If You Build It, Will They Come?
I remember watching the Field of Dreams for the first time before I started my career in communication. The year was 1989, I was still in school, and I had no idea what the future was holding for me. At the time, I think I experienced this story as an almost sci-fi version of the afterlife. I doubt I was paying much attention at the time of its deeper meaning.
But this past week, after watching a series of old movies over the winter, I stumbled upon this flick and watched it again for the first time in nearly 40 years, and it landed WAY differently with me this time. What stood out most was the line toward the end of the movie between a father and son:
Wanna have a catch?
Four words. And something cracks open.
From my more mature and evolved POV, I’ve been thinking about why that is…why that particular moment in that particular movie reaches into so many of us and pulls something loose. And I think it’s because it isn’t really about baseball (I’m not a huge baseball fan, but my grandfather was a die-hard Yankees fan, and it’s what I treasure most about our short time together…watching baseball on TV). It never was. It’s about all the conversations we didn’t finish. All the relationships we left in a state of almost. All the parts of ourselves we set down somewhere along the road and kept walking, certain we’d come back for them later.
We forget to come back.
Here’s the story, if you need it: Ray Kinsella is an Iowa farmer who hears a voice in his cornfield. If you build it, he will come. He doesn’t know what it means. He doesn’t know who he is. He only knows he has to build the field — a baseball diamond, right there in the middle of the corn — even though it makes no financial sense, even though his neighbors think he’s lost it, even though he can’t fully explain the pull he feels toward something he doesn’t yet understand.
So he builds it.
And they come. Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 Black Sox — players who were banned from the game, stripped of their dignity, given no second chances. They come back to play the game they loved, in a field carved out of ordinary farmland, lit up in the evening like something sacred.
And eventually, his father comes too. Young and whole and full of everything they never got to say to each other.
Wanna have a catch?
I’ve been sitting with a voice of my own lately.
It didn’t come from a cornfield. It came from 30 years of working inside organizations, watching people struggle to say what they actually mean, watching leaders perform confidence they don’t feel, watching teams talk around the thing that everyone in the room already knows. It came from building a marketing agency I’m proud of — real work, real results, clients I love — and feeling, underneath the pride, a persistent tug toward something different. Something deeper.
The voice said: there is a field here. Build it.
The Field for Human Communication isn’t a program or a methodology, though it has those things. It’s more like a premise. A clearing. A place where we try to practice something that the dominant culture has made surprisingly rare: honest, embodied, trustworthy communication — the kind that comes from the inside out, not the outside in.
I don’t know exactly where the trail through this field leads. I only know I have to build it. And I trust — the way Ray trusted, with the particular belief that can’t quite be argued into or out of — that if I build something true, the right people will find it.
Not everyone. The right ones.
This is what Field of Dreams gets right about reconciliation: it doesn’t happen through argument or explanation. It happens through the thing you build. Through the space you make. Through showing up, over and over, to something that required more faith than sense.
We all have unfinished emotional business. Conversations that ended wrong or didn’t end at all. Versions of ourselves we abandoned because the world rewarded a different version. Patterns we inherited and repeated for decades before we even noticed we were doing it.
The Field is where that work happens — not by relitigating the past, but by recognizing the patterns that are still running, still costing us something, and choosing to show up differently. Today. In this conversation. With this person.
That’s not small work. It’s the whole work.
There’s something else happening right now that I can’t stop thinking about. We are living in a moment of profound technological acceleration — artificial intelligence is reshaping what it means to work, to create, to communicate. And I notice, underneath the anxiety about all of that, something unexpected: a growing hunger for the real thing.
For a human voice you can trust. For a conversation that isn’t optimized. For presence — actual, embodied, fallible, full-of-feeling presence.
The contrast with AI is clarifying something. We are not machines. We never were. We are flesh and bone and beating hearts. We have bodies that know things our minds haven’t caught up with yet. We carry grief and joy and the particular weight of our own histories. We need to be witnessed, not processed. Heard, not analyzed.
The Field is the place where we remember that. Where we come back to what we actually are.
And I think the moment we’re in — disorienting as it is — might be quietly offering us that gift: the chance to remember ourselves. To ask, perhaps for the first time in a long time, what it would feel like to communicate from the full truth of who we are.
The disgraced players in Field of Dreams don’t get to go back and undo 1919. They don’t get a legal exoneration or a public apology. What they get is a field. A chance to play again — simply, joyfully, without the weight of what happened defining everything that comes after.
That’s redemption, as I understand it. Not erasure. Not a clean slate. But a field where you can show up and be more than your worst moment, your longest detour, your biggest mistake.
We all have those. We all stayed too long somewhere we’d outgrown. We all took paths that turned out to be dead ends, or said yes when we meant no, or let years pass before we understood what was actually happening.
It’s never too late to make another choice. To walk toward the field that’s been waiting.
The reason If you build it, he will come became one of the most quoted lines in cinema isn’t the baseball. It’s the permission.
Permission to trust something you can’t fully explain. Permission to build for the right reasons, even when the reasons are hard to justify. Permission to believe that if you create something with truth and care and genuine intention, the people who need it will find their way to it.
I believe that. Not naively — I’ve spent 30 years working in communication and marketing, and I know that magnetism is not magic. It’s made of something: resonance, clarity, belonging, trust. You have to build all of that into the field before anyone can feel it from the outside.
But underneath the strategy and the craft, something else has to be true. The field has to mean something. It has to be built for real.
There’s a moment in each of us — if we’re lucky enough to find it — when we stop asking what do they want from me and start asking what do I know to be true?
That’s the voice in the cornfield. That’s the catch at the end of the film. That’s the thing the field is for.
The Field for Human Communication is my answer to that question. Built slowly, built honestly, built from everything I’ve learned about what happens between people when they finally stop performing and start speaking from the place where they actually live.
If you’ve been hearing a voice of your own — something quiet and persistent that keeps pointing you toward a different way of working, leading, speaking, being — I hope you’ll trust it.
Build the field.
They’ll come.
Mary Huron Hunter is the founder of The Field for Human Communication — a philosophy and practice for leaders, organizations, and communities ready to communicate from the inside out. She writes here in The Field Journal about the larger questions behind the work. Learn more.
