One million. A humongous number. An inconceivable number. But one that we have reached, together, nonetheless.

Jake is something else.

Tireless. Delusionally confident in our ability to get from A to a never-before-seen B. To have watched this bearded man work at the eternally shifting puzzle we call Maui Nui for 15+ years has been equal parts exhilaration and exhaustion. Kidding, kind of.

Within our teams, I’ve watched his leadership take on so many forms, the most curious of which is his penchant for building and releasing tension, what I think he thinks is the straightest line to driving home some new idea. To wit: filling up a trash can with water using a single spray bottle.

This is what he tasked our harvest team with at a late-night meeting last week. He produced a 44-gallon trash can, a spray bottle, and the simple instruction of filling one using the other.

And then the boys did what they do best. They immediately started problem-solving. One brave soul jumped up and sprayed and sprayed and sprayed until his forearm seized. He was the only one still following instructions. The rest of our guys had moved on to R&D—how to get the water out of the bottle faster. One proposed plan was just cutting open the nozzle, for throughput.

How long would it take to fill this trash can? Jake asked. Then: how long for three trash cans? Someone confidently suggested four hours. Jake’s answer was—over a month. Spraying eight hours straight per day for 36 days would do the trick. Twelve days per can.

Silence. Momentary dread.

But, of course, our team knows by now that these shenanigans weren’t about filling trash cans via spray bottles. Jake was attempting to drive something home yet again. This time—what 1,000,000 feels like. Because that’s the number of pumps it would take. One million. A humongous number. An inconceivable number. But one that we have reached, together, nonetheless.

Since March of 2020, we—as in the boys, the butchers, our marketing and ops teams, our ranch and mission partners, Jake and I, and you (YOU!)—have shared over 1,000,000 meals with families here on Maui and across Hawaiʻi.

And the spray bottle analogy falls a million bowls of chili short, of course.

But it does invite us to imagine one meal and then one meal and on and on and on.

It does invite us to remember the abundance we can unlock when we run down our craziest ideas. Six thousand, seven hundred and fifty-three deer. Animals that would otherwise keep pressing on the most rarefied ecosystems on Earth, animals that under some other idea of management could have gone to waste—but, instead, were turned into food for our communities.

It does invite us into deeper and deeper gratitude for all the people who ripple out from our little retrofitted containers up in the hills of Honuaʻula. The families, communities, and customers who continue to support us and drive us forward, who allow us to continue to do such sustaining work.

What I mean to say is—mahalo.

For every 1oz stick purchased, every pack of ground browned or fancy rib rack grilled, every email forwarded and story shared, and on and on and on, for all the ways you have supported our point A to holy-moly-how-did-we-get-here? point B, we are unspeakably grateful.

So what about 10 million meals? Jake asked at the end of the meeting. Nods all around. Because there is more to come.

That spray bottle is up on a shelf somewhere now, sharpied with the plan: Keep Showing UP!

And the point isn’t some crazy number (even though we are so excited to celebrate this one with you). The point is that when we commit to the long work of holding the tensions of balance, of trying to help meet the complex set of needs of our people and places, more and more shared health follows. It keeps showing up.