Kendall Thompson — Rooted in Utah

Growing things slowly. Learning what lasts.

A former athlete. A man who spent twelve years in chronic pain finding his soul in the soil. A husband, father, and believer writing honestly about faith, mental health, and what it means to tend a life the way you'd tend a garden you loved.

About Kendall

From the track
to the soil

I was an elite runner before chronic pain took that away for twelve years. In the process of losing my athletic identity I found something more durable — a faith stripped of its performance layer, a love for growing things slowly, and a deep conviction that meaning is available almost anywhere if you're willing to pay attention.

I live in Utah with my wife and daughter. I grow perennials, vegetables, fruit, and flowers. I write about what the garden teaches me about everything else.

From the blog

Recent writing

The Garden
The Garden
Dormant, Not Dead

The perennial looks finished. The root system is working. What I've learned to be careful about calling dead.

5 min readRead →
Faith
Faith
My faith in the hard years didn't look like the faith I'd been taught to perform

Prayers that were more complaint than petition. A faith that got harder and became more durable for it.

6 min readRead →
Mental Health
Mental Health
The quiet kind

Depression that goes to church and answers fine. The version that loses color gradually, like light fading at the end of a day so slowly you don't notice.

5 min readRead →
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The Examined Life

Weekly letters on faith, gardening, mental health, and the slow work of becoming. Written like a letter to one person — because it is.

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About Kendall Thompson

I used to be a runner.
Now I grow things.

The story of how twelve years of chronic pain, an identity crisis, and a patch of Utah soil made me the man I am.

My name is Kendall Thompson, and for most of my life I've been searching for meaning.

I grew up in Utah surrounded by mountains, faith, and the ordinary rhythms of life that seem insignificant until years later when you realize they shaped who you became. I was a runner — a serious one. Track and cross country. The kind of athlete who felt most like himself at mile six of a ten-mile tempo run, when everything hurt just enough and the rhythm took over and the world got very quiet and very clear.

"My body was the thing I trusted most. I knew what it could do. I knew its limits and I knew how to push past them. My identity lived there — in the pace, in the times, in the feeling of crossing a finish line having left everything on the course."

Then chronic pain arrived. Quietly at first — the way a houseguest shows up before you realize they're not leaving. I kept running because running was what I was. I ran through the early discomfort the way I'd run through every other hard thing — head down, jaw set, certain my body would cooperate if I just demanded it to.

My body had other plans.

The Decade

Ten years is a long time to be in pain. I want to say that plainly because I think we soften these things and the softening does a disservice to anyone going through something similar.

It was hard. Progressively, relentlessly hard. The kind of hard that changes your personality, your relationships, your faith, your sense of who you are and what your life is for. I watched the running go first. Then the easy movement. Then the assumption that tomorrow would feel better than today.

What I didn't expect was how thoroughly chronic pain would get into everything — producing anxiety, producing grief, a particular kind of loneliness that comes from suffering that is invisible and hard to explain. And then the loss of my athletic identity left me with a question I wasn't equipped to answer: Who are you when the thing that defined you is gone?

Those questions became more than philosophy. They became survival. I searched everywhere for answers — in faith, science, theology, philosophy, psychology, in books I read at 2am because sleep wouldn't come, in prayers that felt like shouting into a room I wasn't sure had anyone in it.

Finding the Soil

I found the garden when I couldn't find anything else. Not through a dramatic decision — I just needed something my body could manage. Something that required presence without requiring performance. Something that gave back without demanding more than I had.

The soil asked nothing of me that I couldn't give. It didn't care how fast I used to run. It just needed attention, consistency, a willingness to show up even when nothing visible was happening yet.

"The garden became the first place in years where I felt like myself. Not my old self. Something newer. Something that had grown in the hard years without my realizing it."

I grow perennials mostly — things that come back. Vegetables because there's something quietly sacred about eating what you grew. Fruit because patience has a flavor. Flowers because beauty is not a luxury. Some of mine are edible. I like that — things that feed you and make you stop and look at the same time.

The Miracle

After roughly twelve years the pain began lifting. Slowly. Without a clear medical explanation. After years of searching, treating, praying, and enduring — one day it started getting better, and I don't fully know why.

I hold this quietly. I prayed about this for twelve years — not always faithfully or eloquently, sometimes the way you talk to someone in a room when you're not sure they're listening. I kept talking. And then something changed. Maybe that's what a miracle looks like. Not lightning. Just the ground thawing when you had started to accept the cold.

Who This Is For

I write, garden, and build this page for a specific person. You'll know if it's you.

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You're in a hard season and need someone to tell you dormant is not dead.

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You love your faith and have real questions you don't know how to ask out loud.

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You're managing ADHD, anxiety, or chronic pain inside a high-expectation life.

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You love the idea of a garden and want to think about it more deeply than just growing tips.

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You lost the thing that defined you and are figuring out who you are now.

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You want honest conversation about faith and mental health — not performance, not platitudes.

All Writing

The Blog

Essays on gardening, faith, mental health, fatherhood, and the slow work of becoming. Written when there's something worth saying.

The Garden
The Garden
Dormant, Not Dead

The perennial looks finished. The root system is working. What I've learned to be careful about calling dead — in the garden and in my own life.

