What is Summer

In August I don’t want 
to know what I have lost

I want fruit salad
like Mom used to make it:
	sliced strawberries, chunks of watermelon
		halved grapes, whole blueberries
tumbled together
in a big glass bowl

Remember when summer was
all grass stains and fireflies
Mom on the front porch
yelling our names
calling us home
for dinner

Remember how words tumbled
from her mouth — 
the stories she told!
We’d roll our eyes, half-turned 
to the door, yearning to go back
into the night with friends

And now

August is here again and what is summer 
without dinner on the back deck:
	corn on the cob, salt potatoes	
	grilled chicken

August is here and what is summer without 
fruit salad and ice cream 
for dessert

I don’t want to know
what I have lost
August is here and

what is summer without
a mother to call 
me home

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My mom turned 79 this week, and it is likely the last birthday she will have any semblance of awareness. Since her diagnosis in 2022, Alzheimer’s has taken so much.

Words that used to tumble from her mouth now come out scrambled and interrupted. She cannot cut her own food, let alone make the summer dinners that marked my childhood — though last week we went over and my dad made the meal described in this poem the day after I wrote it.

Alzheimer’s has made grief a long jumbled mess even as my mom is still alive.

I used to say I was pre-grieving, but my therapist told me it’s all grief. Even as some parts of her remain, I am grieving what has already been lost. I miss hearing her stories. I miss hearing her ramble on, making herself laugh and cry and laugh again. I miss so much.

I don’t know how to live in the world without my mom. And yet, I will. In some ways, I already am. I wish I could go back to the summers when she’d call my brother and me in for dinner, yelling our names across the street where we played at our friends’ houses.

But here we are. What my mom doesn’t remember, I will remember for both of us.

I will make bouquets and remember how she infused the love of flowers in me. I will read poetry and remember how she taught me to love it, opening dog-eared pages to read me her favorite poems. I will savor summer fruit and I will keep telling stories even as my own child rolls his eyes at me, because I need to keep her cadence alive in me.

I don’t want to sink in what we have lost. I want to swim in all she’s given us. I want to keep flowing in her love.

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Become Light 

Did you know butter is sunlight 
distilled into dandelions eaten by cows 
on a bright day, that those rays
survive digestion and radiate
into milk and cream

That's why udders are so warm
and cows are so content on pasture 
they’re out there becoming sunlight

When was the last time
you were so content?

I’ll tell you mine: a cup of tea
and splash of milk
a thick slab of golden fat
slathered on sourdough

I didn’t go running to burn it all off
I didn’t feel bad about it
I poured another cup 
let the butter melt on my tongue
let the butter stick to my bones

after all those years 
of imposed hunger I ate 
a stick of butter and
became light
that’s why I’m glowing
from the inside out

As it always happens, summer has asked me to close the screens when I don’t need to be on them.

And as someone who works at a computer and is also in grad school, I need to be on a screen much more than I’d prefer this season. In between, I take my dogs for walks, I make bouquets, I try to stay on top of the zucchini so I don’t end up with baseball-bat sized zukes.

And when I have a pile of zucchini, I slice them into coins and saute them with butter and garlic until they’re golden and crispy.

As tomatoes roll in, I slather toast with butter then top it with sliced tomatoes and sea salt.

I do the same with cucumbers.

And also with fresh raspberries and blueberries, smushing just-picked fruit onto buttered bread in lieu of jam.

Bread + butter + fruit.

This is the basis of my favorite summer meals. Because let’s remember that tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini are fruit, too! And what else is summer for than eating the body of flowers, and in doing so, remembering how we ourselves are capable of blooming.

And in eating butter, we are capable of becoming light.

I started writing “Become Light” last summer and finally finished it this winter. In July, I shared it at Butterfest: a celebration of the fat of the land and the richness of being together – you can read more about Butterfest on ’s newsletter:

here we are

ritual churning

Each July we throw a gathering called Butterfest. (Why and how this thing got started.) The event has grown and shifted over the years but the root concept remains: a celebration of the fat of the land and the richness of being together; an experiment in how generous and creative and joyful we can be for a couple of days; a commitment to making beauty o…

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2 months ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Grace Oedel

For a lot of my life I tried to be the smallest physical version of myself. When I started farming — when I learned how to milk goats, then cows — I started to heal from all those years of shrinking myself. Ruminants turn sunlight into milk; people turn milk into cheese, yogurt, ice cream, butter. There is so much nourishment in the world, and what a gift it is to be part of it.

Here is my summer wish for you and all of us:

May we feed each other well

May we fill up on all the deliciousness of the world

May we glow from the inside out

Did you like this poem? Would you like me to mail you poetry?!

Become a paid subscriber and you’ll receive the Poetry Post: a mail club where you receive a new poem and letter from me each month.

Become Light went out in July’s Poetry Post. The next post goes out on August 15th. Subscribe by the 14th to get the next edition!

Yes, this month brought in a heatwave, but I still love July.

How my body feels pulled to lakes and ponds and rivers. How fruit erupts and we must eat it all before the next harvest arrives and that probably means we’ll have strawberry juice on our shirts, and what a beautiful thing to be stained by a strawberry. To have sweetness cling to us, despite it all.

We are still here living, alive on this planet. And what a gift, despite it all. What a gift of possibility. I saw an NPR poll recently asking Americans if they feel the country’s best days are behind us or ahead of us. The poll was quite spilt — but I put myself in the second category. Not just because I am a mother and therefore must believe in the future, but because I have always looked to what we can create, what we can learn, what we can grow.

July is proof that the starkness of winter is not final.

Let us remember that the future is written in berry seeds and rivers. Let us gather together and dig in. Let us write poetry and let our imaginations be fruitful and generous.

