Oxbow Strategies
river with oxbow
ISSUE 33, 9 June 2026
Welcome back to The Bend!
The Bend follows a simple rhythm each week. The Eddy Line opens with a one-line thought or observation, something short enough to remember but worth thinking about. What the Current Pulled Toward dives a little deeper into where the previous week’s energy went, whether that’s a project, a partnership, or a personal lesson learned. Signal Fire highlights a person, place, or initiative that deserves some attention. From the Field, shares a small anecdote about the broader outdoor recreation economy from Oxbow’s non-profit arm, the VA MTNS Outdoor Collective. And One Thought Worth Sitting With closes things out with a brief reflection or quote that will hopefully help guide you through whatever you may be dealing with.

It’s part journal, part field note, and hopefully something that makes you pause for a moment before diving back into the current.
The Eddy Line
“Two things can be true at the same time.”
What the Current Pulled Toward
This week the current pulled toward mixed emotions.

For whatever reason, most of us tend to treat life as if everything needs to fit neatly into one category or another. I do this quite a bit. Good or bad, success or failure, proud or disappointed, and right or wrong.

I think most of us also know that life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes a project is successful and still falls short of what it could have been. Sometimes a relationship is healthy and still requires work. Sometimes an organization is doing all the right things and moving in the right direction and still has significant challenges to overcome. And sometimes the people we hold in highest regard leave us feeling incredibly proud while simultaneously demonstrating that they still have room to grow.

The workplace is full of these kinds of contradictions. We have employees who are doing great work but could be doing better. We witness leaders make excellent decisions and occasional poor ones. We see organizations that accomplish remarkable things while still struggling in important areas.

Too often, we tend to pick one side of the ledger, to either celebrate or criticize. The best leaders I’ve worked with, however, understood that two things can be true at the same time.

They knew how to recognize progress without pretending perfection had been achieved. They knew how to hold people accountable without making them feel defeated.


Leaders learn how to hold both.

- Mike.
Signal Fire
The Blue Ridge Land Conservancy has been protecting farms, forests, waterways, and scenic landscapes across western Virginia since the 1990s. To date, the organization has helped protect tens of thousands of acres through conservation easements and other land protection strategies. Among its most notable projects was helping permanently protect large portions of the viewshed and watershed associated with Carvins Cove Natural Reserve and Mill Mountain Park, two of the region’s most important natural resources.

While sitting on the Board of Trustees, I’ve come to appreciate that conservation is one of the purest examples of long-term thinking. The people doing the work today often won’t be the ones who fully benefit from it. They’re making decisions for future generations, for people they’ll probably never meet.

That’s a pretty remarkable thing when you stop and think about it.

To learn more about BRLC, click here.
From the Field
The broader outdoor economy may have a measurement issue.

We tend to count the things that are easy to count: visitor spending, jobs created, tax revenue, hotel nights, event attendance. Those numbers are important, no doubt. But some of the most important outcomes are much harder to quantify.

How do you measure a college graduate who decides to stay because they love the quality of life? A family that relocates because they want access to trails and public lands? An entrepreneur who starts a business because they believe in a community’s future?

The outdoor economy is often discussed as either an economic driver or a quality-of-life investment. Can’t they be both? Shouldn’t they be?


Two things can be true at the same time.
One Thought Worth Sitting With
This week’s theme: Mixed Emotions.

“There is nothing stronger than gentleness
and nothing gentler than real strength.“
-Saint Frances de Sales
Follow Oxbow on Social Media
Facebook Instagram LinkedIn Threads