their thoughts privately. Assuming they are the odd ones.

Writing is a way of lighting a small lantern.

You put a thought out into the darkness and see who notices the glow.

The funny thing is that I’m not trying to persuade anyone of anything when I write. I’m not trying to win arguments or convince people that my way of seeing the world is the right one. I’m simply describing what it feels like to stand where I stand and look out at things from here.

And if someone reading it feels a small sense of recognition — that quiet inner nod that says yes, I see that too ~ then something good has happened.

A little pocket of isolation dissolves.

Two strangers realize they are not quite strangers after all.

In a noisy world, that may be one of the most valuable things writing can do.

It helps the scattered ones find each other.