[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!
Melanie Faith
Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.
Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.
The Society of Professional Journalists
In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.
I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.
Maxine Greene
Philosopher and Education Scholar
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Everything Is Waiting for You
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
From David Whyte’s “Everything Is Waiting for You“
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
The weight of aloneness is everywhere. In the thoughts we have about “if” and “should” and “ought.” In the work of traveling away from ourselves, our truth, and our knowing. In the state of perpetual doubt on which our minds perseverate. In the fear that burrows in the corners of our heart. In the anger that consumes the very essence of our elemental peace. Shed aloneness like a snake’s skin, like a butterfly’s cocoon, like night’s darkness.
Whyte asks us to consider something else. He explains, “Alertness is the discipline of familiarity.” I take this to mean aloneness eases when we pay attention. Abandonment changes when we find pathways through the everyday filled with breath and light and connection. Isolation moves when we dance with the familiar and the strange. Separation shifts when we open our minds, hearts, and hands to the not yet and the as if. Everything enters in.
About Katie
Born in Louisville. Live in Atlanta. Curious by nature. Researcher by education. Writer by practice. Grateful heart by desire.
Buy the Book!
The Stage Is On Fire, a memoir about hope and change, reasons for voyaging, and dreams burning down can be purchased on Amazon.
