Wendell Berry once wrote, “The growth of the years must return—or be returned—to the ground to rot and build soil.”

That sentence has haunted me—in the best possible way—for years.

Because what Berry’s really talking about isn’t just agriculture; it’s a law of reality. Everything that lives, creates, or expands must eventually return to the soil—literally or symbolically—to renew its fertility. Culture, memory, wisdom, even identity all follow the same pattern. If we forget to return the growth of our years to the ground, if we stop composting experience into wisdom, the soil beneath our lives begins to die.

And when the soil dies, everything else follows.

I think about that a lot when I look around at the state of our towns, our economy, our relationships, our attention spans, and our inner lives. We’ve built a civilization that’s spectacular on the surface and increasingly hollow underneath. Our buildings are new, but our foundations are crumbling. Our technologies are dazzling, but our capacity for discernment and stillness is eroding.

Berry’s warning about culture and soil runs parallel to Charles Marohn Jr.’s warning in Strong Towns: we’ve been mistaking growth for prosperity. We’ve been confusing movement with meaning. We’ve built an entire financial and cultural system on the assumption that expansion equals health. But the truth, as any gardener knows, is that endless growth is the logic of cancer. Real life depends on cycles of growth and decay, on the willingness to return what we’ve taken and to nurture what already exists.

The Law of Soil

Healthy soil isn’t made through force—it’s made through patience, time, and decay. It’s a long conversation between death and life. The same holds true for the human psyche, for families, for economies, and for towns. If we never pause to integrate what we’ve learned, if we never compost our mistakes, we start extracting from the same exhausted ground.

The symbolic soil of our lives—the base layer that holds our memories, skills, and cultural patterns—has been over-tilled by distraction and under-nourished by reflection. We’ve become too linear, too industrial in the way we think and build. In trying to optimize everything, we’ve lost our humus.

What Berry calls a “collection of memories, ways, and skills” is exactly what Strong Towns calls local wisdom. It’s the feedback loops that form when people actually pay attention to the ground beneath their feet. It’s not abstract data; it’s experiential intelligence—earned through care, failure, and relationship.

Every strong town, like every strong soul, is built on that kind of intelligence. It’s humble, iterative, and grounded. It’s not sexy. But it lasts.

Solvency of the Soul

Marohn talks about financial solvency—how cities expand infrastructure faster than they can maintain it, borrowing from the future to make the present look prosperous. I think the same is true spiritually and psychologically. Most of us live beyond our energetic means. We borrow dopamine from tomorrow to survive today. We trade reflection for reaction, silence for stimulation, connection for convenience.

And just like cities that can’t afford their roads, we eventually can’t afford our own maintenance. Anxiety, disconnection, burnout—these are the potholes of the soul.

A solvent life, like a solvent city, is one that lives within its means. It doesn’t mean small—it means sustainable. It means knowing your energetic budget, knowing what you can carry without collapsing the infrastructure. It means doing the maintenance work that no one applauds: the inner sweeping, the emotional accounting, the regular repair.

We don’t need more expansion. We need more caretakers.

Incrementalism and Emergence

The most liberating idea in Strong Towns is that strength grows incrementally, not through grand plans. We don’t need another utopia; we need a thousand small, intelligent steps that respond to real feedback.

That’s true of civic design, and it’s true of self-design. Transformation doesn’t come from the ten-year plan; it comes from daily attention. From noticing where life wants to grow and making space for it. From planting a seed, not paving a highway.

Complex adaptive systems—like forests, towns, or human beings—don’t evolve through control. They evolve through relationship. Every small experiment, every honest adjustment, builds the feedback loops that make emergence possible.

When you live this way, you start to see your own life as a kind of ecosystem. Some projects are trees that take years to bear fruit. Some are weeds that need to be pulled. But nothing is wasted; everything decomposes into new fertility. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s regeneration.

Beauty as Sustainability

We talk a lot about sustainability, but beauty is the most sustainable force there is. The Pantheon still stands because it’s beautiful enough for people to love it. Generations have repaired it, not because they had to, but because they wanted to.

That’s the forgotten law of longevity: people preserve what they love. Beauty inspires stewardship.

So what if we designed our homes, our businesses, our digital spaces, and even our civic systems with beauty in mind—not as luxury, but as function? What if beauty were the metric of sustainability?

When something is made with harmony, proportion, and intention, it naturally invites care. The opposite of beauty isn’t ugliness—it’s neglect. And neglect is the mother of decay.

A strong soul, like a strong town, becomes beautiful through maintenance. Through repetition. Through daily alignment with what is true, not what is trending.

Decentralized Genius

Healthy ecosystems are decentralized. The intelligence of a forest is distributed through mycorrhizal networks. No single root system runs the show. Each part participates in the whole by knowing its own role.

That’s what I believe about human beings too. Each of us carries a unique genius—a frequency of perception and creativity that can’t be outsourced. When society forces people into cookie-cutter roles, it wastes its most renewable resource: individual essence.

Our job isn’t to industrialize people; it’s to liberate their inner ecosystems. To help them become strong souls, capable of self-governance and contribution.

