The Root-Gift Layer: The Deep Ones Feed the Field by Habit #63
Staying underground stops being preparation and starts being a comfortable place to hide. Week 63 breaks down the shift from hermit mode to touching air, taking back your own best root-energy, Robin Wall Kimmerer's law of reciprocity, and stepping into the open. (266 characters)
Onion roots don't just take. They leave the soil richer than they found it. Healed, strengthened, the ground itself changed because they were there.
I've been thinking about that this week.
For most of my life I thought roots were about anchoring me. What holds me steady when life pushes. So I went down to find them. Hermit mode. Off the scene. Out of the networking Miami pipeline where people knew my name. Into the quiet. Down through the layers.
I found what I was looking for. Now I have to answer for what I do with it.
The Kingdom Is Within
Joseph Campbell audiobooks comfort me. And again. In a conversation with Michael Toms he put it like this. The kingdom of God is within you. You don't need a priest, a church, or a savior in the sky. You look inside your own consciousness and wake up to the fact that you are already a manifestation of the thing you were looking for.
It just makes sense to me.
Here's what's wild. I went to look up the actual verse this week. King James, Luke 17:21, "the kingdom of God is within you." Try to find it clean on Google AI mode, and you can't —or I wasn't specific enough. But you get influencers first. Facebook captions. Summaries of what other people think it means. The verse itself is buried three scrolls down behind everyone else's take on it.
And that's the point acting itself out in the browser. The world will hand you everyone's interpretation before it hands you the thing itself. You have to push past the noise. You have to go in and find it yourself. Same door, just internal instead of external.
That was the whole point of digging down in the layers. Not to build a bunker. To find the thing the bunker was hiding.
A root goes deep before it feeds anything. It has to. You cannot enrich the ground around you with something you haven't touched inside yourself. That was the going in.
What comes back up through you is the whole point.
The Field You're Not Tending
Here's the mirror I had to hold up this week.
I pour everything I have into my clients. Deep creative work. Strategy. Psychology. The best version of them out there in the world, being seen. They tell me. Their people talk. Someone hired me last month because of what they saw me do for someone else.
And this isn't just art. It's the work that pays the bills. Affords the life we're building. That's not something I take lightly, and I never will.
But the newsletter that documents my becoming, the one you're reading right now, has been getting the leftover energy. Sixty-three weeks of going this deep on purpose. And I've been treating the promotion of it like it'll get discovered on a wing and a prayer.
That is not root-gift. That is root-neglect. In my own soil.
Ask yourself the same thing. Where is your best root-energy going that isn't feeding what you actually want to grow? Whose field are you enriching while your own goes dry? Not out of guilt. Out of honesty. The ground in front of you is telling you.
You're Already a Root
Before I go anywhere else with this I have to say the other thing that came up this week. Because just calling myself out isn't the whole truth. There's the honest acknowledgement of my progress too.
You are probably already a root that feeds. You just don't stand over the ground long enough to notice.
People still play songs I wrote years ago. Know all the words. Songs I haven't sung in a decade are playing in someone's car on a Tuesday commute to work.
Friends have come back years later and said, you told me something once, and I didn't like you for it. And then a year later it changed me. Root-gift isn't always soft. Sometimes it stings on the way in and feeds on the way through.
My dad told me he loves how my wife and I are raising our son. Involved. Present. Loving through the ebb and flow. I thought about that for some time. A man whose father sees him as a good father is a man who has already changed something in the ground his kid will grow up in. Without a speech. Without a plan. Just by being what he is.
Roots don't ask the soil if it wants nutrients. They give what they are. And the ground either gets richer or it doesn't. You don't need to become someone whose presence enriches. You already are ONE. The question is whether you're going to keep giving it by accident, or start giving it on purpose.
Plant on Purpose
This is the turn.
You get to choose the soil now. That's what this whole stretch has been asking me and I finally hear it.
For me this week that looks like finally showing up on camera. The root neglect on my own marketing keeps giving me the same analytics. I need to show my face. The whites of my eyes in full expression, hosting the onion character I've created. And I keep delaying it. The cameras are ready. The mic. The lighting. Even the script, in the same formula you read here. A summary, my talk, the coaching, the book, then a quick play by play on the weekly AI videos. Post it to YouTube. Just start.
