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Manhood often feels like navigating through uncharted territory, but you don't have to walk alone. Join us as we guide a conversation about how to live intentionally so that we can join God in reclaiming the masculine restorative presence he designed us to live out. Laugh, cry, and wonder with us as we explore the ins and outs of manhood together.
Cody Buriff
Welcome to another episode of the Restorative Man podcast. My name is Cody Buriff and today I'm co-hosting with the none other than Jesse French. Hey, Jesse.
Jesse French
What's up Cody, good to see you.
Cody Buriff
to see you and our guest today we have a special guest is super special to me. This is my wife, Alison Buriff. Welcome to the podcast.
Alison Buriff
Thank you. Good to be here.
Jesse French
Awesome. Thanks for joining the fray. Hopefully this is worth your time. So, well, Cody, we kind of hatched this up recently and excited for, think where this, conversation could go. And I think some of the genesis of it was, I want to say maybe like a year and a half ago, you and I were on a, on a call, like a work meeting and we're just kind of catching up before we dove into the.
the nuts and bolts of stuff. And if I remember right, just kind of unloaded on you and said, man, our raspberry bushes are struggling. proceeded to just kind of bemoan the fact that we had transplanted some raspberry bushes from our old house to our new house. It had felt like for at least a year, they had done nothing but just subsist and produced no delicious, fantastic raspberries.
and just kind of looked like they're on life support. And so I shared this with you because you're a green thumb, you're handy. And I was like, well, let's just have some moral support here. And you responded with this little phrase that I had never knew. And you said, well, have you heard the thing about planting perennial plants? There's kind of this old adage that says sleep, creep leap. And I said, no, I have not heard of
catchy little phrase, tell me more. And I'll butcher this. So I'm glad that you and Alison are here, cause you can actually correct my understanding. But essentially the way I heard it was, yeah, when you plant perennial plants, which are plants that don't have to be replanted, they're not annuals, the first year they kind of sleep and don't do a whole lot or somewhat dormant. The second year is the creep phase where they maybe grow a little bit. And then the third year is the leap phase where...
fruit and blossoms, I guess, like it does really well and thrives. And so that has like been this mind blowing epiphany. And I not to throw you under the bus, but I think like you probably learned that from your wife. I understand that right. The source of this wisdom is Alison. Yeah.
Cody Buriff
Definitely stole that from her. So yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Jesse French
Which made us all just want to, when we were kicking that around, we thought, hey, let's bring Alison in because we want to be able to pick your brain. Some of around Alison, your experience, your expertise, some of your passion as it relates to growing things, to tending for space well. Because as we started thinking about that, we really quickly realized like, wow, man, there are just some fascinating parallels to the plant life.
plant living organisms to, to humans. And so rather than me and Cody reaching and sharing that, like, let's go straight to the source. So that's a long intro to all of that, Allison. Like, maybe you could just start by sharing, how did you get in to the space of growing things, learning about plants, how to tend them well? Like where, were the origins of that, that story and that part of your life? Yeah.
Alison Buriff
Well, really, I grew up on a farm in Illinois. So there was corn, soybeans, hogs, grandpa had beef cattle, you know, so that was just kind of the setting that I grew up in, in the agriculture side, went to college, majored in agribusiness and agronomy.
Cody Buriff
What is agronomy?
Yeah.
Alison Buriff
Agronomy is like the science of crops. But really what I loved was soil science classes and kind of the whole living source organism under the ground, like all that's going on there, understanding that better because that is the foundation for all the life above it that we see. And then I was in ministry for quite a while. And then in 2020,
It was just apparent to me that my season in full-time ministry was finishing and kind of the question on the horizon of, you know, what is ahead for me? And I even knew then based, especially because of our experiences having just restored the gardens of the house we currently live in. knew like, I want to be outside in the garden, like on my worst day, on my best day. Like that's just what I want to be doing.
And what I love to help other people have kind of get over the hurdle to connect into their gardens and to be connected to their property and to see it flourish and tending it because I think there's just like you said so much metaphor and almost poetry and encouragement and lessons. I don't know. There's just something really that gives back to us the more we spend time there, I think. And so I started a business. This is my
fourth season, would say, like really looking to serve others and helping them just create a landscape, a garden setting that just they can come home to and smile and just be happy to spend time in.
