The Practice

How repetition, devotion, and the oldest meaning of the word keep us rooted in an unpredictable world

I love watching the sunset reflect on the surface of the pond.

Practicing

Whenever my husband visits a doctor, he jokes with them about why he should trust them if they’re practicing medicine. He does the same with attorneys. And he always follows it with, “Would you trust me if I told you I practiced fixing airplanes?”

It’s a good line because it reveals something we forget: practice has nothing to do with incompetence. It’s a word with a long, wandering lineage that came to its modern form in late Middle English. In the Old French, practiser meant to perform or carry out, to act upon, to apply knowledge. Earlier still, its Latin ancestor practicus meant to be concerned with action rather than theory, and the Greek praktikos meaning of or pertaining to action.

Over time, practice became the name we give to anything worth repetition, devotion, and deepening: medicine, law, prayer, craft, creativity, riding horses, and growing a life worth living.

To practice is not to dabble. It is to show up again and again for something that matters enough to shape you.

I started writing this week with the grand plan of leaning into how schedules and practice shape our creative routines, but the words took on a life of their own — which is the cool thing that happens with practice, especially when we don’t feel like showing up for it.

Practice, for me, is what happens when the world around us won’t behave — when fear shows up without warning, when dusk drops too fast, when a gunshot breaks open the quiet. It’s an act that lives in our hands and our breath and our choices. These practices keep me tending the fence line, caring for the horses, and returning to myself when I’d rather run away.

This is practice in its oldest sense: a way of acting our way back into our lives when the dark closes in.

The pond holds the evening light.

When it’s not a drill

In less than a day, I see headlines about the shootings at Brown University and Bondi Beach. My best friend is traveling in Australia right now, the next stop on her year-long tour, so the distance seems closer, and my heart belongs to the students who grow up with me at the farm. I’m not a mother, but I play one on TV, and I know what it feels like to have a bullet fly over my head and to run in terror from wherever the next one might land.

I’ve removed firearms from my house because of sick family members. I’ve run self-protection drills. I’ve learned how to clear a room, and practiced two to the chest, one to the head. I’m a Winchester by my mother’s lineage, and I understand why the house in San Francisco was built with staircases leading nowhere as Sarah Winchester tried to outbuild the ghosts born from her namesake.

When I caved and practiced shooting, it was because a man on drugs at the old farm tried to repeatedly kill me.

And then a few short months before we moved to the new farm, another neighbor hired a meaty man to sit in a blind all day and pick off coyotes with a high-powered rifle. The shots ricocheted through the river valley and through the riding ring. I flinched at first. Later, in the last session of the day, a single shot cracked too close, and a seasoned horse spooked with a rider on top of her.

Christopher marched up to the blind and told the neighbor to stop. The neighbor got angry that Christopher had stepped onto his land and hurled curse words at him. Christopher apologized for his language. The neighbor’s feelings were hurt. We never spoke again.

So my tolerance for random gunfire is, and will always be, in short supply.

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The practice of repair

In our move to Lavender Hill, we inherited some very old fencing. Before we can complete an overhaul, we need to get settled, fundraise, and recover from the enormity of the transition. In the meantime, we patch the fence and reinforce connections, spooling out the coiled lines of electric tape we breakneck removed from the old farm before launching to our new home.

A section of fence will catch my eye, particularly in the gelding’s field, the graveyard field, that is ringed in the debris of Hurricane Helene with its big toppled pines and white oak root mountains. I’ll gather a bag of supplies and stitch together sections using whatever I can find to make temporary fence posts in the tangled debris of the trees.

Fixing fence is a meditative act for me. I grumble about having to do it until I’m securing and drilling and tensioning and the satisfaction of doing something useful and necessary overrides my initial frustration and bother. I zone out. I talk to the horses as they try to help (such good helpers) and take time to see the world around me for the first/hundredth time.

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The practice of fear

The first time someone shot a gun beside me at Lavender Hill, it was dusk and I was fixing fence and racing the faltering light. The shot came from the other side of the fence, my visibility obscured by hurricane debris.

I froze the sound of the gunfire vibrating through my ears. Then I screamed with rage and terror spilling out in equal measure. I couldn’t find the shooter.

The second time someone shot a gun beside me at Lavender Hill was near the same area — our fence borders the neighbor’s huge field. There isn’t a house or a human in sight at this spot, but there are so many better places for someone to practice target shooting. The last sunlight slipped past the horizon across the pond. I couldn’t find the shooter. I screamed and raged, and I told myself next time I’d scream like I’d been hit and hope whoever was firing would scurry away, imagining blue lights in their driveway.

The third time someone shot a gun beside me at Lavender Hill, I was checking the geldings for the night, adjusting their blankets. My hands were against Bentley’s smooth neck as the shot rang out. It was fully nighttime, and the stars were crisp and clear above us. Bentley and the others bolted around me. I wanted to run away with them.

