The Soil We Leave Behind

Dear Beloved,

As we come down from the Highland with Katara McCarty, I keep thinking about the conditions we leave behind us — the emotional, spiritual, and relational soil that others must learn to live in after we are gone.

That may be one of the clearest gifts Katara leaves in our hands.

In a world that still rewards overextension, praises exhaustion, and mistakes urgency for importance, Katara offers another measure. She asks us to consider not only what we are building, but what our way of building is doing to the soil beneath us. She reminds us that leadership is not only about vision. It is also about pace, capacity, discernment, and whether we are leaving the ground more alive than we found it.

That lesson lands differently after Brittany. Because Brittany opened this season by asking what we are ready to seed. Katara answered with the next necessary wisdom: the seed is not the whole story. The soil matters too. The conditions matter. The pace matters. The body matters. The breath matters. What we refuse to burn matters.

And perhaps that is where this conversation becomes more than personal. Because the soil of a life is never only our own. It is the emotional climate of a home. The nervous system of a team. The pace of a community. The care practices of a movement. The way a child learns whether love feels like pressure or presence. The way another woman learns whether leadership must always come at the expense of her own body.

Katara teaches us that what we protect in ourselves becomes part of what others inherit from us. If we normalize depletion, someone will call that devotion. If we model over-functioning, someone will call that leadership. If we keep burning the soil, someone will mistake surviving the scorch for strength.

But if we pause? If we breathe? If we let the soil rest?

If we create spaces where Black women can lower their shoulders and truly exhale?

Then we begin to leave behind another inheritance altogether.

An inheritance of remembered care. An inheritance of boundaries. An inheritance of slowness. An inheritance of discernment. An inheritance of lives built at a pace the body can actually survive.

That feels like the bridge to what comes next. Because once we ask what we are seeding, and once we ask what kind of soil that seed requires, another question begins to rise:

What is being planted in the emotional ground of the people coming after us?

What are children learning from the pace of our lives? What are communities absorbing from the way we move through stress? What are the next generations inheriting from the environments we create around them? What grows in people when the ground beneath them is steady, soft, and alive?

Katara’s episode helps prepare us for that question by insisting that care is not decorative. It is not branding. It is not an afterthought. It is structural. It is environmental. It shapes what can grow. And it teaches us that before we can tend the future well, we must get honest about the conditions we are normalizing in the present.

So as we leave Katara, I want to carry forward her clearest invitation:

Grow, yes.

Build, yes.

Dream, yes.

But not in ways that ask you to abandon the body.

Not in ways that glorify depletion.

Not in ways that leave the land less fertile for those who come next.

Let this be part of what we seed: a slower pace, a truer yes, a more discerning no, and a way of living that does not confuse exhaustion with love.

Until we meet again at the Highland - sending love,

Gabrielle

Write at the top of the page: What am I teaching others by the way I tend my own life?

Then reflect:

• What have I normalized in my pace, habits, or leadership that I would not want the next generation to inherit?

• Where is my life inviting more breath, softness, or rest?

• What kind of emotional and relational soil am I helping create around me?

• What would it mean to leave behind conditions that make exhale possible?

Close with: The inheritance I want to help create is ________.

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