Wishing you a bountiful July ~ I’ll leave you with this poem:

A couple years ago, while on a story retreat in Northern Ireland, I was in a liminal space. We had just announced the end of the CSA, and I didn’t know if I could still write about farming. I thought maybe I had to just leave it all behind. As I talked with , one of the retreat’s facilitators, and Terry, a friend of the retreat leaders, they told me no — “bring it all with you,” they said.

It’s been nearly two years since that conversation, and in many ways that time has been an extended liminality. Maybe it’s summer, or maybe it’s the way time can help us compost the past in order to find the lessons, but it’s only recently that I’ve felt an emergence from that liminal period. Now, I’m looking back at pieces I wrote throughout the 12 years of running Good Heart Farmstead. I carry them forward, the lessons and the experiences, and let them weave into what is growing now.

With that, here’s a piece I wrote seven years ago, on a late July morning when summer was in full bloom.

From the Archives: We Made All This Together, July 2019

I gave birth to my son, Waylon, six years ago.

We were living in a yurt, and the only farm structures were a sheep barn/seed house, woodshed/outhouse, and yurt.

The only “running” water came from a frost-free hydrant in the seedhouse in the middle of the field, and a squeaky hand pump in the yurt.

Sheep, turkeys, chickens, and pigs grazed on pasture. We grew for 18 CSA shares on less than ⅓ of an acre.

This morning, before coming up to my writing nook, I sat outside the house with Edge for a few moments, taking in the flowering elderberries, the greenhouse and hoophouse, the nearly 1.5 acres of crops, the light fog whispering along the edges.

And I thought: we made all this together.

I remembered how nothing really happens on its own.

We’re a communal species, more than we realize. Our own sweat dropped into soil where mycelium runs, earthworms wriggle, and roots reach out. Our own energy intertwined with the seeds that reach up, the sun that shines down, the water that quenches.

All of this growth comes from a million tiny things working together and supporting each other.

And amidst the growth, there’s cutting back.

Yesterday, as I deadheaded calendula, I thought: this is what I need to be doing — cutting back what’s not blooming, cutting back what’s diffusing my energy, and focus in on the few things that will bring me where I want to go.

It’s a fine balance between wildness and cultivation, between knowing when to let something go to seed and when to prune.

Right now it’s high summer, time to keep growing, time to stay focused if we’re to harvest all we plan on.

October will come sooner than I think, the sun will soften and go to bed earlier, and then I’ll let calendula scatter its seeds for a new generation.

But not yet.

What I’m getting at is this: prune what isn’t bringing you closer to your goals.

We don’t have sheep, turkeys, chickens, or pigs anymore. We don’t use the old seedhouse attached to the sheep barn, which has transformed into a tool shed. We no longer rely on the shallow spring that fed that squeaky hand-pump and frost-free hydrant.

Pruning all these is what let us take the leap to cultivating more acreage, to putting up a greenhouse and drilling a well, to having the time and space to plant elderberries, which are flowering now, panicles spread open on this cool morning.

What do you want to grow? What’s spreading you too thin? Who’s holding you up, saying we can do this together?

There will always be distractions, detours, quack grass trying to sneak into the carrots.

But there will also be compost to give you a boost, ladybugs to eat the aphids, and your favorite hoe to clear the way.

We’re all in this together. We can grow and create beautiful things together. You can plant a seed and grow what brings you more alive.

Now Waylon’s in my lap, falling back asleep, too big to swaddle.

So I’ll leave this here.

My son snuggling, the fields growing, and a profound awe of what grows every day — of what we can be part of if we decide to dig in.

It came out with a kind of ease that didn’t exist last year. And in the way that only other farmers respond, she also lit up and said “that must feel great!”

The truth is, it does feel great. At the core of this transition away from farming is a clarity and ease. But for a long time, it was much more complicated. It was heavy with grief and questions of worthiness.

And in a way that only others who have experienced a career with such intensity can, she asked, “has that brought up a lot around identity?”

Yes. Oh yes.

Running a farm is more than running a business.

It became who I was – or maybe I became who I thought the farm needed me to be. Most likely it’s a little of both.

In the years leading up to my shift away from the business, I couldn’t reconcile the changes happening inside with the outward projection that had become an unconscious part of my marketing. Layered onto that was climate change — flooding and drought and more flooding — and my mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and eventually I couldn’t hold it all. I gave myself a fallow season.

I’ve done a lot of internal composting over the past three years.

A lot of asking, who am I now? After so many years of introducing myself with, I’m a farmer, who was I beneath the label of a career?

And, as songs often do, Stevie Nicks’ Landslide kept me company through the digging and questioning —

I’ve been afraid of changing, cause I built my life around you…

Can I handle the seasons of my life?

It turns out that yes, I can handle the seasons — if only because I made it through them.

If you’re going through a transition right now, I want you to know that it doesn’t have to be graceful or beautiful. It’s more likely to be hard.

I remind myself often that the most nourishing soil starts as old bones and shit and discarded weeds, and all of that has to be layered and turned and heated up enough to transform into something that can grow healthy plants for the next season.

Now I’m growing into a new season, and it feels like the right time for a re-introduction.

So hello, I’m Katie. I’m a big-hearted, hope-oriented person who asks a lot of questions.

I believe that creativity is as essential as food, and my writing sprouts from the intersection of land, body, and art in all its forms. At the heart of my writing is the question: How do we grow a world of nourishment and belonging.

I write poetry and essays, and grow food and flowers, on a hillside in Vermont. As a poet and gardener, I seek to grow a world of belonging, where beauty wakes us up and food brings us together.

