Stillness in the Soup
On roots, metamorphosis, and what actually carries us through.
A consulting practice built around a tree metaphor is great until you read about bug soup.
Let me back up.
Last week I launched Cambium + Root. Our name is inspired by the idea of grounding and growing—the cambium being the layer of a tree responsible for new growth, the roots being what keeps everything steady. So even when the ground is shifting, even when the wind takes the leaves and the cold strips the branches, the roots hold. Just like an organization with lived values and a clear purpose can weather storms and always have a solid place to build from.
Beautiful, right? Then I read Jennifer Brown's "The Ground Is Shifting," and Googled, "How bad is it for a business to rebrand after one week?"
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Jennifer puts language to the moment we're in better than anything I've read lately. She references futurist Jamais Cascio's BANI framework (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible) and it clicked immediately. This is a structurally different kind of moment than what we were trained to navigate.
Then she introduces bug soup.
For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, its immune system attacks its body and everything dissolves. Biologists call this histolysis. Informally, they call it bug soup.
Uh oh, if everything dissolves during a metamorphosis, doesn’t that include the roots?
Here's where the piece gave me relief. Jennifer writes that although the form is lost, the ingredients are still there. The wisdom we've built—through tough lessons, meaningful relationships, big and small wins—that doesn't dissolve. That's what reconstitutes on the other side of change.
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Reading that, I was reminded of a lesson from my own experience that’s stuck with me.
When I was doing anti-trafficking work, the biggest challenge facing our clients was housing—a matter of both safety and dignity, which made it urgent for us to solve. A private foundation posted an innovation award for exactly that issue, so my partners and I immediately started strategizing. What would resonate with this funder? What were others likely proposing? What would be a cool and totally original idea?
At a certain point, someone said (sarcastically, I believe), "Wouldn't the most innovative thing be to just... pay for the housing?"
It was the wakeup call we needed to start asking ourselves the right questions. Who are we? What do we know? After that, we stopped guessing and started operating from a place of knowing.
An app won in the end, if you can believe it. But we made it to the final round with a proposal grounded in our human rights values (who we are) and an evidence-based housing framework (what we know). We also made a lot of new allies along the way, which helped us ultimately launch the first-ever public housing pilot for survivors of trafficking in the country.
We stayed grounded in who we were. And from that place, we built something we hadn't been able to imagine at the start.
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Everything feels urgent right now, and nothing feels certain. That's a scary time to live in, let alone lead through.
But these are exactly the moments when slowing down is the most important thing we can do. Jennifer captures it in a line that I’m going to keep going back to when I need the reminder:
"Stillness doesn't make us passive. It makes us permeable."
It's in the stillness where we can hear what we already know. Our judgment. Our values. Our strengths. That doesn't dissolve in the soup. Those are the ingredients that reconstitute on the other side.
Stay grounded. Keep growing.
Turns out I won't need that rebrand after all.