You’ve identified the plot, prepared the soil, and planted the seeds. The launch of your business is the first harvest. It’s the first time you’re sharing your dream, vision, and gift with the world. It’s a time filled with palpable excitement, where you get to watch the seeds you’ve planted come to life and share its fruit with those around you. Often a launch is successful because of the energy of hope, excitement, and a dream that’s bigger than you being shared with people you know and love. It’s a feeling of being alive, of being seen, of being known, and being valued. As humans, we love that feeling. We live and die for that feeling.

The hard truths about business come after the launch. A business at first harvest is never the fully formed or final version of that business—it’s just the first harvest, and rarely an indicator of longevity or success. We all have the ability to take an idea and turn it into reality, but most never do—entrepreneurs do. And the successful ones do it over and over and over again. That’s the thing: entrepreneurship isn’t something you do once. It’s not a launch into business; it’s a launch into an experiment. The day your website goes live or your doors open is the first test. What worked, what didn’t work? What turned sour and what remained juicy far after it was pulled from the soil? It’s what you do with that information that will determine how many more harvests you have left.

Business, like nature, operates within seasons and changes from year to year. The mistakes you make in the winter will often be revealed in the summer. The plots you ignore in the spring will remain empty in the fall. This is why entrepreneurship feels like guessing, but when you shift your focus from what is right in front of you to the season before and the season to come, you begin to see the entire ecosystem and start to think like a regenerative farmer—someone who knows their land intimately, who can spot the slightest change in weather and investigate it with care, patience, and an understanding that in time and attention, answers will be revealed.

There are seasons in business that are abundant. It’s in those seasons that you feel validated to have made the leap and go after your dream. The entrepreneur’s high is unlike any drug. The numbers in your bank account begin collecting commas and zeros and you’re finally able to make those Pinterest-worthy upgrades to your wardrobe and workspace. On your next high, you buy a car and allow yourself to take your foot off the gas and coast a bit. You’re on top of the world, collecting checks while posting positive reviews. You start sharing about your journey as an entrepreneur and try to convince anyone who will listen to quit their corporate job and come over to the bright side. The one where you get to call the shots. It feels good to feel good—and you feel good.

Then—and usually right around the corner—is a season of despair. You’ve run out of gas and your bank account drops below the panic line. Your clients have paid and you have nothing on deck. And it turns out that one client you knew would be difficult is, in fact, difficult, but you never got around to updating your contract terms so you find yourself cleaning up the mess you ignored while you were busy coasting.

This is where entrepreneurs make their most costly mistakes. Instead of taking a bird’s-eye view of what is right in front of them, they change the game altogether. They add new seeds to their soil, switch up the fertilizer, and drown everything in water. But, nothing changes. Or it does, but the harvest isn’t the same. Now, the clients feel different, the work isn’t as rewarding, and the income is out of balance with the output. This is what happens when an entrepreneur operates from a place of fear and scarcity, forgetting that they’re in an ecosystem that ebbs and flows as one.

The prickly pear cactus doesn’t panic between seasons or try to grow a new kind of fruit. She responds to the conditions around her without trying to become something different. She conserves her energy, collects water when it comes knowing it may not come back for a while, and allows the sun and nutrients in the soil to replenish her, allowing her to do what she was always meant to do.

Your business doesn’t need a new service, marketing strategy, or logo—it needs you to pay attention to the parts that you’ve been ignoring—your finances, your copy, your contracts, your systems of operation, your partnership agreements, your pricing strategy, and your workflow.

Too often in business we equate more with results—more effort may bring you more results, but it will also bring you more work, more headaches, more mistakes, and eventually, burnout. Instead, look to nature as you navigate your business. This is where you will find ease and flow. This is where sustainable businesses are built.

Every business has a spring, summer, fall, and winter. Entrepreneurs love the summer—this is where we see the fruits of our labor, but we often forget that this season only comes around once a year. How you operate in your summer is not how you should be operating in your fall. Once you’ve navigated your busy season and counted your apples, look to see what remains. What worked, what didn’t work, and why? Your job is to answer the why—and you will find it inside what you’re already doing.

As the temperature drops, winter will come. It’s dark, cold, and you’re stuck inside looking out at a barren plot of land. This is where you prepare for the next harvest. You’re getting back to your business plan and updating it with the knowledge and experience you’ve gathered in previous seasons. You’re an entrepreneur now. While you may not have all of the answers or be where you want to be just yet, you have more answers than you did at your first launch. Use this knowledge, it’s a gift. The seasons are a gift, so are the hardships, lessons, and red flag clients. That rotten apple that was left behind last season—look at it, get to know it, and find out what needs to change so that the next harvest leaves no fruit to rot. And if you’re not sure where to look, start inside your numbers. Get to know them, plot them, play around with them, and put them in a spreadsheet. You don’t have to be an expert to know that your income needs to be higher than your expenses. You’re the entrepreneur, figure it out—it’s kinda your thing.