Thanks for being here. I’d love to know who you are beyond your job title — what do you love? What do you believe?

Maybe you need some time to turn those questions over, too.

I think that’s the beautiful gift of seasons: we can keep asking questions, keep digging, keep discovering what each turn has to teach us.

I’ll leave you with a poem today.

I wrote this one sometime last year, remembering what drew me to farming:

It was enough

remember what made it 
enough

how long days with the sky 
turned my face a constellation of freckles 

how soil caught 
my tears and turned them

into flowers, into sungold
cherry tomatoes, into something 

that filled every plate
and vase and heart with beauty

how soil embedded
in my fingerprints

so anywhere I went
I could hold up my hand

and show you 
where I came from

that kind of belonging —
it was enough

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It’s Mother’s Day, and though I’m not inherently against brunch, there’s a way this day makes it feel forced.

I’ll gladly accept flowers any day of the week, but more than a fresh bouquet, I want the world to change. I want mothers to be heard, respected, and honored not with a box of chocolate but with policy change. I want a world that understands the might and strength of mothers’ love. The strength of peace.

And that’s how this “holiday” began — with a mother proclaiming peace. A mother demanding that politicians stop sending sons to war.

Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, after the wreckage of the Civil War. Here’s an excerpt:

Her proclamation inspired my poem above. And it reminds me of the power of words and poetry.

Even if writing doesn’t bring immediate change, it plants the seeds of change. It offers visions of other possibilities, and it connects people who once may have felt alone in their aching or dreaming. That connection helps grow change.

Poetry is an act of imagination. Writing is mapmaking, laying down words as pathways.

Can you imagine what it meant for a woman in 1870 — who was not viewed as a citizen and didn’t even have rights to her children because they legally belonged only to her husband — to write the Mother’s Day Proclamation. She didn’t live in a world that granted her rights, but she felt a world that could be and she wrote into it.

In 2024, when I was on a story retreat in Northern Ireland, I learned the word imaginal. Cynthia Bourgeault describes the imaginal realm as “a meeting ground, a place of active exchange between two bandwidths of reality.”

I came upon this word again while reading The Beginning Comes After The End. In it, Rebecca Solnit writes:

“The beginning comes after the end. A chrysalis is the beginning of a butterfly, but in that chrysalis is no elegant transition. The caterpillar falls apart — it turns to goo, and something profoundly different reconstitutes from it, guided by the hitherto dormant imaginal cells. In that slurry, the dissolving caterpillar’s immune system perceives the imaginal cells as alien and attacks them. But they survive, multiply, and set in motion the instructions to become a butterfly.”

Later, she equates ideas to imaginal cells:

“Ideas have power, and while those who support them often dismiss that power, those who fear them recognize they can change the world…Ideas are seeds in that they are beginnings; if they succeed, they do so as they take on more tangible and concrete forms. They become how the world is, how we do things; they guide our practical actions, whether it’s our relationships to each other or the land. Seeds — or imaginal cells, the instructions for transformation.”

Ideas and seeds. Poetry and proclamations.

They become how the world is.

What seeds are you planting?

What words are you reading?

What ideas are you tending?

This morning, when my husband said “Happy Mother’s Day” I asked him if he got me the redistribution of wealth. He smiled and said yes, he’s on it.

He did get me two apple trees, plus a flowering crabapple and an oak tree. We’ll plant those later today, and in their own way these trees are a redistribution of wealth. They are free meals and food sovereignty.

When you plant a tree, you plant a future where there is abundance to share.

It’s not definite. The apple trees are replacing two we’d planted a couple years ago that didn’t make it, but the act of planting is a commitment to continuing care.

We don’t know what the future holds, and that’s precisely why we write and plant. It’s why we seek and give beauty in the form of flowers, why we feed each other.

Because maybe this poem plants a seed that turns into connection that turns into community that turns into advocacy that turns into policy change.

Maybe a proclamation written 156 years ago is exactly what we need to bolster our actions today as we live for a world where all children are safe and fed and loved.

Come with me into the imaginal, come with me into the garden — we will sow a future of love.

For Mother’s Day Give Me

Flowers and the redistribution of wealth. A bouquet of locally grown tulips and universal health care. I don’t want brunch. I don’t want to smile in public. I want lilacs and gun control laws.

I want every bomb to explode into seeds and every land my government destroyed to be given over to wildflowers and the mothers who will never stop grieving. Give us poppies and the end to every war. 

Give us clean water and clear air, free school meals and food sovereignty. For Mothers’ Day, give me the laughter of my child and a handful of seeds. Come with me into the garden and help sow the future.

It’s such a sweet event, held at Silloway Maple’s sugarhouse where maple sap gets boiled down into syrup.

It was a delight to hear Taylor Mardis Katz and Sasha Hom perform their work.

At the end of the readings, we ate maple creemees, which is an appropriately Vermont-y way to conclude National Poetry Month. (For those outside of Vermont, creemees are soft serve ice cream with a slightly higher butterfat content so they’re richer and creamier).

Today, I want to share with you one of the poems I read, called The Potatoes Have Eyes:

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I wrote this in March, as part of a fundraiser for the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network.

I was thinking about the ways history and lineage weave together to inform how we move in the present. Many of my ancestors came from Ireland, and though others came from Italy and Germany, the matrilineal lines on both sides of my family are rooted in Ireland, and it’s that Irish identity that has been most strongly passed down through the generations. My family has records listing our ancestors as farmers who spoke Irish, and I wish I could hear their voices and know their stories.

When the first waves of Irish immigrants arrived in the United States, they faced discrimination and hatred. Now, we see immigrants from Latine, African, and Middle-Eastern countries treated horrendously.

