Meet the Co-Directors - Katharine

Dear Friends,

This is Katharine, another new Co-Director here at Plainsong. I’d like to formally introduce myself and tell you what excites me about our work here at the farm.

I came to the farm in 2019 eager to learn about growing food on a larger scale, naively thinking I might want to be a farmer.  I tagged along with the first group of fellows as a volunteer, learning things like how to use a broadfork, while having challenging conversations about food, faith, and life.  When it was time for the fellows to leave, I wanted to stay.  

Though I’ve lived in a number of cities around the world, working at Plainsong has brought me back to my roots growing up in rural Michigan.  I have a background in formation and spiritual direction as well as a love for all things related to gardening and homesteading, the connection of which drew me to the farm.  Seeking beauty in my home life while trying to live intentionally in ways that both nurture spirit and care for our broken earth as I grow the four, teen humans I call my own has given me both practical handiwork skills as well as a perspective on how hard and yet vital this work is.  

When I came to Plainsong my spiritual path had taken a turn.  What I found at the farm was a spacious place - a place that allowed me to hold questions, to express my faith in new and different ways, a place that nurtured me and brought healing in unexpected ways.  Though caring for the earth wasn’t new to me, noticing the earth’s care of me was.  I  experienced prayer and reciprocity in so many new ways - in listening to the abundant birdsong, in singing with co-workers under the silver maple, in using my body to weed carrots or pray the embodied Lord’s Prayer.

Plainsong is all about making connections - to our places, to each other, to God and to ourselves.  I have taken the connections nurtured here back home with me - to the friendly toads in my garden boxes, to my times of quiet watching the goldfinches in my backyard, to meaningful discussions around the family dinner table.  Though I no longer want to be a full-time farmer, I am excited to be a part of nurturing spacious belonging and cultivating for others the kind of connections that have been so valuable to me.  

Thank you for making these connections possible.                                                    
grace and peas,
Katharine

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