When ideas run out at my desk, I climb a tree.
Not a metaphor. There's a giant maple tree in the middle of the courtyard at Boereau, the old farm my wife Cynthia and I run as a meeting venue.
I bring my laptop, wedge myself into the branches, and I write.
I have a theory about why it works.
If you go to the trouble of climbing a tree to work, you don't want the trouble to be for nothing.
So you actually think. Whatever thought you climbed up here to have.
It also awakens the child in me. (When I was young, climbing trees was basically all I did.)
Somehow that kid knows how to pluck ideas from a tree, way better than the grown-up I became.