I reach back into my lineage and wonder: what did my own immigrant ancestors face, and how do I act now, knowing they did not have the protection of my current identity. How do I show up bolstered by the fierce love of people who risked all they knew in order to seek the possibility of a safer life for their children?

This is the energy behind The Potatoes Have Eyes.

The energy of fierce love. Of feeding each other. Of growing toward the possibility that we can still plant a future that nourishes all.

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He told us, “There’s technically a two-day waiting period, but I’m a hopeless romantic, so come back tomorrow!”

We spent the night at the Viking Lodge, a cabin two hours south, tucked in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. The next morning, we drove back to Tok and got married.

And then we set off across the country on a three-week road trip/honeymoon. Now, 15 years later, we’re celebrating with a three-day trip into the mountains for some climbing and hiking.

When I gave Edge the poem below for Valentine’s Day, our son didn’t think it counted as a love poem. It’s not a poem for courtship or even the first year of marriage. Instead, it’s a poem that can withstand the visible annoyances for the deeper understanding between two hearts.

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Folding
for Edge

your side of the bed
is a mess
as if you’ve never
heard of folding —
	just roll and toss
		clothes to the 
floor

and why not?
your hands, perpetually
stained with soil
have known fresh
        lettuce to grow out
                of what once was 
				        discarded

I have learned not to look
too long at the unpaired
socks, the mass of wrinkled shirts,
        pant legs stretching 
                        beyond the pile

you have learned it 
bothers me, how I need
        space   to     think
how my crowded thoughts trip 
                                        on tattered
				                hems

sometimes you (attempt to)
fold my clothes
        (though I shake them out
        and refold when you’re not 
        looking)

and yet I fold into you
feel the warmth 
of your chest
        toss my anxiety into
                your heat
                let it compost
			into breath

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Edge saw the love in it, and rather than framing or tacking it up somewhere, he folded creases in the poem and set it on the shelf above the sink, where he sees it each night as he does the dishes.

And as he cleans the kitchen, I fold the laundry.

p.s. Come see me on Saturday, April 25 for Farmer Poetry Night in Randolph, VT!

This event is part of PoemTown Randolph, in celebration of National Poetry Month. The poetry reading is followed by maple creemees!

Perhaps more likely: When was the last time you thought about your food and where it comes from?

Today, I invite you to weave those two things together — joy and food — and put them on a map.

If you, like me, feel whiplash and horror at the news and what the US Administration is doing, it can sometimes feel like nothing good is happening. But when I look out the window, when I talk with my neighbors, when I connect with people who are involved in feeding others both in Vermont and across the country, I see a much different landscape. And I believe that in order to grow a future that nourishes, we must focus on and grow nourishment here and now.

In 2024, as part of the Food Solutions New England Network Leadership Institute, I helped create Mapping Joy in the Food System: A project to bolster collective food system narratives.

As a group of people working in food systems, we wanted to shine a light on the reasons why we grow food and feed people. I was reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights at the time, and his work directly influenced this project.

As it says on the Map, we wanted to offer proof and possibility:

Proof of the many people and projects that are making a positive difference, and how they are imperative to creating a just and equitable food system. Proof of impact and the importance of funding resilient food system projects.

Possibility of the nourishment we can create when we connect individual projects in a network. Possibility of what can come from supportive policy, funding, attention, and care.

Now stewarded by UVM’s Institute for Agroecology, the map continues to live and grow!

You can explore the many points of joy and add your joy here.

And now, here are two poems for tomatoes and joy:

The first is one I wrote a few summers ago.

Every spring when I’m preparing the garden, there are certain harvests I look forward to the most. Tomatoes are on the top of the list. My favorite varieties are Rose de Berne and Green Zebra.

This second one is by . I love it so much:

Today, look for joy. And if you can’t find it, find a way to plant some.

Do you want poetry in the mail?! Upgrade your subscription to receive the Poetry Post!

Paid subscribers receive a snail-mail poem every month. Upgrade here:

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Finally, I leave you today with these words by Ross Gay on Joy:

Mapping Joy in the Food System

I’d love to send you a poem in the mail!

Paid subscribers to Art & Soil get a poem mailed to them every month. Subscribe or upgrade by April 10, and I’ll put one in the post for you, too.

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The more I write poetry, the more I understand it as a mycelial network.

Poetry connects us, transmits energy, gives nourishment, wakes us up.

When I’m in a writing lull, reading poetry reignites my own creativity. When I share poems, I feel a similar response from others, which in turn lights me up again.

Today, in celebration of the poetic mycelial network, I have three poems to share with you.

The first is from my friend , who is another farmer poet in Vermont. Taylor just released her book Intergalactic Devotion and it’s so beautiful.

These poems are alive.

They give me the feeling of a cool stone on a hot day: weighty and grounding while at the same time instigating. What would happen if you threw the stone into the water? What kind of splash would it make? Let’s find out – and then retrieve it and look again, look closer, feel how the stone holds a millenia of change, feel how it holds grief but also flecks of mica that make it sparkle, despite the centuries.

Intergalactic Devotion will hold your heaviness, sprinkle you with biodegradable glitter, and make you laugh.

You can hear Taylor read the title poem here: Intergalactic Devotion

And you can get a copy of her book at Free Verse Farm Shop.

Next: one poem that inspired me, and the poem I wrote in response.

Every day in March, I wrote and shared poems with my sponsors for the March Arts Marathon, a fundraiser for the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network. Some days poems started propagating in my head before I got out of bed. Other days, I needed to seek out inspiration.

