Welcome to 2025 Letter

The design for a new mentoring program that I’d been asked to create at Juilliard wasn’t coming clear to me. I couldn’t quite find the heart of it—a familiar stage in every creative process. So I went for a walk in the woods behind my house. I live on the border of a large nature preserve with miles of paths. I headed toward a familiar one that traversed both woods and open meadows, a good path for fresh thinking.  

On that path, as luck would have it, I bumped into a man who was an expert on trees. We chatted a bit. He compared the fortunes of a young tree in the middle of an open meadow with that of an identical sapling in a clearing in the woods where an older tree had fallen. He said that the sapling in the woods would grow faster and stronger, even though it got fewer hours of sunlight. This surprised me; wouldn’t the open space without arboreal competition nurture a healthier tree? You’d think so, he said. But a young tree in a forest clearing has one advantage that makes all the difference. The tender roots of that young tree “find” the old roots of trees now gone and grow along those to quickly reach deeper, richer soil. The old root systems help them find their way to the fungal networks that trees use for food and drink, and for connecting with other trees. 

There it was, right when I needed it—the metaphor for mentorship. We mentors let our roots serve the young. We grew those roots into nurturing soil and connective understandings over time, through experience, often the hard kind of experience. We survived seasons and cycles long enough to make strong roots to offer those on their way to becoming tall enough and strong. We mentor by the way we live, even after we’re gone.

Love all year,
Eric