You Are Always the Trunk

To all who are building a legacy (spoiler alert—that’s you!) …

Jako Farm, Kansas. I had never heard of them. I still, to this day, have never been there. I’ve never spoken to a single person who works there and only just now, have I visited their website. Then what does a random Kansas farm have to do with my article about legacy? Because sometimes you inherit things from people and places that you’ve never met or been to.

Consider a tree. It has hundreds, or even thousands of roots below the surface. They gather at its trunk. Then, its branches are spread dozens of ways and have hundreds, or even thousands of ends. The roots pull nutrition, the foundation for the tree, up to the trunk. The trunk then carries that growth to the branches out toward its future in the sky.

You are always the trunk.

We leave many kinds of legacies. Most people think of their familial or religious legacies, but we leave legacies in friendships, buildings, etc. This is a story about my work legacy.

Many years ago, Jako Farm answered a vital need for a friend of mine by offering her access to clean food that she needed for health and healing in her body. Through them, she learned principles about customer/small farmer relations and sustainable systems that allowed small farmers to thrive.

She then passed those principles on to me as we built our Farm Hub store. I, in turn, have used these same principles to teach and mentor others who have stores like mine, as well as some of our producers. That’s at least four “generations” deep in the inheritance of knowledge—that I know of.

Of course, many things like “principles” can be thousands of years old, but some are new concepts. Alternatively, not everything needs to, or should be, passed on. Hopefully, we can “prune” ourselves leaving only the best parts to be “inherited.” I know, easier said than done, but we are the ones who decide what’s worthy of the next generation. The question is: What legacy are you passing on, intentionally or not?

We pass on more than knowledge, DNA and our houses. We pass on attitudes, fears and dreams, good and bad habits, generosity and grudges, compassion and bitterness, courage and curiosity, respect and love. Part of the work of the trunk is recognizing that some things deserve to grow and some things deserve to end with us.

Jako Farm may never know the gift they’ve given to us, and most assuredly so many others. In the same way, we’ll likely never know the width of the canopy of our tree either. What I do know is how proud I feel when I sit beneath the shade of those strong branches and realize that I am both the product of everything that came before me and the beginning of something that will come after me. That is special, friends.

Leaving a legacy of food for thought,

Liz Threlkeld