One trove of inspiration came from Upon Learning That: a collection of poetry based on facts about the natural world, curated and edited by . Here’s a poem by :

Which inspired me to write my own poem with the same title:

Upon learning that if you lay out all the veins in one human body end to end, they could stretch around the earth more than twice

I reach out
see where
my fingertips end

pick up a pen
and imagine
the ink lines

as veins 
write these words
send them around

the world pulsing
and grass-stained, wild and
tangling with mycelium

can you smell 
the soil in these lines
are you scattering

words like seeds
in response? are you 
stretching twice around

the world? is your ear
to the ground
listening? I am listening —

are you marveling?
I am marveling 
in the hum

And here’s a beautiful number to add to the hum: in March, Vermont artists raised $95,011 for the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network!

A generous reminder of how art brings us together and grows communities of care.

Thank you, as ever, for reading and connecting with me here. I’d love to read your poems, too! Share in the comments or tag me in notes – together we’ll keep growing that poetic mycelial network.

p.s. Save the date for Farmer Poetry Night: April 25 at 7pm!

I’ll be reading alongside Taylor Mardis Katz and Sasha Hom at Silloway Maple in Randolph, VT. More details to come, but for now please mark it on your calendar and join us later this month for poems and maple creemees.

Planting seeds and seedlings outside is still at least a month away (for the hopeful), though more likely two (for those who, like me, live on colder mountain hillsides).

Which makes today a perfect day for another cup of tea and reading poetry. And — it’s World Poetry Day!

In celebration, here’s one new poem and two from the archives:

This isn’t a good poem

but I want to be good 
even when 
this want makes
me feel bad

this isn’t a great poem
but it’s not pretending
it’s not heralding spring as if
last night didn’t dump 
a few inches of wet snow
over yesterday’s sunshine

this is not an outstanding poem
it’s just sitting here
as my dog lays on her bed
by my feet
doing nothing 
but being

waiting for me to notice 
and do the same

***

I wrote this one on March 4 as part of the March Arts Marathon, a fundraiser for the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network.

We’ve now collectively raised over $90,000! As a participating artist, I’m sending out a daily poem to my subscribers all month. If you’d like daily poems for the rest of the month, you can donate here.

Donate to CVRAN

***

To Make A Meal

We began this meal
with seed catalogs and tea,
dreaming nourishment

Spring came: rain and mud
You bent in the greenhouse, you
a moving prayer

Summer: crops vining
blooming, ripening. Roots hold
to soil as we weed

This is what they don’t
tell you: how much you’ll pull out—
how much space growth needs.

Wheelbarrows of weeds!
So onions can bulb, so we
Can chop and sauté

And now the harvest
Another prayer: thank you
roots, leaves, fruits, flowers

And now the table:
barely room to place a glass,
we finally eat

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I love haiku, but I also love long poems. This one is a series of haiku, pairing the rules and order of haiku with tendrils that keep reaching out.

Just like a garden!

And now, one more poem for spring:

Hope

It can be easy to dismiss, 
like the slight wisp of dandelion fluff 
blowing away on the wind

But hope has roots

Like the dandelion it knows
how to bridge memory
and dream

knows how the future
is nothing but 
a dispersal of seeds

parachuting into the sky only
to land and soften again
to nestle into soil until one day

May comes and entire fields
bloom golden 
like sunlight

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May is true spring, when we are actually planting the garden. I wrote this poem a couple of years ago, during ‘s “Poem a Day in the Month of May” series.

If you aren’t already reading her essays and poetry, you can find her at – and join me over there when she shares daily poetry prompts in May!

Wishing you a beautiful start to spring, whether it’s snowy or flowery. May the seeds we plant this season nourish and grow a loving world.

How to Stare Into Space

throw your phone
off a cliff 
to save 

your mind — frantic
like a thousand bees
	swarming —

there’s music 
in there somewhere
listen

as the buzz
turns to waves
with each breath

lift your face
	to the open sky
let it swallow you

let the bees escape
from your open mouth
        let them pollinate

wildflowers that are
suddenly surrounding you
                                        for miles

wildflowers that were 
here all along
        that could only be seen

when you stared 
        far enough into 
                        the open blue

of possibility

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This poem came to me the other day after I couldn’t stop scrolling all the bad news on my phone.

I’ve been feeling a jumble lately – restless, buzzing, and yet unsure of which direction to focus. I wonder what bees feel like on warm days in late winter. What they think when they leave the hive only to find snow stretched out for miles. If they look for flowers. If they feel restless.

[Note: I stopped writing to learn about bees on warm winter days. They leave the hive on what are called cleansing flights to remove waste. Which makes me think of spring cleaning and leads me to wonder again at how profoundly life connects life. Humans cleanse. Bees cleanse! We all have cycles of clearing out…this is a brief glimpse into my mind these days.]

Anyway, I’m feeling restless.

These past two months have been extra heavy for all the political reasons and also for some personal reasons. Sometimes I stop to remember we are all wading through things that others don’t see, and this softens me. Sometimes I don’t remember this, and I feel like a thousand bees swarming – loud and dangerous and impatient.

Those are the days I need to swim, or to go for an extra-long ski in the woods, and to stop looking at my phone and the scroll of horrors that make me freeze.

Those are the days I escape into magical books. The kind of books that delight and intrigue and remind me how wonder and imagination shape the future just as much as anything else. This is why people who seek power for the sake of control want to ban books. This is why we must keep reading all the books! To stretch our imagination. To understand our connections. To grow a world where care is more powerful than control.

On that note, here are three book recommendations for you

If you’re looking for witchy-cozy-fantasy, I highly recommend:

A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, by Sangu Mandanna.

I loved this so much that I immediately read another book by Mandanna: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

Both books have themes of power, discrimination, immigration, belonging, and found family. If you like novels with magical realism, you’ll love these!