Just as Strong Towns advocates for local decision-making and small-scale experiments, we can apply the same logic to human design: listen to your own feedback loops. Honor your lived experience. Adapt locally within yourself.

Your perspective is your genius. It’s the pattern that only you can see. When you live from that place, you naturally become anti-fragile—because you’re rooted in authenticity, not imitation.

Symbolic Soil and Ancestral Memory

I believe Berry’s “local soil” also refers to something subtler: ancestral memory. The deep strata of wisdom we inherit through culture, story, and archetype. Carl Jung called this the collective unconscious. Others call it the Akashic field, the morphic resonance, or simply intuition.

Whatever the language, the point is the same: we are not disconnected nodes floating in a vacuum. We are participants in a field of memory and meaning that predates us and outlives us. And that field, like soil, must be cultivated.

When we forget our lineage—when we lose contact with myth, ritual, and the sacred arts—we become spiritually rootless. We start repeating mistakes that wiser generations already solved. We till the same barren ground expecting new harvests.

Re-connecting to this symbolic soil doesn’t mean retreating into nostalgia. It means composting the past into nourishment for the future. It means reading old books with new eyes, listening for the perennial wisdom underneath the language. It means recognizing that progress and preservation aren’t enemies—they’re part of the same cycle.

Technology and the New Erosion

If the industrial age eroded our physical soil, the digital age is eroding our symbolic soil. Our attention—the topsoil of consciousness—is being strip-mined for clicks. The humus of reflection, silence, and boredom has been paved over by endless feeds.

We’ve built a global city of light, and forgotten that plants still need darkness to grow.

I’m not anti-technology. I believe tools can be sacred if used consciously. But right now, the infrastructure of our attention is insolvent. We’re spending energy faster than we replenish it. The only solution is to re-localize the mind—to bring our attention back to the tangible, the sensory, the human.

Analog acts—writing by hand, cooking, gardening, making music—rebuild the symbolic soil. They slow the tempo of consciousness back to a human scale. They remind us that creation is reciprocal, not extractive.

If we want a civilization that lasts, we must rebuild our capacity for presence. Presence is the new infrastructure.

The Economy of Meaning

Economists tell us that war stimulates GDP, that debt fuels innovation, that consumption drives growth. But that’s an accounting trick. It’s the same illusion that cities use when they build new subdivisions to hide the insolvency of the old ones.

Real productivity is regenerative, not extractive. Real wealth is the ability to sustain life, not the ability to simulate prosperity.

When a society starts treating destruction as growth, it has lost its relationship with soil.

So what if we redefined productivity in human terms? Not as output, but as fertility. Not as endless expansion, but as the capacity to create meaning faster than we destroy it.

A meaningful life, like a strong town, is one that generates surplus vitality—energy that spills outward, nourishing others. That’s the kind of wealth that compounds across generations.

The Strong Soul’s Infrastructure

If we were to diagram a strong soul the way an engineer diagrams a city, it might look like this:

• Foundation: values, integrity, and worldview—the bedrock.

• Framework: habits, rituals, and systems—the scaffolding.

• Circulation: energy and attention—the streets and rivers.

• Facade: expression and beauty—the architecture of the visible self.

• Maintenance: rest, reflection, and repair—the ongoing stewardship.

Strength isn’t about size; it’s about balance. A massive structure built on weak soil will crumble. But a modest home, tended daily, can last centuries.

The same is true internally. We build inner infrastructure not by consuming more inspiration, but by practicing what we already know. Maintenance is the real miracle.

From Strong Souls to Strong Towns

The pattern scales infinitely. Healthy individuals build healthy families. Healthy families form healthy neighborhoods. Healthy neighborhoods sustain strong towns. And strong towns, in turn, nurture strong individuals.

It’s fractal. It’s ancient. It’s the same intelligence that guides ecosystems, galaxies, and cultures that last.

Berry said that a human community must “exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place.” I think the same is true for the self. The centripetal force of a strong soul is attention—the gravity of consciousness that keeps everything coherent.

When we each tend our own soil, when we live within our energetic and ethical means, when we build beauty that deserves to be cared for, we become microcosms of the world we want to inhabit. We become the infrastructure of renewal.

The Work Ahead

We live in a time of unprecedented access to wisdom. Thousands of years of philosophy, art, and craft are available at our fingertips. There’s really no excuse for spiritual or cultural amnesia anymore. The question isn’t access—it’s attention.

Can we slow down enough to integrate what we already know? Can we compost the excess information into real understanding?

We can rebuild our towns. We can rebuild our families. We can rebuild ourselves. But not through expansion—through return. Through humility. Through stewardship of the soil, literal and symbolic.

The path forward isn’t a revolution of force—it’s a revolution of maintenance. Of care. Of beauty.

That’s what I mean by a Strong Soul: a human being whose inner infrastructure is solvent, whose attention is rooted, whose creativity is regenerative. Someone who builds, not consumes; who tends, not dominates.

If enough of us become strong souls, the strong towns will follow.

And maybe, just maybe, civilization will remember how to build soil again.