Not because I need to be seen, technically. But because sixty-three weeks of root-work has to sprout out to what it's supposed to become, or it stays dormant underground til the next lifetime. Let's touch air —SPROUT.
Special beautiful madness behind it, if I'm honest. That's what this is.
For you, it might be a different move. A conversation you've been avoiding. A project you keep behind the tab. A field you know is yours that you've been letting go to weed while you tend everyone else's. Whatever it is, you already know.
Root down. Then feed the ground you were planted in. On purpose.
Still here, roots down, soil fed. Same peel, coming up to air. Let's build from here.
Want to write through these same layers and make them your own?
The "Being Coached" Layer: What's the Depth For?
Larry's out this week, so I'll carry his chair — but I know exactly what he'd say, because he's said versions of it to me before. He wouldn't get on me about the cameras. He'd just tilt his head and ask the quiet one: "Sixty-three weeks of digging down. What's all that depth for?"
And he'd let it sit, because he knows the answer embarrasses me a little. A root doesn't go deep to stay deep. It goes deep so it can feed something above the surface. "You've got the substance," he'd say. "You did the hard part — the part most people quit. Don't confuse staying underground with doing the work. At some point the depth stops being depth and starts being a real good hiding spot." Then the part that'd actually land, said plain, not pushed: "You're not protecting the seed by keeping it in the dark. You're just keeping it a seed."
He wouldn't order me to turn the camera on. He'd trust that once I saw it, I couldn't un-see it. That's how he coaches. He doesn't make you jump. He shows you're already standing on the edge, and then he gets out of the way.
The Takeaway for You: Notice where you've been calling it "getting ready" when it's really staying safe. Depth is only worth what it grows. If your best energy keeps going into everyone else's field while your own stays underground, that's not humility — it's a comfortable place to hide from being seen. The seed was never meant to stay buried. Let it touch air.
Bookshelf Peeled - The Law of Reciprocity in the Dark Soil
In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer bridges indigenous wisdom and modern plant biology to reveal a fundamental law of nature: no root exists solely for itself. She explains that when plants go deep into the soil, they aren't just hoarding water and minerals to build a private bunker. They actively transform those nutrients and return them to the earth, feeding the surrounding fungal networks and enriching the soil for the whole field. In fact, sweetgrass that is tended and harvested flourishes, while sweetgrass that is left alone and ignored eventually chokes on its own buildup and dies out. Depth without distribution isn't health—it’s stagnation.
This completely reframes the years spent underground in "hermit mode." Retreating into the quiet to find your roots and do the internal work is necessary, but staying down there under the guise of "getting ready" violates the ecosystem. As Kimmerer notes, the gift demands to be given. Pouring all your high-level strategy into client fields while letting your own platform starve isn't humility; it’s withholding the harvest. The root-work is complete. The depth is already in the soil. The only natural move left is to break through the surface, show your face, and let the gift feed the ground on purpose.
The Takeaway for You: Stop using "preparation" or "internal work" as an excuse to stay hidden. Depth that never sprouts isn't a strength—it's a bottleneck. If you've spent the time doing the heavy lifting underground, you have an obligation to bring that value up into the open. Turn on the camera, launch the project, and share what you've built. Honor the root by letting the harvest feed the field.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants - by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Design Rebel: Hermit Mode No More
This week was inspired by breaking out of hiding. No more hermit mode—it’s time to show up in person and just start. Myself included, starting this week new in-person video, and it's been declared now I need to get it done.
Behind the Build: Bringing this sequence to life required far more than a single prompt. While Leonardo.ai, Veo 3.1, and ElevenLabs generated the raw assets, the real breakthrough happened in post-production. Everything was manually edited, structured, and synchronized frame-by-frame in Wondershare Filmora to protect the creative vision.
The trap of getting ready forever —The Rebel Onion.
This Got Me Thinking:
Clearing the ground isn't a failure—it’s the violent, necessary clearing of the surface that forces your roots deeper and allows what you’ve built inside to finally sprout on purpose. Seem fitting for this week.
P.S. If this resonates with you, share it with someone. I'm dedicated to helping fellow explorers—or anyone who found this page—uncover their authentic self with humor and insight. We're all in this together, finding the courage to truly live from our core essence (or as close as we can get!).
The Photosynthesis Layer: Turning What You've Lived Into Energy
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