Another book that knocked my socks off is The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar.

This faerie-tale story is about the bond and love of two sisters, and is set in a place where grammar flows through a river. As much about the magic of language as it is about the power of land and love, this book is unlike anything I’ve ever read. I highly recommend the audio-book version!

Those are my affiliate links to Bookshop.org, but these three books are also available through the library and on Libby.

What books are you loving right now? Let me know!

And one last thing – the March Arts Marathon starts on March 1st.

This fundraiser for the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network supports asylum seekers and refugee families in Vermont with housing, living expenses, and legal fees. When you donate to the fundraiser, I’ll send you a poem each day in March.

Thanks for reading and connecting here. I’m grateful for you, and I believe in all of us who are creating and growing care in this bumbly-buzzing world.

The conference’s theme was Seeding The Future — a reminder that what we sow now creates the possibilities to come, and a call to seed a future that nourishes all.

Here’s the poem I shared:

Root Words

Here, take these words
let them grow like
seeds inside 
your heart
let the syllables turn 
to roots strong enough
to lift up any song
so when you are grieving
you may wail
when you are ecstatic
you may shout
and when the notes fade
you know
you are held 
in the silence
held in the trust
that those root words
will bloom again
writing a healed world 
into your hands
giving you seeds
to plant and
make it so

- Katie Spring

As we lean into seed starting season, here are some of my stand-by favorite varieties:

What are you looking forward to planting this year – literally or metaphorically?

I’m very excited about Rose de Berne and Green Zebra tomatoes, basil, and a lot of flowers.

Also: more poetry, joy, and community.

And especially more poetry workshops with farmers and gardeners! and I had so much fun leading the Words As Seeds: Poetry For Change workshop at the NOFA-VT Winter Conference. Taylor even brought a mailbox for poetry. It was great, and I’ll keep you posted when more events like this sprout up.

On that note, I invite you to join me in the March Arts Marathon – a fundraiser for the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network (CVRAN).

This fundraiser supports asylum seekers and refugee families in Vermont with housing, living expenses, and legal fees.

At a time when our country is being rocked by fear and violence, we need more ways to creatively take care of each other. The March Arts Marathon is a generative way to connect with local artists while supporting CVRAN’s work.

When you donate to the fundraiser, I’ll send you a poem a day in March.

That’s 31 poems! You can donate any amount - from $5 to $15 to $50 or more.

Donate Now

All money raised will go toward housing, living expenses, legal fees and other support services for the asylum seekers and refugees whom CVRAN supports in Central Vermont. Together, we can show how many people are weaving a network of support. Like mycelium through the soil, we can create a foundation for growth and nourishment.

Here’s to seeding a future where all are fed.

1. The February Poetry Post goes out on the 15th!

What is the Poetry Post, you ask? Once a month, paid subscribers of Art & Soil will receive a poem and letter in the mail. If you love snail mail, poetry, and holding something real in your hands, this is for you.

To receive the post, become a paid subscriber by the 10th of the month.

Subscriptions are either $7/month or $70/year (two months free!). Poems will be mailed by the 15th of each month.

Subscribe now

Paid subscribers must fill out this form to receive the Poetry Post.

2. Join me and fellow poet-farmer at the NOFA-VT Winter Conference for a workshop titled Words as Seeds: Poetry for Change

This is one of my favorite events of the year! NOFA-VT brings farmers, gardeners, and homesteaders together just as the earth tilts again toward the sun and light stretches over the land for 10 hours a day again – a tipping point for growth.

This year, Taylor and I are co-leading a workshop on poetry for change. Here’s the official description:

In times of change, words can serve as roots that hold us steady and seeds that foster new possibilities. This workshop explores poetry as a tool for activism, highlighting poems that spark imagination and social action. Participants will write a collaborative poem and experience how the act of creating together forms a mycelial network that strengthens connection and inspires collective action.

Register for the conference and join us on Saturday, February 14.

3. I’m a participating artist in the March Arts Marathon – a fundraiser for the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network (CVRAN).

This fundraiser supports asylum seekers and refugee families in Vermont with housing, living expenses, and legal fees.

At a time when our country is being rocked by fear and violence, we need more ways to creatively take care of each other. The March Arts Marathon is a generative way to connect with local artists while supporting CVRAN’s work — I hope you’ll join me!

When you donate to the fundraiser, I’ll send you a poem a day in March.

That’s 31 poems! You can donate any amount - from $5 to $15 to $50 or more.

All money raised will go toward housing, living expenses, legal fees and other support services for the asylum seekers and refugees whom CVRAN supports in Central Vermont. Together, we can show how many people are weaving a network of support. Like mycelium through the soil, we can create a foundation for growth and nourishment.

Here’s a poem I wrote in last year’s marathon:

May we open our doors, feed each other, and grow a world of belonging.

Little Riot

the riot started
in the cracks —
a seed that settled but
didn’t give up
when it felt 
concrete

somewhere in our cells
we remember
how our softness
softens even the hardest 
around us

the seed shed 
its coat, gave up
protection for
the pulse of 
possibility

that turned out
to be life

Dear friends,

The first three weeks of the year have already held too much suffering. I have so many words bubbling up, and then grief weighing me down, and small action propelling me forward.

There’s a term in farming called “hardening off” – when you move seedlings from the protection of the greenhouse to a mid-way point between the ideal conditions and the unknowns of the field.

Before you plant seedlings out, they need to build up proverbial muscle and get used to the wind and sun. Otherwise, they may never grow to their full potential.

Last week, my friend and I went to a protest outside of the Williston, VT ICE office. A few minutes before we left, we heard there was concern about safety, based on a comment left in a Facebook group.

