Discernment about what belongs

There is a plant taking over my yard right now. Creeping Charlie, my neighbors call it — and they say it with a certain gravity, the way you’d name a problem that needs solving. Pull it up, they tell me. It doesn’t belong. To be clear, I welcome their guidance. 

But I’ve been watching it. It grows where the grass won’t — in the shade, in the thin spots, in the places the lawn has quietly given up. It flowers purple in early spring, before almost anything else does. The bees find it. It smells like mint when you brush against it. I’m not sure I want to pull it up. I’m discerning what’s best, at least for my little yard. 

Discernment feels like the right approach for many areas lately — it’s a concept that comes up a lot in our work with couples. It’s not decision-making — that’s a different thing, faster and more confident than what I mean. Discernment is slower. It requires you to notice what’s actually here before you decide what else should be. It asks you to sit with the question a little longer than is comfortable.

Spring always seems to arrive with such pull — toward action, toward planting, toward filling the open spaces. I’ll confess: I already planted. A few weeks ago, before anyone with more patience would have advised it. It was a beautiful day. I just couldn’t wait. And now it hasn’t rained since. I’m out there every day now with the watering can, except the rare occasions when I convince one of my kids that watering is fun, tending to what I rushed into, already a little tired of it — and still not quite able to regret it.

There’s something in that tension that feels worth sitting with. The impulse to grow isn’t wrong. But discernment asks us to notice — to feel the pull, and then pause long enough to ask: is this the right moment, or just an eager one? What will this cost to tend? Am I ready for that?

This winter was a heavy one for our community. The weight was harsh, and it landed unevenly — on families, on practitioners, on people who were already carrying more than their share. And now, on the other side of it, comes spring — not as an erasure of what came before, but as what comes next. Seeds were planted and taken root. The fullness isn’t here yet, but it’s coming.

Walk-In has always grown the way connective tissue grows — not upward toward the light, but laterally, quietly, into the spaces between. Fifty-six years of showing up in the gaps that formal systems leave behind. Free. Anonymous. No appointment needed. We are not the canopy. We are the root network underneath it, and that is not a limitation — it is the design.

We are also, right now, in our own season of discernment. We are asking big questions about who we are and who we’re becoming. We are building slowly and on purpose, tending roots before we tend reach. This is not caution born of fear. It is patience born of wisdom — the understanding that outsized growth, rushed growth, is the kind that doesn’t hold. And it is also, quietly, preparation. Roots don’t spread slowly because they have given up on the canopy. They spread slowly because they hold one.

If you are new to this community, welcome — you are joining something alive and held by many hands over many years. If you are returning to it, welcome back. And if you are somewhere in between, at the edge of a transition, finishing something or beginning something — that threshold is asking something of you. Use it. Bring your whole, discerning self to what comes next.

We are glad you are here.

Kate