We’re into June now, the second half of the year opening up in front of us, and I want to spend this one with cedar. It’s one of the deepest medicines in my life, and one of my all-time faves to learn from.

Let me give you the personal context first, because it matters. I’m part of a Two-Spirit Sundance ceremony, and cedar is one of the primary medicines of that ceremony. It’s a dear, deep medicine for my people and for so many people around the world. I keep cedar around my house, on my desk, everywhere. And one of my proudest moments as a birth doula was bringing in everything we needed for a cedar bath for a baby and a parent at a hospital birth. We did it right there in the hospital. I tell my clients this all the time: we can make anything work anywhere. We’ll figure it out.

That’s the spirit of cedar, and it’s the spirit of this work.

Cedar doesn’t bloom and disappear. Cedar stands and shelters for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Whole forests depend on it. That’s what I want for the organizations I work with. Deep, relational, foundational, trust-building, story-driven work that actually lasts, that sustains others, that creates a healthy forest floor for everything else to flourish.

So this is a long-game episode. It’s about what happens when we stop chasing fads and the feeling that we should be all things at once, and instead start building something evergreen and rooted in community, something that can’t be replaced.

Roots come first, and they come before you can see them

Here’s what lets a cedar stand for centuries: a deep, extensive root system that’s there long before the tree is visible. Those roots stabilize the soil. They let cedar thrive in rocky ground, in the nutrient-poor places, in soil most species would write off. They make cedar drought tolerant and able to pull what it needs from genuinely challenging conditions.

I find that such a lesson for all of us. Cedar goes into the hard places and improves the soil. It doesn’t go looking for greener pastures. It asks, with where I am and what I have, how can I contribute to the health of this ecosystem?

In our work, the roots are the relationships. The trust. The organizational culture of listening and story and wisdom. Organizations that skip the root work and jump straight to the campaign or the strategy, without listening first, are the trees that topple in the first storm. We have to start with the foundation. And if trust has been broken somewhere along the way, we rebuild it at the pace it actually takes.

That’s so much of what we do together in a Story Lab Session. We start the root work. We map what’s already there, what we can strengthen, where the relationships live, so an organization can grow tall and stay and keep growing in service of the whole ecosystem.

Cedar doesn’t take winters off

Cedars are evergreen. That dense foliage is year-round shelter for wildlife, and the canopy regulates light and moisture for the entire forest floor. It doesn’t vanish in winter. There are gorgeous lessons in the cyclical species and plants too, and we can live from those. But cedar’s steadfastness teaches something specific. It never fully goes away. The shelter is always there.

I think about that constantly in this work. What would it mean to be that dense foliage for our communities? To build trust in a way where people know, in their bones, that we are always going to be there. Steady and solid. We’ve got them.

So we don’t treat deep listening and story gathering as a seasonal activity, something we pull out for the annual report or the grant deadline. Narrative infrastructure has to be evergreen. It’s something we tend all the time, so the trust keeps deepening and the work keeps getting stronger and taller and able to shelter more.

This is where the ongoing support comes in. The office hours, the retainer engagements. The point is to make sure your community has shelter in every season, and that you feel resourced enough to keep anchoring and growing into those deeper roots.

Protection that doesn’t need a fortress

This is the part I keep coming back to because I love it so much. Cedar produces aromatic oils and resins that protect it from pests and fungal infection. That protection doesn’t require a wall. It’s part of who cedar is.

You know the people you meet who are just solid? You don’t even have to talk to them much, you just feel that they’re protected and secure, that there’s a natural steadiness around them. Cedar is that. No loudness or flashiness needed. Just an embedded, quiet durability.

I know y’all are a bunch of overachievers. And I want you to feel what it’s like to come from that steady, protected place instead of being hypervigilant about comms talking points and reputation and breaches all the time. Of course those things matter. But when you’ve shown up for your community over and over and your frameworks are genuinely anti-extractive, the protection takes care of itself. You’re not stuck on defense. You’ve got a beautiful, solid, trust-built ecosystem, and you can let the work flow.

Feed the soil as you go

When cedar drops its needles, those needles enrich the soil and feed the species around it. Cedar feeds the system even as it sheds. (We saw a version of this with the orb weaver, who consumes her old web and digests those proteins to build again.)

Imagine if everything we did were designed that way. Not just the polished outcome, but every part of the process nourishing the community, even the parts on their way out. What would that feel like?

That’s exactly what happens when story-driven work is done well. The gathering of stories strengthens a community’s trust and its own narrative capacity. The listening builds trust. The strategy surfaces the people and assets you already have, so you can go where things are working and grow from there. You’re making the ground more fertile as you move. The work itself becomes the service, not just the thing you produce at the end.

I don’t want us living in that end-game mindset, where our contribution only counts once we arrive, once the report ships, once the thing is made. I want us designing the work so we’re contributing at every single step, because for me that’s the whole heart of story-driven strategy. It makes the doing itself a service to community, to organizations, to health, and to justice.

There’s more cedar can teach us here too. The western redcedar is a keystone species in some temperate forests. Pull it out and the whole system shifts. And cedar is a carbon sink, taking in what’s harmful, holding it, and alchemizing it. I think that alchemy is the real teaching. How do we understand the harms and the hard histories the communities we serve carry, and help move that energy through in healthy, supportive ways, so the ecosystem stays well?

The pace of true growth

Cedar grows slowly and steadily, and that’s exactly why it lasts for centuries. Strategic pace isn’t urgency. The work can absolutely be fast and efficient and impactful. What it can’t be is rushed. When we rush, we skip and compress, we cut the relationship building, and then we just can’t grow. Cedar asks us to take the pace of true growth, because that’s where the real work happens.

So I’ll leave you with what I’ve been sitting with. How deep are your roots? Is your organization’s story practice evergreen, or does it only show up when you need something from the community? Is it extractive? And what would it look like to build this work in a way that lasts, not just through the fiscal year, but over and over, embedded into the organization itself?

If you want company in that root work, the second half of the year is a beautiful time to start. A Story Lab Session is three hours where you and your team show up, answer some questions, and walk away with a roadmap for deeper community engagement and the trust building you came to the work to do, built around the resources and capacity you actually have right now. There are office hours twice a month for lighter, ongoing support. And for the orgs that want the done-for-you model, we can build something custom together, from full strategy creation and implementation to a staff retreat or training, or a multi-year partnership. The best way to start is always to just book a call.

Spend some time with a cedar tree this week if you can. It teaches us so much about how we want to do this work, the pace we want to do it at, and how it feels to witness it done well.

M

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