Jesse French
Yeah, man, there's so many things I appreciate about that. Even just that last piece of even my comment to Cody a year and a half ago is, you know, kind of based in this fact of like, this feels like a struggle. Like I am losing the battle in this. so even just to to give people some help in that. And like you said, the believing the parallels and kind of the metaphors around some of that are so right.
I want to go back, Allison. So like I studied agriculture in college on the livestock side of things. And so when you talk about soil science and that side of things, give us a very kind of like pre one-on-one understanding to the fundamentals of soil. Like, I'm sure you, like you could go on for on like for a long time, but help us understand like what are the dynamics that are present there when you think about the science of soil.
Alison Buriff
Definitely, yeah. So kind of it's made up of different textural components. So there's sand, silt, and clay. And so different places, different geographies have different proportions of each of those components. So that sets up maybe the growing medium, like what a root can grow into. And then things like pH is the acidity level.
And so that impacts basically the nutrient uptake, the nutrient holding capacity of a soil and then how much nutrients the plant can take in. And so those are some key parts of it. Basically, how does water move? Does it sit on top? Does it percolate through? Does it? Yeah. Like how does that, the soil affects the water and it affects nutrition and kind of the support system to then a plant that's alive within it.
Jesse French
Yeah. Yeah. That makes so much sense. Cody, I'll put you on the spot now. Like even hearing that brief intro and obviously you've had a front row seat to Alison's work and that process, but even just thinking about kind of that layer of like soil and the dynamics of nutrients and what happens there, like what begins to kind of percolate in your head around some of that analogy, right? Like we've said it on this podcast before at RP, we
We're lovers of metaphor. so we're, never tire of trying to like, equate some of the analogy and metaphor. So I'm curious for you as you think about Alison, talk about some of that around soil and those dynamics, like where does your mind go?
Cody Buriff
Yeah. Well, I mean, what I heard you say very early on, was talking about that kind of ecosystem under the surface of the ground. and what's going on there under the surface impacts more than almost anything. Like what shows up outside, you know, beyond the surface for a plant and I would say for a person. And so like,
You know, I'd be interested in you talking about this more, but you know, I'm aware that like a lot of what we do, Jesse, is we're helping men dive down under the surface layer of life and what's going on inside of them, their inner worlds and kind of that ecosystem. You know, what's going on there, what has been historically that has created these.
you know, situations we'll call it, you know, is there a lot of clay or is there a lot of sand or is it, whatever? don't, you know, that's not my, I don't know. I'm not an expert in soil, but that's a lot of what we do. And so it's interesting because I know you will go on like site visits. You'll go visit someone, see their place. And one of the things you do is you, you do a soil like composition or acidity check or yeah, you'll do that. What's I'm going to put you on this by now.
What do you do and what does it look like to do that in a person's life?
Alison Buriff
for sure. There's lot I could say. You know, but man, so we live in a place where there's a lot of new construction homes. And what happens we live in Indiana. And what happens is they'll come into a former cornfield, they'll excavate away the first couple inches of what had been some productive well draining, moderately.
healthy soil depending on what it was cared for and beneath it is clay like 100 % and so then these people are now trying to
Jesse French
Which let me just jump in for a second. Clay, like I hear you say that I'm like not ideal ground for like let's plant my vegetable garden or my flower garden.
Alison Buriff
So clay is a challenge for sure. It's very dense, very heavy. It holds water well, but also when it gets dry, it's very difficult to get it moisturized. It holds a lot of nutrients, but it's not easy for a plant to take them up. It's hard to work with. And so I've learned a lot about plant selection, about what do we need to do to help set up some successful gardens. anyway, but yeah, it does just, I think,
help us see like what's beneath the surface is crucial to the external health. In fact, when we plant new plants or I transplant anything, I use a special fertilizer that feeds the soil microorganisms and all of that to create a healthy place for the plant because then it has a better resistance to the external demands that it faces, whether it's drought or a lot of rain or pests and diseases and all those things.
