Human Capital

Your true assets are not what you possess but the capacities you carry.

Sometimes a life doesn’t break apart.

It simply outgrows its container.

There was a time I left a life that was easy, known, and beautiful in Wisconsin ~ not because I had to, but because something in me said there was more.

That took a kind of capacity I didn’t yet have words for. The willingness to step away from comfort, to trust myself without a map, to begin again where nothing was guaranteed.

Those same assets were also what allowed me to risk the move to Missouri and begin that chapter in the first place. It takes a certain kind of person to leave what is familiar and build a life somewhere new. That decision wasn’t an accident or someone else’s generosity. It came from the same qualities that have guided my life all along.

For a long time, I lived inside a shared chapter. Fifteen years of building something with another person ~ money invested, work given, days and seasons folded into a life that, at the time, felt like the place I was meant to be.

But nothing I brought to that life was given to me.

I earned it.

Every bit of it.

Through effort. Through discipline. Through the steady application of capacity over time.

And I travel thru life with that capacity. 

There was always another current running quietly beneath the surface of my life. A pull toward something not yet built. A different shape of living. Something that required more risk, more imagination, more authorship.

Not everyone feels that pull. And not every relationship can hold it.

So eventually, the chapter ended ~ not because one of us was right and the other wrong, but because our imaginations for life no longer pointed in the same direction.

When I left, some things stayed behind. That’s the nature of shared lives. Structures remain where they were built. Investments settle into place. The visible parts of a life don’t always travel with you.

But what built them does.

I didn’t walk away with what was given.

I walked away with what I had always carried.

My capacity to generate resources ~ the ability to create value over time. That doesn’t come from luck or generosity. It comes from showing up, again and again, and doing the work.

My vision ~ the ability to see something before it exists. To look at an empty space and recognize what it could become.

My persistence ~ the willingness to stay with something long enough to bring it into form.

My independent mind ~ the strength to walk away from what no longer fits and follow a path that is my own.

My curiosity and creativity ~ the quiet impulse to shape spaces that feel meaningful, to build something others can step into and feel.

And my authorship ~ the understanding that my life is not something handed to me, but something I am actively creating.

These were never gifts.

They were developed. Earned. Lived.

They are the reason anything I have ever built exists.

They are what allowed me, years ago, to take the risk of beginning that life in the first place. I was not carried into it. I walked into it ~ with the same capacity I carry now.

And I walked out with it too.

Now I find myself on a ridge.

A place that asks something of a person. It asks for imagination, for work, for problem-solving, for patience. It asks you to see what isn’t there yet and stay long enough to bring it into being.

Cabins are rising here. Water runs from the ground after a long and stubborn effort. Paths are being shaped. A place is emerging where people will come to rest, to breathe, to feel something they didn’t know they were missing.

And when people stand here, they will see the ridge.

But what they won’t see ~ at least not immediately ~ is what made it possible.

Because a ridge doesn’t exist because of what sits on top of it.

It exists because of what lies beneath it.

The deeper structure of the earth lifts it into being.

A life works the same way.

The visible things ~ houses, money, shared assets, past chapters ~ those may remain behind. But the deeper structure ~ the capacity, the imagination, the persistence ~ moves with the person.

And wherever that structure goes, something new rises.

That is what I carried with me.

The builder.

The dreamer.

The problem solver.

The host.

The writer.

I was never given those things.

I built them.

And they are what build everything else.

That is why this ridge exists.

And that is why my future does not belong to anyone else’s story.

” 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.