A Year of Tending

Dear friends,

This time of year the sun tops the trees on the western hillside for only a few hours each day, and then breaks into a million golden spears that pierce the forest floor. Most afternoons the scattered light is our backdrop as we tend to the sheep and walk hand-cut paths through trees and pasture. Land as old as this land puts one’s life in a different perspective. It makes you want to think less about what you’ve accomplished and more about what you’ve tended. What’s grown under your care, for the few days and years it’s yours to steward. 

This past year, we’ve been tending a family, a set of commitments, a piece of land, and a set of questions about how people live and work together. Some things flourished immediately. Others are taking their time.

Our family changed shape in May when Lidia joined us as a foster youth, under the care of the saints working at Commonwealth Catholic Charities. (They’re not literal saints, the Catholics would remind us. But metaphorically they’ve more than earned the title.)

Lidia arrived — remarkably — with her own strong root system, and watching her take hold has been remarkable. She stepped into school, field hockey, basketball, and Navy ROTC with a level of discipline and self-command that makes us suspect she’s been practicing for this life longer than we’ve known her. Some people arrive needing care; others arrive ready to grow…and to grow others. Lidia is the latter.

Lela turned twelve this year and seems to be discovering who she is at precisely the right pace. She’s thriving academically, anchoring herself in field hockey and volleyball, and spending long stretches absorbed in arts and crafts. She remains one of the very few among her friends without an iPhone or TikTok—an arrangement that has not ruined her life, but seems to have given her more attention for the world immediately around her. She’s developing an emotional intelligence that most adults should aspire to.

Nella turned five and is growing like a hop bine in summer. She’s in the 98th percentile for height (those Lakin genes asserting themselves early) and speaks with the precision, timing, and dry humor of someone at least twenty-five years her senior. (Half the time. The other half of the time she’s offering nonsensical rhymes and bathroom humor.) She is already a natural storyteller, deeply invested in insects (a passion that alarms her peers and delights her parents), and would choose being outside over nearly anything else. We suspect she’s paying closer attention than the rest of us combined.

Becky’s year unfolded across a broad and varied ecosystem. She continues her tenure as a popular professor at Arizona State University, and her service as Chair and Elected Director our local Soil and Water Conservation District. She also saw the non-profit she founded in 2018 turn seven. What began as a modest experiment in neighbor-to-neighbor giving, The Giving Wall has moved several hundred thousand dollars directly to families in crisis, in partnership with local nonprofits. This year, that work extended into consulting with nonprofits themselves — helping organizations rethink employee experience and workplace design so the people doing essential work can actually sustain it. In her community forum Many Hands, she hosts monthly conversations with leaders responding courageously to the challenges of our time.

Jason completed nearly a decade with Kuehne+Nagel this year — a series of seasons that included visits to 54 countries and work alongside more than 2,000 leaders across a Fortune 500 company with 90,000 colleagues. He continues to write quarterly reviews of books, media, and the arts for national publications, an ongoing practice of sense-making in a noisy world. And this year, Becky and Jason began sharing time between The Giving Foundation and a new venture still very much in cultivation: The Tomorrow Company.

Which brings us, inevitably, back to the land.

This year we became stewards of 39 acres of conservation land — ground  lived on for generations of the Arrohattoc people, later farmed by freedmen, and now entrusted to us for a chapter of its history. We don’t think of this as ownership so much as temporary responsibility. The land has a longer memory than we do, and a much longer future.

At this ranch in a historic farming corridor in Henrico County, we’re building a learning landscape. A place for team retreats, corporate off-sites, executive sabbaths, community events, and therapeutic experiences for companies, nonprofits, and guests of all ages.

The sheep have already arrived. Along with Forrest, our sheepdog, whose sense of purpose far exceeds his sense of humor. Our formerly wild mustangs will move to the tracks and pasture this spring, timed to the grasses. An arena goes up in a matter of weeks, a site for relationship between people, animals, and the conversations that make community possible. Treehouse lofts will follow. Fire pits. Hiking trails. Spaces of engagement and discovery for people, community, and teams within and well beyond central Virginia.

We are welcoming bookings for nature-based experiences in late summer and early fall of 2026. Retreats. Workshops. Offsites. Therapeutic experiences for folks of all ages.

There's nothing we cannot learn from the natural world. Bring us your challenge, and we'll connect you with a creature and ecosystem who can help. 

In November, we hosted 70+ neighbors, friends, and allies on a series of walkabouts, to vision as a community what we might build together. The first few of countless conversations to come. If you’d like to be a part of the growing community attached to this place and what it stands for, let us know, and we’ll not only keep you informed, we’ll invite you to join us and others. To plant. To build. To remember: We are of the Earth and for each other.

Wendell Berry, who has been a constant spiritual companion to us, wrote often that the health of land and people are not separate endeavors. This year has given us so many beautiful opportunities to tend to both.

We’re grateful for those who have walked closely with us for years, and for those who have amended our soil with new friendship and partnership. There is room here. There is work worth doing. And still so much to learn.

Love for this season and the ones to come,

Becky & Jason
Lela, Nella & Lidia
The 3 Mustangs
The 5 Sheep
The 3 Dogs
The 2 Cats
The Chickens that remain
And the nameless birds + bees, flora + fauna that call this place home, and allow us to call it home too.