And so almost thinking for our own selves, like as we take care of our heart, our walk with the Lord, our relationships, our personal, whatever personally like brings us energy, we can learn over time, like what's really draining, what brings us life to help cultivate that kind of internal resource load, you might say, because life has a lot of pressure.
and opposition and a lot of demands and there's going to be a drought season or yeah, just obstacles. And so we can create, learn and create rhythms that then help foster healthy individual life, I guess.
Cody Buriff
Yeah, I feel like one of the things like so you'll go do like a soil test or kind of you'll go observe somebody's like site conditions, you know, how's the sun? How's what's the soil like? What's the water drainage like and those kinds of things and and some of what goes into that or my understanding of it is like a little bit of like history of like how was this taken care of how or not taken care of even with farmland like
you know, speaking much broader agriculture, it's like, you know, has it been stripped of all of its nutrients and therefore needs to be fertilized every year? Or are we spraying and killing all the good bugs that, you know, help things live or what's, there's a lot of like history that we look at a lot of story, you know? And so when, you know, when we buy a house, there's a lot of history to that landscape that has to be understood in order to plant the right things there or remove the wrong things.
And Jesse, when I, when I think about that of like, when we observe our own lives, our own stories and can, we have to go back and look even generationally. Yep. What, what's been handed to us? What are we, you know, inheriting as we're taking on this life and this body?
Jesse French
For sure, which I think that notion I would imagine as people listen to that, there's maybe some folks that are like tracking and really follow that. And I'd imagine there's probably some people that are like, what do mean? Like what the two, three, four generations did before me, like that's way in the past. I'm the like captain of my own destiny. And I say that because like I would imagine most people probably start that way of just like this very sort of
Cody Buriff
Totally.
Jesse French
independent, more short-term focus of like the fruit of my life, the results of my life are dependent upon me and what you're saying. And kind of what we're inviting is like, no, actually generations previously they matter, right? Like Pete Scazzaro talks about that a bunch in some of his work, right? Of like, we have to, even that language that sometimes gets used in, I've heard you use it before Cody, like in story work, this language of excavation, right? It's like peeling back.
generations deep of what was the environment that I was born into. We, ⁓ one of the RP father son trips this summer. And one of the guys that I was guiding with a good friend of ours named Nick, the way that he phrased it, I think was really, really good. He just said, look, like we have to under begin to understand some of that context and some of that layers. Cause if we don't have that, it's like picking up a trilogy in the second or third movie, right? Like we miss all of that, all that context, totally. Right. And again,
That piece of excavation, I think is, it is so needed. And yet also feels like, and how do you even go like, cause really for lots of people, their family, you know, for sure, three generations, four generations back, folks are not around and not likelihood, right? And so that creates some challenge of how do we begin to engage some of that?
Alison Buriff
That's true. One thought I have along that, and I love what you guys do, is you offer vocabulary for entering into that and being able to communicate. And that just, I learned so much, and I know you've taken classes too, where you learn to identify trees. So now that when you're out on a walk, you don't just see a tree in a forest, but now you see what types of trees. And you were once blind, maybe, but now you can understand better.
what is there and has always been there, but now you have a name for it. And I love, you we have apps that identify plants and we love just pulling it out on a forest walk and just be like, my gosh, like.
Cody Buriff
Guys that have been on a backcountry trip with me have seen me pull out the app. They're like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm in this competition with my wife to see who can get the most new species in the world.
Jesse French
Do we have like a live scoreboard on that?
Cody Buriff
She's always winning.
Alison Buriff
It's so it becomes fun. And you see more of just what's in front of you. yeah, what is that parallel to
Jesse French
Yeah. Yeah, man. That's, that is, that's such a great point. What do you think naming and under like actually knowing, Hey, this is this species of a plant. This is this species of a tree. What does that foster? Yeah. How does it change it from just saying, that's some random, you know, shrub, but to actually know, no, this is, this is rubber, rubber brush or whatever it's called.
