by Hope Radford
It makes so much sense to me that our staff retreat was in the depths of fall this year.
There’s no greater season for the lessons of grief, the necessity of hope, or the sureness of change.
It’s a time of transition for TWP. Roles, work environments, and climate conditions are changing rapidly. Our finance director and dear friend, Diane, is retiring after 18 years with the organization. And we kept the retreat close to home this year, near Loveland, so some of our staff could respond to the health decline of family members.
We’re also facing these transitions after a year of drought and deluge throughout the Americas.
Waterways are dried up across the West, crops are devastated across Central America, and some of our New Mexico staff barely made it to the retreat amidst floods affecting their families.
There is necessary grief in our work no matter how well we do it, just as there is in returning home to the newly-bare elm tree that shaded my front yard all summer.
But in transition, there is opening. The challenges of the moment have opened conversations that will help sustain us as an organization and as a group of people who care deeply about one another. We’re already seeing the youngest voices of TWP lead us with a courage and self-assuredness we can only hope defines the next generation. And while some of us are facing the imminent loss of people we love, others are welcoming new ones.
I like to think it’s not a coincidence that a picture of a sunny fall aspen stand watched over us in the room we spent two days together in.
I felt too, after the retreat, that the sun was just a little brighter.
Maybe that’s what the leaves falling makes room for.
