Letting It Grow Wild

There’s virtue in letting things go.

My family and I bought a house in September. The yard needs work. We have fourteen trees, most of which provide a canopy over the back half of our backyard. Grass doesn’t grow there much. It’s a mix of muddy clay soil and an overlay of clover and other ground cover that will flower a bit in the next few weeks if we let it grow. On the barest of the patches up against the back fence line, we put down a bunch of wildflower seeds. Just beyond that, right against the fence, we tossed our old pumpkins last fall. We’re hoping for volunteers.

This morning on our way to drop off my eldest for a speech tournament, we couldn’t help but notice the wisteria growing everywhere. The pale purple-blue against the early shades of green is something to behold down here.

My neighbors do not have a pretty yard. It collects things. Plastic furniture. Broken equipment, from two shattered basketball hoops and a dismantled children’s play set to a half installed volleyball net. At the back of their property, right next to us, they keep two dogs in a set of fence kennels. The kennels are beat up, patched up, and not at all kept up. No roof. The dogs don’t leave but about five days a year. The smell is thick. I’ve called our local animal services but aside from a visit or two, not much happens.

My wife used to work for a land easement foundation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The whole idea there was for the foundation to buy land that they’d put under easement, meaning it could neither be developed nor could it be used to feed cattle. During this time, we rented a hundred year old farmhouse that had an easement on it for about ten or fifteen yards on either side of the Middle River in a little spot on Cattleman Road. Fencing lined the easement to keep the cattle and other large critters out. And the plants around it just grew and grew. The idea is that maybe the river will find its ideal ecosystem again after decades of agricultural development nearby. And maybe downstream will have less runoff from cattle farming.

My work life has been a mess lately. The institution where I work insists on more and more every day. They’re interested in productivity, not ecosystem. They’ll squeeze every drop of value out of the land and its people they can.

Everywhere I look in the organizational world, we’re oriented towards growth. What are your enrollment numbers? How many credit hours are you teaching? What is church attendance looking like? Is our budget growing? Are you expanding your programs? What’s your audience reach? Are ticket sales up? What about property values? Bank account? I could go on.

I think growth is good. Growth is the sign of things not dying. But I do think we have a choice: there is the growth that is defined by productivity and obsession with numbers and where the value comes from what this growth can do for us. And then there is what I’ll call wild growth.

Wild growth lets the dogs next door be wild. They aren’t meant for cages. Neither are college professors and student development people and creatives and cranky church ladies and visionary clergy and neurodivergent artists and and and.

Letting our backyard go wild in spots will foster a new ecosystem. If we let it grow wild next to the fence where the neighbors’ dogs are, maybe we’ll smell something different and more pleasant.

Letting your people go wild in an organization sounds more dangerous than I mean it. But if you want growth, it’s the thing to do: empower folks to do what they do better than anyone else. Feed and water. Stand back. Manicure much less.

There is always time to prune or mow or clear the forest. Last week, I joined with some folks to clear some overgrowth of vines and small trees and brush on our church property and we can see our neighbors for the first time in years. In cutting back some of the gnarly vines, we saved some trees from a slow, choking death. Sometimes to save the woods, we have to burn the shrubs.

And sometimes we have to let things grow wild.

Going wild means giving up control — internally and externally. How can we grow wild? And where?