Alison Buriff
Well, as a horticulturalist, it tells me a lot of information about that situation and what like different plants, like different aspects of water, some like stream bank, know, like a willow is going to love being near water where others are going to hate it. You know, and so I can learn a lot by just seeing what naturally exists in a certain place to then know what to also bring to foster something or
Now I know which to get rid of as fast as I can. You know, what are threats to a healthy environment? Like what types of trees are going to break apart in a windstorm in a couple years and damage a home? Things like that. And so it just expands both the past understanding and appreciation, but it gives wisdom then to look toward the future.
Cody Buriff
Yeah, I was going to say too, like that appreciation, I think is the component for me of like being able to see something out there and name it and know like its qualities, the goodness in it. It adds a lot more color to my life, my day. And I think, you know, jumping back over to like life, you know, being able to name things, being able to see what's actually true and give it a name and give it some language is
It makes it real. makes it something that you can actually do something with or about, whether that is grieving it or celebrating it, uprooting it, you know, giving it some nutrients like in your life, like the awareness makes a huge difference in who you becoming.
Jesse French
Yeah.
Alison Buriff
just allows you to position yourself around it, you know, differently and keep learning along the way of like, what does this mean? Almost reflecting back to you something that you get to now make a choice around.
Jesse French
Yeah. Dan Allender has that great quote. You are only able to reclaim that which you name. Right. And so I think you guys say that really well of the naming, allowing there to be an appreciation of what was for good or for hard. Right. And then Alison, what you said to also be able to, out of that naming and that knowledge, be able to plot a course forward of what, and now how would we like to move on?
Alison Buriff
Yeah, because it doesn't necessarily mean you're stuck dealing with it always. But there might be a lot of work ahead to make it something different.
Cody Buriff
Yeah.
All right, I'm going to tell you, you mentioned this at point, and the words a lot of work is what triggered this in my head, but there is a plant in our yard that you have done a lot of work to try to mitigate.
Alison Buriff
Yeah, well, there's a lot of them.
Cody Buriff
the Winter Creeper. Yeah. For people who have no idea and maybe don't even care. But like what is Winter Creeper and why are you trying to get rid of it and what has that process been like?
Alison Buriff
Yeah, so here's a situation of an introduction of something that was from a far away place that got planted and it had some desirable qualities. But what's happened, it's a ground cover and it's also known as euonymus, but it's evergreen and it will fill up a shady area. It doesn't need much water, things like that. So that's why it was planted. But now it is out competing.
almost everything it's near, will smother plants, will climb up trees, and then it'll bury insect fruit that then creates more of that plant or wildlife will eat it scattered about. It's like invading natural areas. It's not staying contained to the places it was meant to be in. So a couple years ago, I like, I don't know how much time it took. I pulled it out of some garden beds manually, because you can't really to get rid of it.
There's just no good option. So I hurt my back a lot, like trying to pull this stuff out. And it's been pretty successful, but without a doubt, I see it popping up. What I think even by seed, somewhat by if there's a little bit of root left behind, it's going to generate new stems and still grow. You know, and so I think that's what you're kind of referring to is just the work to remove something isn't one and done.
Cody Buriff
Yeah, it keeps popping up. And I think that's like true. Jesse, when we like, once we're able to identify some of the parts of our lives that need some of that type of attention where things actually need to be uprooted, like the roots are there and you can't like fully remove it. mean, miracles happen, right? And like reality is, you know, it takes a lot of work and you know, whether it is, you know,
addictive behavior or just patterns of thought or whatever. It comes from someplace and it's been deeply hardwired in over the course of our lives, via our second story, via the attack of evil on us and the glory of God in us. And so the rewriting of that and the removing of some of those lies, they're still going to pop up all the time.
And so it's, yeah, like you said, it's not one that you don't go to a retreat and suddenly like you're all better.
Jesse French
Yeah
Alison Buriff
I'm thinking like, we have that growing next to this big old pine tree. So no matter how much I pull, these roots are interwoven with this pine tree roots. Like I can't eradicate at all. And so just even thinking of like how interwoven it might be to good parts of our story and good parts of who we are. And that can be just so frustrating.
