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I took my Bible and border collie and sat on hay bales as rain pelted the roof of the Big Barn. I was sitting on a throne across the way from God, and we talked. It was warm for winter, but the rain had frozen a crust over the snow. I sobbed with all the intensity of a sixteen-year-old, my blood up and running, "Oh Lord let me write a vision of glory." I’d been reading The Chronicles of Narnia and The Weight of Glory and Till We Have Faces and Mere Christianity for a paper I was writing about C.S. Lewis. “God I want to write like that. I want to do for others what Lewis has done for me.”
This tear-stained call carried me through several careers—college and grad school, basically launching Crossway Books as their first publicist, and teaching developmental composition at Northern Illinois University for twenty years. There I worked with young people from some of the roughest neighborhoods in Chicago. Because I was a three-quarter time instructor, without having to publish or perish, I was able to write and rewrite The River Caught Sunlight along with many drafts of poetry, essays and novels.
When business coach, Jeffrey Davis suggested we recall what made us curious as children, I remembered when I took part in a dig at an 18th century home, where all that was left was the foundation. Every day we walked to the site and dug into the earth, noting the different colors of soil and carefully bagging fragments—broken pieces of pottery, hand wrought nails, sturgeon scales. These were pieces of material culture that let us get to know the people who lived here.
I mention this because I’ve followed my curiosity about the ground since I was a young girl. I fell in love with a farmer and his big machines as a young woman. “But the light fell on him, the brushed back green light, a tidal surge of trees and brush poised over a plowed field. Not the light on flat storefronts, late afternoon amber light that shoves men into their chairs.”
My husband and I live quietly on ten acres in the Midwest. We harvest sunlight in the form of hay. Mrs Horse brings our barn alive and wakes us up when she turns into a fire breathing animal on the short drives we take. Four feral cats entertain us in the barn. Two indoor cats run the place. And two Australian shepherds keep us in line.
These days, words don’t come easy, but pictures do. My pictures are more likely to show where light shows up than my words. I want you to behold the world. After all, it is full of the glory and God’s love. I’ve also just started speaking my essays, because they deserve my voice and breath in a podcast by this blog’d name: Katie’s Ground.
My readers say best what I am about. Patty Scott says, “I love the rhythm of your sharing and the way the photos highlight the words. It felt like an invitation to slow and savor. In a world that swirls much like the wind pressing into your walls, your words and images call me to stillness and a pace more measured and holy. Holiness is being set apart. It's not separate from the mundane but infusing it if we can pause to observe - as you are. Thank you for this gift.”
Another reader says, “You know I love your ambling prose and beautiful photos. They call me home and make me breathe deeply, and often, as you chronicle the details of your life through your eyes, I am left considering unseen and deeper things.”
I can’t thank you enough for reading my work, especially those of you who are paying to subscribe. I am not comfortable with having two tiers of readers, because it’s more important to be read than to be paid.
But being paid helps me support the wonderful service Substack provides in allowing writers to find their people. Being paid is also a great and good encouragement to me after so many years developing my craft.
I hope my words speak encouragement and healing to you. I hope they show you the miracle of our footsteps on the ground, and where light finds its way to all kinds of places.
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