A few weeks ago, I tore my knee chasing a cat.
You may remember because I wrote to you about it. How my body threw itself between my ducks and a predator, and twisted two directions at once until something gave. I ended up hobbling around the property, but mostly keeping my leg up while an ice pack kept sliding off my knee.
Well, here’s what I didn’t see coming.
The knee’s been healing, slowly, and only when I actually stay off it. When I sit still instead of marching around the property warding off dangers and reminding the ducks where the edges of their fenceless world are. So I’ve been sitting. A lot. More than I have in years.
And while I’ve been sitting, something happened to the ducks.
They grew up.
What thrived while I wasn’t hovering
I’m still a little astonished by it.
For most of their lives, my ducks have had a rhythm built around me wanting the best for them. We go out in the morning, then back into their courtyard (I dubbed it Duckingham Palace) every few hours while I do the ordinary things a day requires. All day, every day. I was their guard and boundary-keeper. The one who stood between them and the hawks, raccoons, coyotes, and the wide unfenced world.
But I couldn’t do that with a torn knee, so I stopped. I let them stay out, free-range, dawn to dusk, while I mostly watched from afar.
And the worst didn’t come. Instead, they flourished.
They stopped needing to be marched back to safety every few hours. And instead, settled into the whole property as they’d always known it was theirs.
They got calmer and more confident. More themselves. They’ll be two years old next month (that’s mid-twenties in human years), and they chose this time to show me they’re not babies anymore. They’re responsible and happy.
Which means they didn’t thrive despite me stepping back. They thrived because I did.
The season is doing the same thing
This week, everything turns.
We’ve spent weeks now in a tender, inward, backward-pulling season that’s all memory and home and grief and the inner work of feeling things. If it’s been heavy, you haven’t imagined it. It’s been a lot of looking back.
But this week, the light shifts and the emotional warmth comes back. The season turns from listening inward to shining outward, from tending the private ache to stepping back into the fullness of life. And that long backward pull that’s had so many of us looping through the past, finally turns and starts moving forward again.
Think of it as the exhale after a long, held breath. It’s definitely an invitation back into your own life.
And if you’ve been guarding something or someone, or some part of yourself, or some outcome you’ve been white-knuckling, this might be the week to notice what happens when you loosen your grip. You don’t stop caring. But sometimes the most loving thing you can do is trust what you’ve tended enough to let it be free.
The belief that won’t survive this week
“If I’m not watching, something will go wrong.”
Maybe. But maybe not. And maybe the watching itself has become the cage.
I know this fear intimately. I’ve stood between the ones I love and the dangers of the world with everything I have. Some of you know why. There are losses that teach you to brace forever and believe that vigilance is the same as love. That if you just watch closely enough and guard hard enough, you can keep the terrible thing from coming.
But the ducks taught me that I can’t always keep the predator away. I never could. And the exhausting, endless watching doesn’t actually protect the ones I love.
Vigilance is not the same as love. Yes, sometimes love is guarding. But sometimes love is sitting down, opening the gate, and trusting the life you tended to live itself fully.
Why this matters
When you look at it in hindsight, I went out to protect my ducks, but it turned out they needed something else from me. It wasn’t a bodyguard, but a witness who would sit with them a few times a day, let them wag their little tails and ask to be pet, and then let them go be ducks.
I think a lot of us are holding on too tight right now. We’re guarding out of love, hovering out of fear, and mistaking our own exhaustion for devotion. And this week, as the warmth returns and the season finally lets us come up for air, there’s a gentler possibility on offer.
You can loosen your grip and still love completely. You can open the gate and stay close. You can trust what you’ve raised, tended, built, and healed, and let it be free-range for a while.
So, the ducks are out there right now, dawn to dusk, thriving in a world I stopped trying to fence for them. And I’m on my new deck, knee up, watching them be exactly who they’ve become.
It turns out the whole job isn’t to guard life, but to witness it.
Jonni
P.S. Something new, for those who want the deepest version of this kind of work. I’ve been writing all season about the two ways people process. Some think out loud, some think in ink. So I built a container that holds both, and I’ve called it Both/And. 😉 It’s a monthly call to talk things through, voice to voice, plus UNLIMITED access to write to me in between, for everything that surfaces in the days after the call when the real thing finally hits. The call anchors. The writing carries you between anchors. So, nothing gets lost.
It’s $333 a month, three-month minimum, and I take only a handful of these at a time. It’s a lot of me, and I want to do it well. If you’ve been wanting both the conversation and the companionship between conversations, this is the one.