Cody Buriff
Well,
Jesse French
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and even how you describe that, the role of Winter Creeper, like you describe its qualities of like, hey, this doesn't require a lot of water. It's able to, you know, be evergreen. It's resilient. Like those are positive qualities, right? There's a reason why people introduced it is it does good things. It does some necessary things. It wasn't like, we're going to introduce Canadian thistle, right? And this like, and that probably has
that I don't know about, but there was a reason why that was necessary or why that was brought in, right? And to your point, Cody, and the same is true in our own lives, right? There is a reason that the way that we have learned to navigate life and to, maybe use the word, survive, there are reasons for that. Which lend it to the point that you guys are making of the intertwining of the reality of how deep and prominent its structures are.
Cody Buriff
Yeah.
Jesse French
And so it is so much more complex, right, Cody, than just like, he just, like you said, you just pull the weed out one time and it's done, right? It is, the process is much longer.
Cody Buriff
Yeah, totally. Well, and it brings me back to even what we started with was the sleep creep leap thing that you kindly gave me. It's like, you know, when we jump in, it's not just the like uprooting of things and the excavation of things and the pulling of bad weeds or whatever. Like it's, you know, all of it takes time. You know, like Jesse, I've been with Restoration Project now almost five years.
and like engaging in story type work for quite a while, probably seven or eight years and more beyond that, but really more intentionally in the last seven or eight years. And when you really start getting into that, that space, like diving into your inner world and understanding your story and what's going on and what's actually true, it may not show a ton of results right away. It's a lot of work. It's a whole lot of work. And sometimes the results you see are very disappointing.
just like when you plant, know, transplant a raspberry bush or, or some other perennial plant, you know, it's going to look kind of like lame, you know, or disappointing for, you know, a year or more. And then even the next year it's like, maybe it's a little bit better, but it's putting down roots. And as we're doing that work, like we're putting down the roots.
Cody Buriff
And even still, like, you know, you might know that I'm doing, I'm looking at my wife right now for anybody who's listening. It's like, you might know that I'm doing work, but you might not actually see a whole lot of like, uh, results of that work necessarily for a while. Cause those things have to take root. have to become more and more true. And it's at that point, you know, finally, once the nutrients are there, once the roots are taking hold more and more in the Lord and the, you know, the Holy spirit is energizing.
his goodness in us and we're believing it more, that's when we start to see a lot more of you know, the fruit.
Jesse French
Totally.
Alison Buriff
I think it goes to show the value then of community around you as you're doing that work. Because day to day we may not notice and it can just feel so futile, right? And maybe others don't notice, but when they're either doing the work also or have done it enough to help us remember the why, we can keep going. And I know like some of my closest friends have become people who are also gardeners and just
There's just something that connects us or if I walk into a client's home and I might have an idea of let's move this one shrub from this place to this place so that you can sit near it and enjoy it. And they're like, my gosh, I never thought of that. But it's like having someone else's eyes into the same situation, maybe just cheering us on, being in it with us, thinking the same way is what helps us keep showing up to it.
Cody Buriff
Okay
Jesse French
Alison, I want to ask you about your experience of growing up on a farm and you talked about your family raising, you know, corn and soybeans, some other livestock, but describe like how your family, specifically the raising of crops. I don't want to lead the witness too much. There's a lot that I'm curious about, but I would imagine your family is incredibly hardworking. Like there is a work ethic present to them that is like,
bedrock, they could probably outwork most people. And yeah, how do you think they held like the yield of the crop on a given year? Like how did they metaphorically like how did they view what the yield might be on a given year?
Alison Buriff
Yeah, I think there just was that understanding of like, there's so much we can't control. And we can invest and make choices out of our the best information we have to go on the best intentions. And yet, like I remember the year of the Mississippi River flooding. I don't know how old I was, but it's just this massive flood through the whole Midwest, like devastating, you know, or years of just terrible drought, like
So you're just things that there are, there's no control over. And so I just feel like the almost a posture of being present to it, but just knowing you can't control things and just having a bit of a future that goes beyond it. You know, there will be a next season. There will be more to come, you know? And so I don't know that you can hang, you know, you can stay in the test of time and that kind of work without that bigger picture.