Winter isn’t evidence that your business is broken, it’s evidence that you’re inside a cycle. The entrepreneur who survives is not the one who panics in the winter, but the one who learns how to move with it. Trust that the work you do between seasons will carry you through each year. You will still have seasons. You cannot escape the winter—and that’s a good thing, because it’s there for a reason and what you do with it will determine how fruitful your summer harvest will be. Clean up your books, study your numbers, repair your systems, revisit your pricing, and strengthen your contracts. Summer will come again.

When your world gets smaller, by chance or by choice—maybe you left your job, or lost your house, or left a marriage and lost a community, or became ill and lost access to the world you once enjoyed—allow the art of noticing to fill that space. This practice is not new, in fact, it’s ancient and well documented, crossing over waters, centuries, and people—from poets and priests, to monks and children.

I find it easiest to practice this in nature, with nature. You don’t need a magnificent backdrop—and actually, the more mundane the better because soon you will find, there is simply nothing mundane about nature. You’ll notice that the blades of grass you walk on tickle and poke, dance and twist. The tree that sits outside your door—the one that has watched you come and go year after year holds wisdom and depth, and whispers in the wind.

Watch as she changes with the seasons, just like you—just like me. Notice the space and place she holds for our winged and bushy-tailed neighbors. Notice them too. Do they have a favorite branch? Are they daily visitors? Are they participants in a seed, twig, fruit, or nut exchange—a gift economy? Is there a market you’ve never noticed right there in your own backyard tree? Can you name what you see? What kind of tree is she? Who are those plants? Are they edible? Do they bloom? Are they happy? Are you?

The art of noticing can be practiced anywhere. Where nature offers a place to start and pause, to notice with ease and spaciousness, so do books. The next time you find yourself immersed in a book, notice it. Why does your brain and body tickle more with this read than the others sitting on your shelf? Notice when a particular word or sentence holds weight in your soul. Don’t rush to highlight or look it up—sit with it. Allow it to simmer and to shimmer. Notice what’s not being said, where it lands in your body, how it feels to say it out loud. This is sacred reading, slow reading. Sacred living, slow living. This is the kind of reading (and living)—sacred and slow, that sticks with you, whose meanings unfold over time, seeping into your bones and returning when your life magically, unexpectedly meets the page.

The art of noticing is the art of watching, the art of living, being, and breathing. It’s when the art becomes the artist and the artist becomes the art. Life doesn’t imitate art, it is. Perhaps you just haven’t been taught how to see it, notice it, become it, know it, embody it. Now you have, so go—notice and tell me what you see. Sacred and slow—go.

For centuries, women have gathered in living rooms and behind closed doors to read together.

In 17th- and 18th-century Europe, salons curated by women like Madame de Rambouillet and Madame Geoffrin became spaces of quintessential resistance, intellect, and culture. Hosted in the private intimacy of their homes, writers, philosophers, artists, and thinkers gathered to discuss books and contemplate ideas in politics and philosophy.

I’ve been thinking about those spaces lately, wondering where ours was.

What happened in those rooms became something far greater than a book club. It was where women held space for each other to think, speak, dream, discuss, and build—a space that barely existed then and rarely exists now.

My history with book clubs is decades long. Many moons ago, when I was building my first company, I created a book club for the leaders of the organization. We read books like Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, and Atomic Habits by James Clear. It was the 2010s—era of the boss babe—where hustle culture and habit stacking became the ethos of our generation. Thankfully, I evolved, but not without a life-altering crash and burn—keep reading.

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, we started a Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Belonging (DIEB) book club. We read books like White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, So You Want to Talk About Race by Leona Oluo, Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall, and Unapologetic by Charlene A. Carruthers.

The conversations were thoughtful, the right people showed up, and we learned together.

Then, the crash and burn—The pandemic set my life on a different path and by the summer of 2021, I had sold all of my companies, left my husband, came out of the closet, donated everything I owned, and moved into a van to begin a new life. I found myself suddenly without the structures or communities that had once held my world together.

No house.

No husband.

No office.

No company.

No book club.

No community.

So, I started my own (again).

First, a queer book club in Venice where we read books like Rainbow Rainbow by Lydia Conklin, In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, The Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, Life as a Unicorn by Amrou Al-Kadi, Pageboy by Elliot Page, and Big Swiss by Jen Beagin.

Then, an online book club for creatives and entrepreneurs where we explored reads like The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, The Energy of Money by Maria Nemeth, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, Deep Work by Cal Newport, and Spiritual Economics by Eric Butterworth.