It gave us pause for a moment, and then we both agreed that this was about building our own proverbial muscles.

The event was peaceful and energizing and cold. It may not have made an immediate difference to ICE’s operation in Vermont, but it brought us together with 300 others, gained media attention, and bolstered the Williston Selectboard to pass a resolution opposing ICE.

Well beyond that small protest, we’ve seen the power of people coming together in Minneapolis.

My friend wrote about her experience there with interfaith leaders, and rooting into the power of being nice:

The power of “Minnesota Nice” and simple, human language

Related to importance of knowing ‘who we are’, Minnesotans are very proud of how nice they are. None of the people from the city I met were talking in ANY kind of jargon about why they were there. None told me their political party or their theory of change. They said things like:

• “This is plain wrong.” “I love my neighbors.” “My heart breaks for those kids.” “This is not who we are.” “We don’t really want to be out here in the cold, but we’re Minnesota tough.” “They picked the wrong city.”

• Reclaiming neighborliness and basic “niceness” (and wow does it have teeth!)

• Using plain language and appealing to basic human concepts brings people in rather than making everyone be a perfect ally.

Read her entire post here: We’re taking notes, Minneapolis!

The thing I keep coming back is this:

Soft hearts lead fiercely.

Cruelty and violence want us to shrink and retract.

Softening allows us to reach out, to give and ask for help, to send out roots that can grow into an entire world of possibility.

Let us build muscle for loving action.

Let us not give up.

Let us remember every seed that has cracked through concrete and bloomed.

Let us be those seeds, cracking what is hard, making way for a softer, kinder world.

Just a quick note on this first Monday of the new year.

1. The first Poetry Post of the year is going in the mail on January 15!

Once a month, paid subscribers of Art & Soil will receive a poem and letter in the mail. Poems will be mailed by the 15th of each month.

To receive the post, become a paid subscriber by the 10th of the month. Subscriptions are either $7/month or $70/year (two months free!).

Subscribe now

Paid subscribers must fill out this form in order to receive the Poetry Post.

I’m really excited for this tactile way to share poetry with you! I have the first few months sketched out, and January’s post will reveal the theme of the year’s poems.

2. My word of the year: Wend

Wend (verb): to go in a specified direction, typically slowly or by an indirect route.

I’m a wanderer at heart, often forgetting the time and then being surprised when the clock suddenly jumps hours ahead of where I’d last checked it. At least, it seems sudden to me. In December, I told my husband that I was late because I have a whimsical relationship with time.

To move slowly feels both rebellious and rejuvenating. To wend feels like an invitation to wander, to explore, to allow myself to follow the curiosities that arise along the way.

All the while, I do move in a specific direction. And this year, that direction is toward more poetry, creativity, community, and nourishment.

And on that note…

3. My first poem of 2026:

January

they speak of newness
but the dark still cradles me
curled up until spring

it is not time to
unfurl – don’t you see how ice
sparkles in stillness

no rush to wake up
in this season of dreaming
let yourself be held

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Do you have a word of the year? A poem that’s guiding you? Leave a comment to let me know! Wishing you an easeful start to 2026~

What has nourished you?

What is nourishing you?

What will nourish you?

I started Art & Soil after a fallow season, with this question at the foundation: How do we grow nourishment?

At the time, there was the specific lens of farming – how do we create a system where farmers don’t burn out while nourishing others? But the lens quickly widened to encompass all of life.

How do we nourish each other? How do we nourish the land? And how do we receive nourishment? It should be so simple. And yet our society makes it complicated. We live in a country where 63 million tons of food is wasted while millions experience hunger and food insecurity. This is just one example of a societal imagination rooted in greed and inequity over connection and care.

As 2025 closes and 2026 opens, I want to go back to the roots.

To the simple mutuality that sustains and nourishes life. I want to grow systems of nourishment.

In her book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes:

“All that we need to live flows through the land. It is not an empty metaphor that we call her Mother Earth. Food in our mouths is the thread that connects us in a relationship simultaneously spiritual and physical, as our bodies get fed and our spirits nourished by a sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods.”

The beautiful gift here is that the answers already exist – we don’t need to create something brand new, but simply to grow along with the Earth. To tend to each other and to be nourished in return.

I believe that creativity is as essential as food, so my answers to those three questions include both:

What has nourished you?

Poetry has nourished me this year. From reading it to writing it to sharing it, the creative pulse of poems has sparked my heart and deepened connections.

What is nourishing you?

During a cold Vermont winter, sweet potatoes and black beans, fresh bread with a generous slab of butter, another cup of tea with a splash of milk, a square of caramel-filled dark chocolate – all of these are nourishing me.

What will nourish you?

A new year doesn’t open all at once. And like January, I feel a deep need for continued rest, for wandering through the snow-filled forest on my skis as my dog bounds ahead, for entering slowly into the year. In the months ahead, paying attention to my energy level and allowing myself the rest I need will nourish me.

As I wrote coming out of my fallow season: Who knows what will sprout up from the rested, replenished soil of your soul.

Please leave a comment with your answers to these questions! Let’s set words as seeds and grow into a new year of nourishment together.

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Poetry Pop-Up Shop

I have a new poem in ’s Winter Issue:

I wrote this poem last year after coming home from a story retreat in Northern Ireland.

On the first day of that retreat, told us, “where you start a story will often determine where it ends.”

In his book, How Not To Be Afraid, Gareth writes, “The stories we tell shape how we experience everything.”

And that idea has been turning over in me ever since, asking me to explore the stories I’m reading and telling, asking me to ask: where does this story begin, and what is the impact of it being told in this way?