Jesse French
Yeah. Yeah. Which is this crazy, feels like almost contradictory posture that's needed, right? Of like, man, you have to work so, so hard in this space. And yet you're in a space where there are all these crazy realities that are not in your control, like you're saying, right? And so it is the strange dynamic of all of our work is needed and like,
All of our trust, all of our acknowledgement that this is bigger than us is also needed. Because, right, if you don't have either one of those, like you said, like there's no way people sign up for agriculture. Like, no thanks. Let's fix something else. Which I think is this fascinating, like it is instructional for how we can live, right? That there is this posture of participation. There is this posture of my work and my engagement and my sweat and my reflection.
And it is also true that we are not the generators of the results of this, right? And so the fact that there is this much larger story that the results are not dependent upon how well we execute the plan. I think that is some of the absolute wisdom that farmers and gardeners and people in the agricultural world know, right? That it is this unique participatory posture of living that is required.
Alison Buriff
For sure. Yeah, I think, well, taking it a step further in a faith journey component, like I think as a young Christian, I had so much expectation and much more like, if I do this, then this is what will happen or this is how God will show up. I feel like the walk of faith for me has been this just dismantling of my expectations of God and coming to this sense of like, no matter what, like I will be okay.
And it can rock me to the core sometimes because it is just a stripping away of like a sense of control or of like a system or making things work. But when that can be held in tandem of like me showing up and when it all breaks down, like there is something still holding me and there is, there's a person still there, still holding me and that personhood of God.
that I can be okay in whatever is just priceless. But man, it can be unpleasant to learn and that.
Jesse French
Mm-hmm.
It's true. I've got one more question. You talked about in your guys's neck of the woods where there is like housing developments going in and you know, when they come in and begin excavating the soil, you talked about them in that process, the scraping of topsoil that is there. We're talking like inches of topsoil. Is that right?
How many thousands of years has it taken like for that topsoil to be created?
Alison Buriff
Right? I mean, when I look at, well, the soil and science geek of me, you know, there's like 16 types of soil in Indiana, which is a lot, but it's all glacial till, right? And so, and even Indiana was much more a wetland, a forest area. And so just even more shows like the dismantling of what was and the years and the ecology and all that, that is now, it just ruins. Like it's, there's not coming back like.
Jesse French
Yeah. Yeah. Like that's thousands of years in three or four inches that is taken that. And so like, think to some of your point, Cody of the patients to this, like this is, this is a long game, right? Longer than our lives. Like this is the like generational piece of hopefully how we're engaging and joining God and what he is doing is like building the soil so small that it is like,
compounding hopefully of what generation after generation that happens but it is whole man it's a long game.
Cody Buriff
Yeah, I mean that's on a much less long game than thousands of years. But when, when I look at our property or even other places, it's like, you know, I like to plant trees. I'm a tree guy. And so like, we'll have little seedlings pop up in the yard. I'm like, let's save it and plant it somewhere. And, but in my head, I'm fully aware that like this tree, you know, this oak tree, this little seedling, you know,
10 years from now is going to be, you know, 15 or 20 feet high. And it's going to be another a hundred years before it's this wonderful, beautiful, massive tree. And I'm not going to be alive. Yeah. And so I'm not like, I can envision what that will be someday. I don't even know if the house will be there, right? The tree will be, you know, and so it's the whole phrase, like the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. And the second best time is today or whatever, you know, it's.
The wise people are planting trees not for themselves, but for the next generations. And the same is true in us, you know, but the work that we're doing is, you know, yeah, we hopefully get to like experience some of the goodness of it. like, Jesse, like we're all about like the next generations and generational like transformation, changing the family tree is a phrase we use sometimes.
Jesse French
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You have this sweet shirt, Cody, that I think has a picture like of the Sequoia. you. Yeah. And it just says great things take time on it. Alison, thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and not only your expertise, but also just your perspective and your wonder around this. is, yeah, it's fun to be able to have you here and have this conversation.
Alison Buriff
Yes. Thanks for inviting.
Cody Buriff
Thanks for nerding out a little.
Jesse French
Always welcome and wanted. Thanks, Jesse.
Cody Buriff
Yeah, talk to you later and see you later.