Help Stephen raise money

This spring, I registered for the Falmouth Road Race to help raise awareness and funds for the Native Land Conservancy's (NLC) mission. It had been 15 years since I'd last run, so "out of shape" felt generous. Still, I built a training plan, set to start in June. Life, of course, had other plans.

My second child unexpectedly arrived nearly a month early, on June 4th. Just days later, my mother had to undergo emergency brain surgery. Suddenly my days were split between two of the biggest things a person can hold at once — the joy of a new baby, and the fear of losing my mother. There was no time left for training runs, and honestly, no space left to even think about the race. It quietly slipped away.

Thankfully, my wife and our new baby are healthy and happy. And while she is not out of the woods yet, I'm beyond grateful to say my mother has made enormous strides in her recovery from her traumatic brain injury. I've gone back to work, and I'm still finding my way through all of this change, figuring out what "normal" looks like now. But it's starting to come into focus. And with it, so is the desire to finally lace up, start running again, and finish that race on August 16th (even if very slowly).

In many ways, this has all taught me something I think the NLC understands deeply: that healing is rarely linear, and resilience isn't about returning to who you were before; it's about relearning your relationship to what sustains you. This summer handed me both ends of that lesson at once - welcoming a new baby into the world, and watching my mother fight to live and recover from a traumatic brain injury, which I know intimately, having survived one myself in 2012. New life and a life nearly lost, arriving within days of each other, demanded the same things from me: patience, presence, and trust that healing takes the time it takes. Just as land needs care, protection, and time to recover from harm, so do the people on it. And having a second child has only deepened that truth for me. Every generation inherits not just the land we leave behind but also our relationship to it and the resilience we model for them. Supporting the NLC's mission to protect and steward this land isn't separate from the personal work of healing; it’s the same story, passed from my mother's generation to my children's. 

If this resonates with you, I'd be grateful if you'd consider donating to support the NLC's work. Every contribution helps protect land, restore relationships to it, and build the kind of resilience in ecosystems and in people that we all depend on, for generations to come.