The first line — In the beginning there was Beauty — came to me in Northern Ireland, but it spilled onto the page when I was home, sitting at the window and looking out to the Worcester mountain range. Through its many iterations and revisions (this single poem takes up 4 handwritten pages in my notebook, plus more editing in digital form), the one thing that remained constant is where the poem begins, and how that beginning brings us back to the light we’re all made of.

In between is the beauty and heartache and liminality of life.

When it comes to liminal spaces, I often look to , who helped lead the story retreat in Northern Ireland. In her latest book, Everything Is A Story, she uses the metaphor of an oak tree, from acorn to mature tree, to guide us through the life of a story. Kaitlin asks us to dig deeper into the stories we carry and pass on, and to ask how we can tell a more nourishing story. This is not an easy task. And while there are some parts of every story where the main character goes out alone, we must also remember the call toward connection.

Kaitlin writes:

“This work of kinship and solidarity requires us to lean into these liminal spaces where we connect with one another, where we dream and ask big questions together, not just to get answers but because the work of asking in community creates community.”

And later, in the final chapter titled “The Future of Storytelling,” Kaitlin asks:

“What if, instead of three wishes, we had three seeds? What if you had three seeds in the palm of your hand waiting to be planted somewhere, waiting to become stories, to go on their own journey of changing the world?”

I often think of words as seeds.

It’s what makes writing so powerful. Poetry, essays, books – the stories we tell – grow culture and society, grow the world we live in. And as Gareth says, those stories shape how we experience everything.

I want to experience the world as thriving, nourishing, filled with possibility. I want to feed each other stories that grow from love and help us set seeds that sprout connection.

On that note, I invite you to join me and , a fellow farmer-poet, at the NOFA-VT Winter Conference where we’ll be leading a session called Words as Seeds - Poetry for Change.

We’ll ask questions together, ask what we want to create, and then plant seeds that sprout into poems to be shared. I hope you’ll be able to join us!

Until then, may you find beauty in your days.

May you propagate and share that beauty. May it speed like light around the world, reconnecting us in joy.

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Vermont is already covered in snow, with nights dipping down below 0ºF. It’s a proper winter, and I hope it stays this way. I love the magic of snow and cozying up by the wood stove and having another cup of tea.

Winter is also a time I sit longer in my rocking chair, reading poetry and looking out to the mountains. And I think you should give yourself this gift, too: slow mornings with words that spark your heart.

Or perhaps you’ll give that gift to someone else?!

Either way, I’m excited to tell you that my Poetry Pop-Up Shop is open now through December 19!

You’ll find poetry prints, photo/poem collages, and chapbooks, including my new chapbook: Light Heart.

Light Heart is a collection of poems that weave together whimsy, softness, and heartache.

These poems are airy and rooted, funny and serious, grieving and filled with possibility.

Here’s one of the poems from Light Heart:

Make This

What are we preparing for?
The end, or
the beginning?
Survival 
and sustainability
are close, but 
one is more generous.
Either way
we'll set ourselves
in motion
why not make this
a joyful revolution

Poetry Pop-Up Shop

Thanks for reading and being part of Art & Soil.

May these poems spark your heart and warm you through the winter.

~Katie

Today is Thanksgiving, but I prefer to say thank you everyday.

It’s how I end most journal entries:

thank you
thank you
thank you

A prayer and reminder and state of being all rolled into one. We need it all — gratitude isn’t always easy. It often asks us to peel back the layers and see what’s broken, to look long enough to find what’s still growing and what’s possible from the turning of time’s compost.

For many Native Americans, today is a day of mourning. As millions of people across the US sit down to eat turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, we must remember that this holiday, purported to celebrate the gathering and sharing of food, also hides the history of how indigenous foodways were attacked by colonial settlers.

Within colonizing systems, there is a long history of controlling food to disconnect people from power. In the US, that includes clear-cutting forested hunting grounds in the Northeast, slaughtering buffalo herds in the Great Plains, and damming rivers where salmon used to run freely.

In my own Irish lineage, this includes England’s political starvation that led to the Great Famine. As the blight devastated Ireland’s potato crop, England controlled the Irish-grown wheat, barley, oats, butter, and more and exported it all out of Ireland. The crops that could have saved millions were instead shipped out of ports under the watch of English soldiers.

And today, the world watches as ports and border crossings into Gaza are controlled by Israel, who has restricted food from entering the country, causing mass starvation and death.

The politics of starvation are too heavy for any individual to hold. The grief, woven through land and water and seeds, must be held collectively — millions of open palms, beating hearts, coming together to remind each other how alongside the pain there are stories of people feeding each other. There are stories of flotillas braving seas to bring food. There are stories showing us how to reweave our belonging to the land, how to cook and gather together to rejoice in this basic yet profound ability to feed each other. And when we do, we say thank you.

To say thank you in times of grief is to light a spark so we may see the next step.

To say thank you is to plant a seed for a future harvest that may nourish each other.

This morning, as I made my Nana’s apple pie, I thought again of how she put butter on everything. How, whenever we visited, she’d look at me and say, “You need to put some meat on your bones.”

I wonder now, how much of her buttering and baking and insistence on having a little extra on my scant frame came from the history passed down through her Irish grandmother. It’s been 22 years since Nana passed away, but I can still taste the turkey sandwiches she made with butter and mayonnaise. How she kept her freezer stocked with ice cream. How she loved us through extra helpings. Even now, decades later, I say thank you for her love.

That kind of love is needed in mourning and in celebration.

Whether this day brings you pain or joy or a tangled mix of both, may you feel held.

May you find some connection to the land that endures through generations.

May we all tend to those connections by picking up strands from the layers of history that pulse with possibility for a loving world.

May we say thank you as we grow toward it.