What does the word stewardship mean to you?

We think of stewardship in relation to land, money, and the possessions entrusted to our care. But what might it mean to become stewards of each other?

The idea first came by way of a recent conversation with a friend about character. What is it that we owe one another? The question feels nearly impossible to answer, though I imagine many, when asked, might instinctively answer, "Nothing."

And yet, the question refuses to leave me.

I suspect it feels hard because so many of us are already carrying more than we know how to hold. We are living through a season of profound exhaustion. The reasons differ from one person to the next, but the weight is unmistakable.

Many of us are simply trying to keep our footing while caring for ourselves, children, aging parents, fragile relationships, uncertain finances, challenging jobs, and a constant stream of demands on our attention. Ours is a generation living with fears our parents never imagined and burdens our grandparents might recognize all too well. It is no small thing to remain kind.

Which leads me to wonder: what responsibilities are non-negotiable when giving has become genuinely difficult?

Living here in New Mexico has only deepened that question.

When I made my home here fifteen years ago, I thought I was simply moving to a place. Over the years, I have begun to understand that I was entering a history.

History here is not an abstraction. It is carried in language and place names, in family stories, in grief and celebration, and in the fierce desire of many people to reclaim what was nearly lost. It’s spoken in English and Spanish, in Tiwa, Tewa, Diné, and other languages I am only beginning to learn.

The longer I’ve lived here, the more aware I’ve become of how little I understand. A friend recently expressed disappointment that, after so many years in New Mexico, I hadn’t made more of an effort to learn Spanish. It was difficult to receive. His words touched something true, even if they could not account for all those years had held: the intensity of early motherhood, living with partial deafness, and simply trying to keep pace with the life before me.

Still, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing Spanish in grocery store lines, classrooms, waiting rooms, and public spaces without considering deeply enough what living among those languages might ask of me. I’ve allowed the language to become part of the scenery rather than integrating it as part of the living history of the place I chose to call home.

There have been other moments of recognition. Standing atop a ridgeline in the Sandias, overwhelmed by their beauty, I know I am far from the first person to behold these mountains in awe. People have crossed them, inhabited them, named them, and remembered them for generations beyond my comprehension.

More recently, a neighbor shared a story about the man who built the house where I live. He raised his family here. He worked this land and knew it intimately. He died suddenly in an accident on the property, a loss that continues to shape the family he left behind. I sleep in the room where he once slept. I walk beneath trees he knew. I mend fences along boundaries he once tended. The home I think of as mine is also part of a life that preceded me.

We inherit so much we never chose: land, language, beauty, trauma, faith, and silence. We inherit the stories told around kitchen tables and the stories that were never allowed to be told. We enter places shaped by lives we will never fully know, and yet we are asked to decide what we will preserve, what we will repair, and what we will pass forward.

I have watched folks reclaim traditions that deserve remembering. I’ve also watched how easily the language of belonging can become the language of exclusion. I do not know exactly where that line is.

Maybe humility begins with admitting how much of another person's history we cannot see.

But I’ve become increasingly interested in this:

What is the relationship between identity and obligation?

Heritage tells us where we’ve come from. Identity helps us understand who we are. Both matter. But neither, on their own, can answer the deeper question of how we ought to meet another human being.

Perhaps that’s where character begins.

Character is not only about what we profess, but who feels safer, stronger, or more hopeful because we stood beside them.

I feel this most deeply in the ordinary work of my own life. And as an art teacher and a mother, I think about it almost every day.

For nearly two decades, I've had the privilege of watching young people become themselves. I've guided them as they learned to sketch an idea, solder silver, center clay on a wheel, and build a vessel that wouldn't collapse or crack in the kiln—to imagine something that did not yet exist and patiently bring it into being. Yet I have long suspected that, important as those lessons were, the most enduring lessons were never about the materials at all.

Young people are exquisitely sensitive to character.

They notice who keeps their word, who apologizes, who is patient when no one else is watching, and who treats the child with a disability with the same dignity they extend to the most gregarious student in class.

Children are constantly studying us. As they apprentice themselves to adulthood, they are learning not only from what we teach, but from the kind of people we become in front of them.

We spend much of our lives believing we influence others most through our opinions, our accomplishments, or the certainty of our convictions. But something subtle accounts for far more than we realize.

We lend one another ways of being: patience, indifference, bitterness, generosity, contempt, hope. After our words have faded, people remember what it felt like to be near us.

That realization has unsettled me. I see stewardship as less about changing the world than about becoming the kind of person another human being can safely grow beside.

Motherhood has both complicated and deepened this question, changing how I think about art in the process.

The art world often celebrates uninterrupted making: the uninterrupted career, the residency, the exhibition, the illusion of an uninterrupted self.

For a long time, I accepted the unspoken assumption that motherhood interrupted an artist's life.

But what if the opposite is true?

What if motherhood is its own artistic apprenticeship?

What if spending years attending to another human being changes not only how we love, but how we see?

Artists spend their lives learning to notice light, gesture, texture, rhythm, beauty…

Mothers spend years learning to notice the almost imperceptible shift in a child's face before tears, the silence that communicates shame instead of peace, the excitement that disappears if it isn't witnessed quickly enough. They learn the texture, rhythm, and beauty of a soul.

These no longer feel like separate practices to me.

Every act of genuine attention is already an act of stewardship. And attention does not end with perception. It becomes presence.

Stewardship is accepting responsibility for what passes through your hands, even when it doesn't belong to you.

Our influence is inevitable: a student, a child, a neighbor, a colleague, a stranger…

We often think about the legacy we hope to leave behind. But long before we are remembered, someone else is already living with what they have received from us.

The truest inheritance is not material, but what is quietly formed in another life through the way we have lived.

The question is what another life will carry because it encountered ours.

-Katie