The Thread I’m Following Next

A Long Winter and What Came Into Focus

Saturday. Late morning.

I step off the porch and it hits me immediately. Thawed earth and wet bark, the smell of life waking up. I can still see the vapor of each breath, but the sun is warming the earth. A woodpecker is working somewhere in the canopy. Newly hatched peepers chirping from the pond fifty yards away, just beyond the property line. I’m surrounded by a chorus of birdsong I haven’t heard since fall.

I walk over to my apple trees—the ones I planted years ago, neglected, and finally showed up for last fall. I take them in, up close, for the first time in months.

This winter buried the trees under two feet of snow and ice. I would glance at them from the window during storms and worry.

I’m impressed. The beds look well taken care of, immaculate. No debris. The mulch I laid in November was compacted from the weight of the harsh winter, but these trees were unscathed—they survived.

I get to work, beginning with the smaller Jonathan. I snip the zip ties one by one with my pruning shears, then open the cages, trying not to snag my flannel on the stiff, biting wire. I inspect the young, delicate tree from the trunk up, looking for damage and competing leaders, two branches reaching for the same light, dividing the tree’s energy.

I see one, knowing I have to remove a large branch to support its growth this season. I position the loppers at the base, squeeze the handles, and feel the resistance before the wood gives way with a soft crack. The branch drops. My heart sinks for a moment, not yet trusting my pruning skills and instincts. I pause, then continue with my pruning shears, making a few smaller cuts with slightly more confidence and grace. I move to the Honeycrisp and do the same.

Standing here in the first moments of spring, I feel gratitude not just for the trees, the sun, and the life teeming around me, but also the winter that we’re emerging from. This one was different.

—

Winter was relentless this year in Upstate New York. Sub-zero temperatures for days on end. Several feet of snow on the ground refused to melt for months. Power outages. School delays and cancellations.

In prior years, I would have resisted the cold, complained to my wife every day, and just counted the days and weeks for it to end. But this year, rather than treat it like an unwelcome guest, I decided to lean into it, just as I had with these apple trees last fall.

I wondered. What is winter asking of me? What does my body need in its grips? How do I want to relate to it?

I trusted what I heard. Accept. Rest. Simplify. Go inward. Focus on home.

For five months, like the apple trees, I went dormant. For the first time, maybe ever, I decided to hibernate, focusing on my spiritual practice, my health, my family, and my coaching clients. The rest had to be pruned back—this Substack, vibe coding, courses, podcasts, random books, social media, networking. I just had no energy or desire for anything that asked me to plow ahead and get anything extra done.

Every morning at 5:30 my alarm pulled me out of a dream state. Dark. Cold. Quiet. I’d gently shut the bedroom door, turn up the heat, and tiptoe down the hallway and stairs, careful not to wake my wife and kids.

In the dark I’d take my cushion, fumble for a lighter, and find the candle, waiting for me in the fireplace. The room would shift from blackness to a gentle yellow glow. I’d sit for an hour, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter depending on when the kids lumbered downstairs calling for me.

It was just me, my body, and whatever the mind wanted to serve up. I’d gaze into the flame and somehow the rhythm of my breath would sync with its dance. That daily ritual set the tone for everything that followed. I was coming into deeper relationship with myself.

And that quality of attention, awareness, and relationality began to spill into everything else.

I put the kids to bed without resentment. I went to bed early with little FOMO. I had more intimacy with my wife than we’ve had in years. I cooked giant pots of soups and stews to nourish my family. I didn’t work nights and weekends. I put my phone away, sometimes. No travel. No chasing new ideas. I even paused seeing coaches, going to therapy, doing plant medicine, and breathwork. All of it.

And in the stillness of winter, I began to see and feel it—I was always in relationship with something. The cold that jolted my bones when I ran outside to grab the mail without a jacket. The blisters on my hands from shoveling. The candle on my mantle slowly becoming a blob of wax. The strange silence that settles right after a snowfall. The stray birds emerging from the trees. The perplexing art installations when I escaped to DIA Beacon. The chest cold that had me sidelined for a week. My wife. My girls. My clients. Everything.

—

As the days got longer and the stillness deepened, something surfaced that reframed the path that I’ve been on over the last decade.

I had believed these were threads in a larger reinvention story—meditation, sobriety, leaving venture capital, coaching, Downshift. I saw it as a decade of identities shedding and being reborn. VC to coach. Addict to sober man. City dweller to outdoorsman. Bachelor to husband. Husband to father. Coach to guide and healer. Atheist to Buddhist.

But this winter, in the stillness and quiet, a new vantage point came into view. Every transition brought me into deeper relationship with myself, my body, those in my life, community, nature, and mortality.

I also saw my work differently. I’ve talked about it as shepherding professionals through transition and transformation, but that’s not quite right anymore. What I’m really doing, what I’ve always been doing, is helping high agency professionals, largely men, cultivate the awareness to come into deeper connection with themselves, their bodies, their families, their work, their lives…and then change based on the quality of relating.

—

And just last weekend, the morning after I pruned my apple trees, a few lines emerged in my journal while the kids were still asleep upstairs:

Life as Relationship. At every level. In every direction. All the way up and all the way down.

I’m still sitting with what this will ask of me. It feels big and daunting. I suspect it’ll take years, if not decades, to fully grasp. I can’t articulate why I’m being pulled in this direction, but I trust it.

I can feel it in how I move through my morning ritual, in how I show up with my daughters, in how I listen to a client, in how I stood in my backyard on Saturday with pruning shears in my hand, in relationship with two young apple trees. I’m still working out what relationship actually means at this level, but I’ve come to see it as continuous interplay, attunement, multiple phenomena merging into one.

What I’m beginning to sense is this: so much of how I’ve moved through life has been separate, self-centered, and transactional. For decades, I used situations and experiences to get somewhere else. I treated relationships with people, with work, and with my own inner life, as a means to an end. There’s grief in that.

Something is shifting, though. I’m starting to experience life as a constant, dynamic web of relationships with thoughts, impulses, sensations, emotions, other people, objects, nature, time, even mortality. Inside and outside, simultaneously. What’s arising internally shapes how I experience the world, and what I experience in the world shapes what arises internally. All of it relational and alive, every moment of every day.

And it’s not just about what I’m in relationship with, but also how I’m relating to what’s in my awareness. Am I present or oblivious? Open or armored? Attracted or averse? That’s where the old patterns loosen their grip, and where I find I have more agency and freedom.

I don’t have this figured out and I’m not writing from the far bank of the river. I just hopped into the choppy and muddy water, still figuring out how to swim.

But this is the thread I’m following now in my work, in my writing, and in how I want to live each day. I can’t not do it. It’s exciting, expansive, and overwhelming too, but I feel like a new season in my life is beginning. And when I step outside, I know it is.

I’m grateful to be here with you, in relationship. If something I wrote stirred something within you, hit reply and say hello.