Instinct is a Language
Reading storms, following cats, and finding safety in our skins
Aren’t We All?
This week, I started writing down the intriguing things people say about the barn as they visit. I noted their thoughts on why they come here, what they discover when they arrive, and why they stay.
This is a sampling of what I heard:
“This is the only place I can show up as myself.” - Heather A.
“There is a sense of timelessness about the barn. If you pay attention, there are things that change, but this place has a sense of timelessness that is comforting.”
- Stephanie K.
I’m trying to be more conscious of my internal pressure gauge, noticing where I feel comfortable and where I feel tense. My work focuses on helping people reconnect with their bodies and the messages they receive every waking and sleeping moment, through their always-receiving, organic antenna.
I think I’m pretty good at it, and then I’ll become aware of how much internal pressure I’m carrying, and I realize that I have lots of old habits to release and that the journey will always be ever reaching, shifting, and growing.
One of our beloveds in the barn reads the weather through her body. She messages me throughout the day about incoming storms. She’s a walking barometer.
She says, “As a storm comes closer, either incoming or generating, I start to feel it in my belly.”
“You’re an antenna,” I say.
“Aren’t we all?”
We should be. We have an amazing internal system that is begging for us to notice, to let our bodies take charge and our minds take a little rest.
And nothing drives this home for me more than listening to the words of people noticing their bodies when they’re visiting the farm — AND the things I learn from watching cats.
Let’s get started.
My Protector
I didn’t do a lot of weed eating last year because I was stumped by re-spooling the string and too proud to ask for help. I kept putting it off as the weeds took over the fence lines, but when I finally added it to Christopher’s to-do list, the weed eater was strung and ready for work in ten minutes. (Thank you, Christopher.)
My energy cycles in a pattern of feast or famine. I’ll procrastinate and worry about things I need to do for a while before tackling it all in a flurry of activity. So this past week, when sessions were over for the day or I had a spare hour here and there, I’d head to the graveyard field with my weed eater and trim around the horse’s final resting spots and along the hedgerows of blackberry thorns and poison ivy.
I wear noise-canceling headphones when I’m working on the tractor or messing with equipment, but when the music is turned off, I move through a period of adjustment from my outside voice to my inside voice.
As I washed the bits of weeds off my face in the kitchen sink after trimming the field, a thorn held in sweat at my temple started a weird game of passing from my finger to my face, embedding itself deeper and deeper on each swipe while I desperately tried to wash it off.
As the thorn bounced back and forth from skin to skin, I yelled, “Ow, Ow, OW.”
When I finally resolved the thorn dilemma, I went in search of my mother and Gideon in the back of the house.
Gideon is my little Siberian kitten who is nine months old now and a perfect beefcake who doesn’t like to be held, but also hates being left alone. He’s not affectionate, and he is not cold. He’s a beautiful balance of proud independence and careful observation.
As my mother cleaned his litter box, he heard me yelling in the kitchen as I washed the mulch off my face.
“If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t believe it,” Mom said.
Gideon heard my distress and puffed up big, growling deep, and racing away from her to find me.
He’d never heard that tone in my voice before; he’d never had a reason to. His world so far has been measured in naps and windowsills, familiar footsteps and the sound of Christopher coming through the door.
But still, when sharpness changed my voice, he knew, and something in his small, wild body responded without needing to understand. He didn’t hesitate or stop to analyze what was bothering him. He didn’t freeze. He just puffed up, low and growling, and scanned the house until he found me.
The human animal still carries our instincts, even after all the ways we’ve trained ourselves out of them. Gideon, nine months into this life, indoors and adored, understands how to read the air and his environment. He didn’t train in these skills; his body just knows them and understands what to do.
Humans are also animals.
And our bodies are antennas. We’re all built to respond through so many different mechanisms — a growl or whisper, or something that prompts us to send a text to warn about an incoming storm.
We’re all just trying to remember the sound of our own signal — to notice it again and to respond.
Older Than Fear
In the forests of Siberia, long before cats were turned into hobbies, there were heavy-boned, wide-pawed watchers with thick coats that protected them from the snow like birch bark sheltering the trees from insanely cold winters.
Siberian cats were not human-bred into being. They were wild, forest cats that learned to adapt and thrive in freezing cold weather. Over time, they learned to live alongside humans — part pest control, part weather gauge, part ghost.
These cats were said to guard libraries in monasteries and were brought into the Hermitage Museum to keep vermin from the art. They curled around manuscripts, and kept mice from the grain, and their clever ears listened to wood beams groan under the weight of a coming storm, alerting the humans who were wise enough to notice.
Their bodies feel the shift in pressure and know how to adjust.
I’ve spent the last twenty years learning to do the same, remembering how to tune back into my old instincts. Most days, it feels like a painted window cracking as it opens. Other days, it tunes in like Gideon hearing my cry and racing to save me.
I ask people in sessions to notice the subtle shifts inside their bodies. I want them to learn how to trust their inner barometer, but it’s so easy to forget my own until the winds have already shifted or a thorn is lodged beneath my skin.
But then I watch Gideon with his thick coat and serious eyes and his growl, leading him to the source of my discomfort. He’s just clear, clean, and ancient. I don’t know if I’d call what he does protection — it feels older than that, older than language.
He simply knows and allows himself to act.
Before the Light Changes
This is the time of year when the light starts to bend a little differently, even if the heat hasn’t let up. I can feel the summer trying to hang on and the beginning of fall tugging at its edges. Camp is almost over and the days are still summer slow, but there is a narrowing occurring in the light, like things are edging to a close. The kids are sun-tired and the horses are starting to blink, nap, and rest. Even the cicadas feel like they’re singing with less urgency now.
Late July has always brought a sense of things changing for me. There is a hum of transition that doesn’t quite feel like grief, but it’s not a sense of relief either. It’s more a feeling that something’s about to shift, and I’ll only realize it in hindsight.
This year, in the middle of that hum, we’re welcoming someone new. Her name is Indigo.
She’s not here yet. We’ll take a trip to Nashville and bring her home this weekend. Indigo is another Siberian kitten—silver-coated, moon-eyed, and already her own small weather system. I don’t know what she’ll bring, but her point is to be a companion to Gideon and mostly just to be herself.
She’s arriving at the end of one season and the beginning of another.
We knew we wanted to have a partner in crime for Gideon, but wanted to get to know him some first before adding another cat to the mix. Mom and I tossed around potential names for the incoming kitten before she landed on this earth. And one of those names was Indigo. We didn’t tell anyone about the naming, so we took it as a sign when we were offered one already bestowed with the same name.
Gideon responds to the world like an old priest. Indigo, I suspect, will be something different, another signal to learn and listen into. Nothing gets me out of my whirling mind and back into my body like the honor of watching a kitten grow into herself.
Along with Indigo and the last week of summer camp, I have deeper changes coming next week. I’m not in a place to have words for those changes yet, but when I do, ya’ll will be the first to receive them.
I created this farm as a place of safety for me and as an environment for people to come home to themselves. Some people arrive to the barn and feel the shift in energy right away, like something has dropped down inside of them, or a note finally finding the right key.
Others take time. They walk the fence line first, or circle the ring. They might sit quietly in the gravel parking lot before getting out of their car. But all of them are reaching for the same thing — a place where they can stop holding their breath.
A place that helps them remember how to experience what they already feel.
We are antennas. We’ve always been. Some of us just need the space to tune back in.
I’m so glad you’re here with me.
Love,
Kim
I enjoyed your voice feature. Listening to you read this felt very soothing.
Wow...you really brought Indigo to you!