People came, the conversations were beautiful, but something was missing.

The community only existed within the hour that we gathered. When the conversations ended, everyone returned to their own lives. Where I had hoped for friendship, companionship, a future collaborator, or even a walking partner, I found myself still wanting something deeper than a book club could offer.

The truth is

I’m bored of people. I’m bored of surface. I’m bored of “Business as Usual.” I’m under stimulated and malnourished. I don’t want any more catch-ups or strangers meeting up.

I want conversations about grief. About the death of nature—about our responsibility in it and to it. I want conversations about the dismantling of capitalism—how we’re going to do it, how we’re going to survive it, and how we’re going to build anew. I want to talk about spirituality—not in vague platitudes, but from lived experience, from practice, from pain, and from knowing. I want to build a village with a village, not just talk about it.

I want to sit in a room with women who have lived and who still live to tell about it. Whose face shows both their joy and their pain. Whose bodies hold ancestral wisdom, with the strength to carry it, and the bravery to share it. Women who have loved deeply, lost deeply, and who read for joy and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Women who ask the questions no one has asked them.

I will ask them.

I don’t think this longing is mine alone. I think we have arrived here on purpose and by design—sitting in our individual homes, with our individual lives, and individual problems, scrolling while the world burns and the systems that once defined our lives fracture before our eyes.

Where the news shows despair and the algorithm consumption and comparison, I crave a space that practices hope and joy, that seeks in stillness, and holds without a need to fill the silence.

I feel alone, but I know I’m not. I’ve created spaces that filled me temporarily, but left me thirsty. Now, I’m going to attempt to build differently. The High Desert Reading Society is my small attempt to bring something back into the world that we forgot could exist—community. I am trying something different this time and I’m looking for you to join me.

The High Desert Reading Society

Inspired by the tradition of women’s literary salons, this is an intimate gathering of women who love literature, thoughtful conversation, and meaningful community. The evenings are simple: tea, wine, books, and conversations that continue to nourish us long after the last page.

The Books

We will gather once a month at my home in Joshua Tree and read from the 2026 Booker Prize Longlist, beginning with these reads inspired by Lauren Louise:

• Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuāng-zi (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King) — a richly layered queer story set in post-colonial Taiwan that follows two women, a Japanese novelist and her translator, as they travel through food, memory, and political tension.

• The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken) — inspired by the Danish witch trials, this novel follows a woman accused of witchcraft and is said to be a strange and philosophical exploration of motherhood, labor, and the human body.

• Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur (translated by Faridoun Farrokh) — a banned book in Iran, this is a modern Persian classic in which five women converge in a mystical garden outside Tehran to imagine a life without men (sounds nice, doesn’t it?).

• On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia (translated by Padma Viswanathan) — set in a penal colony, this is a dark Brazilian novel about morality, violence, and the hidden labor that sustains society.

Who I imagine in this room

I imagine my home filled with women between forty and seventy years old, and every decade in-between. Women who are curious, who read widely, and are searching for something deeper than a casual book club. This space is for women who want to explore new worlds together and perhaps, over time, create one ourselves in community with care, reverence, and respect like our ancestors did before colonization, before the patriarchy, and before capitalism.

A note on intimacy

Because these gatherings take place in my home and because I want this space to feel intentional and grounded, the group will remain small—6 to 8 women to start.

Unlike my other book clubs, this is not an open-door event—this is a reading society. Women first come by inquiry, then as guests, and eventually by invitation. Once invited, they stay, they show up, they commit, they give, they receive, they grow, they build, they learn, they cry, they celebrate, they commune.

If any of this speaks to those parts of you that have gone silent and numb, if you are interested in sitting in this circle with me as a founding member, please, request an invitation below.

If you’re new here

Hi and welcome. My name is Lauren, my friends call me LB, and all em dashes are my own. I’m an educator, strategist, and regenerative entrepreneur. I’m also a student in pursuit of a PhD studying the intersections of ecology, spirituality, economics, and justice. I live in the high desert with my dog Ted, a retired therapy dog who will be nurturing our circle. Much of my work and life revolves around reading, writing, and asking difficult questions about the world we’ve inherited and the one we might create together. This reading society is one small experiment in that work.

If you’ve been feeling the same quiet longing for deeper conversation, slower thinking, and real community—this space is for you.

An intimate room, a warm drink, a good book, a comforting dog, and a handful of wise women. Something tells me this is how new worlds begin or perhaps more simply—how we remember the one we were meant to build together.

Request an Invitation

If you feel called to join The High Desert Reading Society, you’re warmly invited to request an invitation. Founding members will convene this summer.

Request an Invitation

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