GardenRead →
New Soil
The Garden
Leaving the Garden Behind

Selling the house. Leaving behind what you built with your hands. And arriving somewhere with roots already in the ground that someone else planted.

GardenRead →
Perennial
The Garden
Why I grow what I grow

Perennials, vegetables, fruit, and flowers. Beauty and utility in the same space. What I'm after in the garden and honestly — in life.

GardenRead →
Faith
Faith
My faith in the hard years didn't look like the faith I'd been taught to perform

Prayers that were more complaint than petition. Long stretches of spiritual quiet. What I think faith actually is versus what I was shown.

FaithRead →
Meaning
Faith
Meaning is available almost anywhere if you're willing to pay attention

The core thesis of everything I write about. What chronic pain, philosophy, and the garden taught me about where meaning lives.

FaithRead →
Anxiety
Mental Health
What anxiety actually felt like — not the clinical version, mine

Not always panic. The low-grade hum. The nervous system that forgot what rest felt like. The invisible and relentless version.

Mental HealthRead →
Depression
Mental Health
The quiet kind

Depression that goes to church and answers fine. The version that loses color gradually, like light fading at the end of a day so slowly you don't notice.

Mental HealthRead →
ADHD
ADHD
ADHD inside a high-achieving identity

The specific shame of struggling at things your faith community says should be simple. You are not spiritually defective. You are neurologically different.

ADHDRead →
Fitness
Fitness
The Restart

Starting and failing to make it stick. The former elite athlete learning to begin again as a different person on completely different terms.

FitnessRead →
Identity
Identity
I will never run the way I used to run

Grief and gratitude living in the same soil. The runner and the gardener. The identity that holds through winters versus the one that collapses with the body.

IdentityRead →
Fatherhood
Fatherhood
I became a husband and a father inside the pain

What it cost and what it produced. Love is not a performance — it's the quiet decision, made again every day, to remain and to try.

FatherhoodRead →
Utah
Utah Life
Utah will teach you patience whether you want to learn it or not

Spring here doesn't arrive so much as negotiate. What the seasons of a Utah garden have taught me about timing, trust, and letting go.

Utah LifeRead →
Free Weekly Newsletter

The Examined Life

Weekly letters on faith, gardening, mental health, and the slow work of becoming. Written like a letter to one person — because it is.

Every week I write one letter. No news roundup, no content calendar, no performance of consistency for its own sake. Just one thing I've been thinking about — from the garden, from the hard years, from the examined life — and why I think it's worth your time.

I've been told these letters feel like sitting across from someone who is being honest with you. That's the only thing I know how to write.

What you get
Weekly

One letter, every week. Never daily. Never more than you asked for.

Honest

Real life, not curated life. The garden, the hard years, the questions without tidy answers.

Deep

Faith, philosophy, mental health, and the examined life — with actual substance.

Free

Always free. No bait-and-switch. No content withheld until you upgrade.

Recent issues
001
Why I'm starting this — the real version, not the polished one
Week 1
002
The perennial metaphor I can't stop thinking about
Week 2
003
What Utah seasons teach you about patience you didn't ask to learn
Week 3
004
I used to be a runner — the beginning of a longer story
Week 4
005
What leaving the garden I built taught me about attachment and grace
Week 5
006
Ten years is a long time to be in pain — said plainly
Week 6
007
What the soil asks of you that nothing else does
Week 7
New Here?

Start Here

If you just found this page and don't know where to begin, this is where I'd send you. Four paths depending on where you are right now.

Path 01 — Found me through gardening

Start with the soil

The garden is the entry point to everything here. Start with these and the rest will make sense naturally.

  • Why I grow what I grow
  • The perennial that came back
  • What the garden gives me that nothing else does
  • Leaving the garden behind — and inheriting someone else's
  • Utah seasons and what they teach about patience
Path 02 — You're in a hard season

Start with the story

If you're in pain — physical, spiritual, or the kind that doesn't have a name — read the origin story in order.

  • I used to be a runner
  • Ten years is a long time to be in pain
  • Dormant, not dead
  • I found the garden when I couldn't find anything else
  • To the person in their dormant season
Path 03 — Wrestling with faith

Start with the honest questions

If you love your faith and have questions you don't know how to ask out loud, start here.

  • My faith in the hard years
  • The searching — what I was looking for
  • Meaning is available almost anywhere
  • Paul's thorn in the flesh — and mine
  • The miracle I hold quietly
Path 04 — Managing ADHD or anxiety

Start with the honest accounts

If your brain doesn't cooperate the way your culture expects, these were written for you specifically.

  • What anxiety actually felt like
  • The quiet kind of depression
  • ADHD inside a high-achieving identity
  • The distracted prayers that still count
  • You are not spiritually defective
My promise to you

What you'll always find here

Honest conversation. The garden taken seriously as a lens for life. Faith that acknowledges hard questions. Mental health content that doesn't pretend prayer is the only tool. Writing that treats you like an adult with a real inner life.

What you will never find here: toxic positivity, performed vulnerability, polished answers to questions that don't have them, or content that treats your struggles as a marketing opportunity.

I don't post on Sundays. That day belongs to my God and my family. Everything else — I show up for.