How to Grow Things Without Burning the Soil

Dear Beloved,

Some of the most important legacy lessons are not about vision. They are about pace, capacity, and what we refuse to shed while trying to grow. Katara McCarty offers us one of those lessons here at the Highland.

In the second episode of Meet Me at the Highland™ Season 2, she gives us a phrase that feels destined to outlive the hour in which it was spoken: “how to grow things without burning the soil.”

It is the kind of sentence that arrives as metaphor, but stays as instruction. Because if we are honest, many of us have been taught the opposite. We have been taught to prove our devotion through depletion. To measure impact by output. To confuse urgency with alignment. To keep showing up long after the body has started whispering no. To believe that if something matters enough, it should cost us everything.

Katara offers another way. She begins by naming what she is seeding in this season: “a slower, more intentional pace of leadership. One that really doesn’t require depletion to prove impact.” And with that, she places a necessary interruption in the middle of a culture that still romanticizes burnout as evidence of seriousness.

What makes this lesson so powerful is that it is not abstract for her. It is lived.

Katara tells the truth about years spent holding others — as pastor, nonprofit leader, mother, caregiver, steward of community, witness to grief, presence in crisis. She tells the truth about how much work required her to keep showing up and how little room there was for rest or self-care. And when that chapter closed, she found herself on the bathroom floor in tears, depleted, grieving, and unsure what could come next.

That moment matters because it reveals something many leaders are taught to ignore: the body keeps score of every season of overgiving. The spirit remembers every time it was asked to carry more than it could hold. And grief does not disappear just because we are busy enough to outrun it.

Katara’s coach told her two things: pour back into yourself, and give yourself time to grieve. Time. Such a simple word. Such a radical offering for a woman who had spent decades in motion. What followed was not a productivity hack or rebrand. It was a return. A deconstruction. A slowing. A coming home to who Katara was in that season and what she needed next.

And then, as if to make the lesson impossible to forget, she gives us the soil. She describes the farming practice of controlled burning: how, in the short term, it can increase yield, but when repeated too often and without enough rest, it dries out the soil, leads to erosion, destroys organic matter and microorganisms, and leaves the land less fertile over time. She translates that truth directly into building and sustaining your legacy: you can grow things, but you do not have to burn the soil. Let it rest.

That is more than wisdom. It is a blueprint.

Because what Katara is really asking is:

What kind of growth are we after if it leaves the source of life less able to sustain us?

What are we calling success if the land is barren by the time we arrive?

What are we building if the builder must disappear for the structure to stand?

These are questions for every leader who has been taught that strength means endurance without pause.

Katara’s answer is not to stop building. It is to build differently. She tells us she has been surprised by what is emerging from this slower, more intentional foundation. Things are still happening. The work is still growing. The vision is still moving. She is resting, taking naps, touching grass, hugging trees — and the dream is still alive.

It is happening… and she took a nap. There is a quiet revolution in that sentence. Because so much of dominant culture insists that if we stop, everything will fall apart. Katara’s life offers a counter-testimony: some things grow better when we pause. Some things become clearer when we rest. Some visions are more faithful when we refuse to sacrifice the body to the blueprint.

And perhaps this is why her work matters so deeply beyond the personal. Katara did not only learn how to care for herself differently. She built Exhale from the anger and grief of not seeing Black women reflected in wellness spaces during the pandemic. She understood that care was being offered in ways that ignored the specific stress, fear, and weathering Black women were carrying. So she created what she could not find. Not a generic wellness platform, but a space where Black women could hear themselves, see themselves, lower their shoulders, and remember care that was already theirs. She calls it not new care, but remembered care.

That matters here because growing without burning the soil is not just a personal ethic. It is a communal one. Katara is showing us that sustainable leadership is not simply about self-preservation. It is about legacy. About not reproducing extraction in the very spaces meant to heal us. About refusing to build a future for Black women that still requires Black women to disappear in order to sustain it. About creating containers where breath can return, shoulders can lower, and care can feel like home again.

This is what future generations can study about her legacy: she got clear about what was hers to carry and what was not. She refused the lie that everything needed her. She chose a lane and loved it deeply. She built from remembered care instead of inherited depletion. She decided that rest was not a break from the work, but part of what made the work worthy of being carried forward.

So perhaps the real question Katara leaves us with is not simply: What am I growing? But also:

What is this growth costing the soil?

What would it mean to let the land rest?

What could become possible if my life were built at a pace my body could actually survive?

What future might open if I stopped calling burnout by holy names?

Katara’s answer is clear. Grow. But not like that. Grow with discernment. Grow with breath. Grow with boundaries. Grow with grief honored. Grow with care remembered. Grow in a way that leaves the soil alive.

That is not only wisdom. That is legacy.

Until we meet again at the HIghland - sending love,

Gabrielle

Set aside 20 quiet minutes with your journal.

Write at the top of the page: How am I being asked to grow without burning the soil?

Then reflect on these questions:

• Where in my life have I mistaken depletion for devotion?

• What am I currently trying to grow that may be costing me too much?

• What would it look like to let the soil rest in this season?

• Where do I need a slower, more intentional pace of leadership?

• What kind of care would help me build in a way that leaves me whole?

Close by writing: The soil I am committed to protecting is ________.

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