I screamed, and the gunshots stopped.

We’ve only lived at this farm for three months.

There was never a pattern to the shooting other than it being dusk or dark. And it was always the same spot along the fence line where an unseen person practiced shooting beside my field.

My students in evening lessons became part of the conversation. We listened to each crack of gunfire and talked about our own histories with firearms. I mapped out the old stories from the previous farm — the neighbor out of his mind, pointing bullets toward me.

But when I planned my first Rooted Gathering for women, I didn’t once think: I hope no one shoots beside us while we sit in quiet reflection by the pond in the afternoon.

So when a shot rang out mid-circle, and the geldings tore through their field beside us, I was stunned into silence before letting out a primal scream across the water.

I had no clue how to stop this practice.

Luckily, Christopher did. He crossed the field and climbed through the fence, and searched until he found a man sighting his rifle. Christopher explained we had a workshop happening yards away. The neighbor listened with humility and kindness. He offered to text before practicing next time, to make sure the coast was clear.

It was such a different exchange, two humans having an actual conversation, than the last time Christopher asked a neighbor to watch their shots. Practice isn’t only what we do with our hands — fixing fence, adjusting blankets, gripping a bucket of tools while our hearts are pounding. It’s also the way we meet each other when things go sideways.

Some people rehearse their fear without meaning to. Others fall back on anger. But then someone surprises you by choosing courtesy instead of defensiveness. That choice shifts the outcome. I’m starting to see that practicing humanity is just as real as any fence repair or evening check, those small, repeated gestures that make it possible for us to live beside one another without bracing for impact.

We’re all practicing something out here.

I’m practicing staying present when the dark closes in, and my instinct is to run with the horses. Christopher is practicing stepping toward a problem instead of away from it. And this neighbor, on this particular day, practiced consideration. It doesn’t fix the world, but it gives a little more room to trust the process. It makes me believe we can learn how to share a fence line without losing our humanity in the process.

The moon hits differently at Lavender Hill.

Practice Makes Perfect

It brings me back to the older meaning of practice — not the kind we joke about with doctors, and not the childhood idea of drilling something until we get it right. When I say practice, I mean the kind that grows out of repetition and necessity, the kind that connects us instead of pushing us apart. By practicing, we commit to showing up, again and again, for the things that teach us how to be better humans.

We have to keep trying until we get it right.

At Lavender Hill, practice looks like mending the same stretch of fence three times in a week and learning the shape of every knot in the wire. It looks like caring for a piece of land we haven’t even had time to settle into yet. It looks like showing up for the people who gather here, even when the day has already taken whatever softness I have left. It looks like screaming when I need to, and not pretending I don’t. It looks like staying still long enough to hear my own thoughts, or stepping forward when the moment requires it.

And it also looks like creativity, because that’s the one place where I can remember the world hasn’t stopped making things. Prayer fits in there too, in whatever form we manage: a breath, a name spoken out loud, or just refusing to turn away from each other when it would be easier to walk away.

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Practice as a Way of Life

I’ll leave you with these words from Nadia Bolz-Weber:

Look, I wish to God I understood the distributed math of human suffering, why it’s not ever really doled out in equal measure or with any kind of fairness. All I know is that none of us get out unscathed. And I’m not trying to be a bummer during Advent, but if you’re not in a time of trouble, one is coming or one has just ended. I’m so sorry about that, I just respect you too much to pretend otherwise.

. . .

So in these last days of Advent, the nights are getting darker and the light from those glowing screens we hold in our hands are trying even harder to convince us everything is horrible, we don’t need each other, and that “thoughts and prayers” are a joke. And you might be tempted to start coming up with your own conclusions.

Don’t fall for it.

Any prayer we can muster for other people matters. So make up your own or recite the old ones. Speak a name, light a candle, send a blessing. And trust that God will gather them up and make the very best use of them because the world needs it, I need it, those who have no one to pray for them need it. And if you cannot pray, know that you are covered by spiritual PTO because we belong to each other and Jesus’ own prayers are still raining down and I promise it is enough for us all. Amen.

Our practices aren’t meant to shield us from the dark. They’re the familiar things we return to while we’re making our way through the shadows. We patch fence, we show up for our work, we set down our fear for a minute and touch the warm neck of a horse— and these small acts remind us that we’re still here, still choosing, still shaping a life inside all the unpredictability.

Practice is the old word for putting knowledge into action, but it’s also the promise we make to ourselves to keep returning, even when the world startles us or the night falls too quickly. And maybe that’s the truest hope we can summon, not that the path will clear, but that returning, however imperfectly, reminds us we still know how to go on.

Love,
Kim

I love the side of the farmhouse. It’s like Amityville, but wholesome.