Anything giving more than it's receiving is dying

Years ago, I was mourning to a mentor of mine about how guilty and selfish and slimy asking for help made me feel.

I knew all the shiny, self-care quotes about pouring from an empty cup and the importance of saying no, but anytime I tried to voice a need to anyone in my life, I still wanted to vomit.

My mentor looked me in the eyes and said “If you look at nature, anything that is giving more than it is receiving is dying”.

Last summer, I got to see proof of that.

The heat wave camped out over Texas for 4 slow, unforgiving months. Every time I stepped outside I would notice new, deeper cracks in the parched soil. Every day the river shrunk away from its banks, as the air greedily sucked at its moisture like an overzealous 5-year-old with a root beer float.

But what I really remember from the drought is the trees.

Driving around became an endless parade of tree removal trucks, as day after day, trees all over the city dropped their branches. Whole swaths of leaves curled in on themselves, brown and burnt in the season they were meant for lush and green.

Posts started popping up on the neighborhood Facebook pages, informing tree owners of how to handle the changes. “Don’t worry, your tree is alive!” They would encourage. “It’s just stressed and trying to make it to the next spring, so it’s dropping some things to conserve resources. Keep watering it when you can and it’ll start growing again when the rain returns!”

In many ways, leaves and branches are the trees’ offering to the world. Of course, they serve purposes for the tree, but they are also food sources for bugs, nesting sites for birds, shade for everybody on the ground. It is no small thing for a tree to let go of providing these services for a time.

But the trees know intimately what my mentor was teaching me years ago…anything that is giving more than it is receiving is dying.

The trees know that it is illogical, nonsensical, antithetical to the laws of nature to keep asking themselves to grow and serve and care and be eaten from when they are not receiving the resources needed to sustain those efforts. They know it is unkind and unsustainable to expect there to be no change to what they have to give when there’s been a change in what they are receiving.

Our Western, human ways of doing things often teach us to focus solely on what we want to provide, transform, or expand. That’s what we see as growth and success. What those efforts might cost of us, the care they might require, gets much less attention. Thinking too much about it might even get us shunned and scolded.

But nature shows us that in order to be impressive, we need to be well-supported.

One of the foundational principles of biomimicry (a scientific discipline that looks to nature for answers to human problems) is “Integrate development with growth”.

People who study the earth intimately see, over and over again, that when an organism in nature wants to do something new, its first step is to develop what is needed to sustain it. Janine Benyus, cofounder of Biomimicry 3.8, writes that “Life builds capacity and connectivity as a springboard for what’s to come.”

“As a tree elongates, it develops hardy “reaction wood” to withstand the winds peculiar to its place. As our bodies grow, we develop bones, blood vessels, organs, and nerve nets—platform structures for the next stage of growth.” - Janine Benyus

The earth understands that when you give an ecosystem what it needs for growth to occur, that growth will happen naturally and efficiently. It also understands that no matter how much you might want growth to occur, attempting to leap into it without first building the right conditions to support it will usually end not in growth but in collapse.

As many of us are beginning to look towards 2025, starting to think about what we might want to create and offer (or how we might like to change, or what impact we hope to make), the earth would like to remind us that it has billions of years of experience in facilitating vibrant growth and dazzling transformation. If we are open to learning from its wisdom, we will soon see that the best place we could put our attention is not on what we want to make, but on what is needed to support what we want to make.

Planting seeds into nourishing soil, to make sure we are receiving enough to sustain our giving.

Identifying what needed resource is in short supply in our surroundings. Being honest about what impact that will have on our output.

Building comprehensive systems of care, of learning, of processing what we learn, to solidify our efforts.

Trusting that if we honor what we need to create growth, growth will find us. We are part of nature too, growing is what we were built to do.

Dream big. And make your root systems bigger.

The trees are trying to teach us, and we’ve already gone too long without learning.

If you’re tired of reaching for growth and instead finding yourself in collapse,

if you’re dreaming of things you want to do in 2025 but are worried about whether the *gestures at everything* of the world might derail those dreams,

if you are realizing that the sources of wisdom you’ve been handed are outdated and hollow, if you’re ready to return to learning from the earth,

I made you something!

Root Systems is my upcoming virtual workshop on building support structures that can sustain growth even in turbulent times.

On December 12th, we will spend 2 hours diving into what the earth teaches us about what expansion requires, and building processes into our world that mirror its wisdom. Replay is available for anyone who can’t join live!

And the three Saturdays after that will host practice sessions, for anyone who knows they might need a little help integrating those lessons.

Paid substack subscribers get 20% off, so by signing up as a paid subscriber you can get access to my bonus content here AND the workshop for less than the workshop costs on its own!

We’ve got big work to do. We’ll need big support. Luckily, we’ve got great teachers.

Would love to see you there!