Katie’s Ground Podcast

When I turned the corner of our house, two eyes flashed in my light. Our feral cat, Tiger ran ahead and sat. Why didn’t he bolt for the barn? He ran ahead and sat. My dogs strained at their leashes. Tiger yanked at my heart strings. He snuggled the earth like when Gray was alive. Would the dogs be his friend? Tears welled up. Someone had set out rat poison, heedless of the broken hearts, heedless...

Yesterday, December 28 was the Feast of the Holy Innocents where Bethlehem paid a terrible price for the birth of Christ. Here I imagine what it might have been like to be a mother who gave birth to her son the same time that Mary gave birth to Jesus. This is a repost from last year. I gave birth to my son the night the shepherds banged on the door. “The Messiah has come,” they shouted even before...

“Finally, finally the tears blew out of me into sobbing in the barn, the cats waiting impatiently for me to leave, Morgen quietly munching her hay. The light softening the wood beams. A hay bale holding my butt. I hoped Bruce wouldn’t find me. Katie’s Ground is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. “Bruce and I had ju...

I was walking the road, my thoughts scattered by what I read on Facebook first thing. I don’t remember what it was that day, but I am obsessed about the drones spooking New Jersey and points nearby. My imagination has gone Hollywood. Is it a foreign adversary sitting off shore sending them in? Are they spraying a biological or chemical agent on New Jersey? Are they our drones doing miliary exercis...

Paul Kingsnorth says it’s not just the indigenous peoples who have a sense of the world being alive or who have relationships with animals. It’s also the Christian view of what it means to be fully human, fully alive. I was sitting in front of my computer for the third of his classes in St Basil’s Writers Workshop . What it means to be human is to be like Adam and Eve in the garden when they were...

Seems like fear has settled over us like a fine, poisoned drizzle. The news, social media, talk shows are like crop dusters spraying ways for us to be afraid and ways to hate each other. The Atlantic cover art shows Trump driving a circus wagon with an elephant trapped, an image echoing the Bradbury novel, Something Wicked this Way Comes . Memes reinforce that message. Cut off friends. Cut off fam...

I delight in squirrels running the trees, jumping from one to the other, sometimes dropping ten feet from one twig to an another. They curl around each other, fighting. We watch through our brand-new kitchen window, that Anderson Construction plugged into the wall last week, and trimmed out this week. We'd  grown tired of feeling cold air pouring into the kitchen when winter nights fell. Bruce wou...

The tiny sparrow hopped ahead of me. (Before, it was a junco by the house.) She’d lift a bit and then trot along. This time while I was walking on the top of the hill towards Petersons. Where did she want to take me? She’d trot a bit. Then lift off. Trot a bit. Then she flew off. I was relieved she could fly. I kept walking. The walk as ordinary as they all are, well actually boring. Sometimes the...

I’m reposting these two WNIJ perspectives as tributes to our feral cat Gray. We said goodbye to him today. When Feral Cats Show Up It’s magical when feral cats show up at the farm. We bless them because we’ve had rats so fat and tame I could grab one as she ran up the rafters. This year two gray and white cats arrived. They acted like a bonded pair. We named them Fluffy and Slick. None of our neig...

Every morning the last few mornings I’ve seen a little bird that can’t lift off the ground. Bruce thinks she’s a junco, but maybe she’s the firebird grounded, telling us both something as it hops on ahead of us. Apparently in Russian fairy tales a person finds a feather and searches for the bird, starting a quest. I think of Abraham called from a prosperous family to an unknown land, promised by G...

Scrolling Past Medusa The Medusa’s hair writhes with snakes so ugly; one look and you turn to stone. The only way the hero can destroy her is not to look. He holds up his shield, wields his sword. Back in the day, the horrors of children burning, hurricanes flooding cities, students being shot were limited to a half hour each night on the news, a newspaper cracked open in the morning, and magazine...

Last week’s joy came through an abscess cut open and cleared. A relative posted a picture of my mother sitting on the couch the last Christmas she was alive. When I arrived home from grad school, her round curves were gone, but in the picture she looked the same, soft round person I’d known, but she looked tired. In a month, I would be moved to Chicago, all hell would break loose in my life, when...

Way off in the distance, over the farm on the corner, where the road turns toward the tracks, I saw a murmuration, birds rising and falling, swelling and drawing in again. Faint. A rare sight by us. Though a couple weeks ago our trees were loud with starlings flocking to fly south. They crackled with their voices. Not the same as sunlight, but with the energy of animals that fly-angels. I walk by...

What if God means it when he says, “there is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom.8: 1)? What if he means it when he says, “now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, as to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all tim...

Something up in the tree, dripped, drip, drip drip, like after a rain stops but the trees are still raining. I stood in the gate looking for the northern lights because it was Autumnal Equinox when a crack opens in the magnetic fields. The sky was just plain dark except for neighbor’s yard lights. I saw through to the faint Milky Way and heard leaves rustling. There were no eyes peering back in th...

(Photo by Jean Pauley) Since we are well into election season, the following are some perspectives I wrote for our local NPR station, WNIJ, with regards to our political environment. I am reading them in chronological order. This Label Shuts Down Honest Talk July 19, 2016 A person can disagree with President Obama’s policies, or be afraid, or be troubled by our open borders, or question Sharia law...

I first saw the barn swallows peeking out of a nest in the barn. Then they'd moved to a second nest when they were about to fly. A small flock swept in and out, restless, demanding I leave. Imagine being so close to all that flight, to be in the midst of all that fierce, frantic joy. One hovered for a second right in front of me. I was so busy snapping pictures, I missed when the young ones droppe...

I don’t know what the heck my boss was thinking. He’d do this little nod thing and his eyes would brighten and he’d tell the king where the Syrians would be. The king listened. The Syrians would set their ambush, but we didn’t show up. All we're doing is teasing their anger. And then what? When a commander of the Syrian army showed up at the king’s doorstep, saying he’d heard he could be healed in...

My horse died. One by one my horse friends decided I didn’t make the cut in their busy lives. “I don’t want to have lunch with you,” said one friend. Another was done after I canceled lunch. The others mostly sank in silence. I sat down in front of the pony barns at the Boone County Fair, people driving by with their horses and carriages and started to say how horse people are mean. My friend woul...

Earlier in this summer, Peggy , a Facebook acquaintance, noted she was traveling through a town nearby. I piped up, “Why don’t you come and visit?” She’d gone north, heading for the badlands, and turned around to stay over for a night because of my post about how I believe that small and hidden are just as much evidence of God’s blessing as people with large followings. While I was cleaning, I won...

When we fixed our barn cats, Kevin, my horse vet said that you spend money on those barn cats and they’ll be gone before you know it, but we could not afford more kitties, so off to Tails they went. Brave and Girl Cat ended up ghosting us, the loss a thud in my gut because I never knew what happened. Tyger and Gray have grown into sleek, striped cats with scraggly, poufy tails and shiny coats. We...

I don’t think I was honest with you in the last piece about Nebuchadnezzar’s monument that dominated the skyline. I wanted Hannah to refuse to bow to the king’s image because I wanted to put that refusal to go along into my imagination because my greatest fear is that I’ll quail when I’m asked what would you choose--following Jesus or preserving your life? You may have thought, wait, what? The thr...

As I was finishing my essay about how my voice sounds like bare feet on gravel, I thought about how our voice becomes incarnate when our breath sings across our vocal cords, driven by our heart and mind because we want to tell something. But what about God’s voice? What does it sound like? I know we can hear his voice as a nudge, or a thought in our mind, or a Bible verse or a friend speaking a wo...

David Whyte in A Heart Aroused says, “The voice emerges literally from the body as a representation of our inner world. It carries our experience from the past, our hopes and fears for the future, and the emotional resonance of the moment…Whether or not we tell the truth, the very act of speech is courageous because no matter what we say we are revealed” (120). I think about how voice is embodied....

In Revelation, when the Seventh Seal was opened, an angel took the golden censor, full of incense and the prayers of the saints. He filled it with fire from the altar and threw it  down on earth, and  "there were peals of thunder, rumblings, and flashes of lightning" (Rev. 8: 1 - 5). The voice of God's presence like on Sinai, the power we forget that is in our prayers. Sometimes people frustrated...