The water at Amelia, Nebraska tasted as though it had come through the deepest bones of the earth. It had mineral in it, a taste that made me imagine the ancient inland sea and the creatures moving through it: long, scaly bodies with fangs, sharp edges flashing in water above what would someday become Nebraska.
I could taste something older than the grass and the road and the people driving on it.
We would stop at that artesian well on the way to and from my grandparents’ ranch. The water spouted up without much ceremony. It was inexorable, there when we came and there when we came back, pushing through an opening in the ground as though the land had more to give than anyone standing on it could see.
I have been thinking about that well because I opened the Bible with a question.
Did the people who harmed me need to make it right?
I landed in Matthew 22, at a wedding where the king was furious, the guests had refused him, and even getting through the door was no guarantee that a person understood what they had entered.
I kept reading because I wanted to decode that scene. The words I kept coming back to were having a care, and they had weight because I knew what it felt like when people did not.
I had lived in the city and worked in corporate America. The lesson I had absorbed was that no one gave a TOSS (but ruder) about anyone. People needed things from one another, and I knew how to be useful. I could give the work my intelligence while giving the people around me an eighth of an inch of myself.
That thin layer was enough to move through a professional day. I was a veneer, and I knew how to keep it smooth. I ignored people and kept moving because there was always more work, another opening, another place to put my attention.
Going wide suited me.
I went to the country because I wanted my children to know themselves and other people. I wanted them to have some depth beneath their feet. The city was wide in my imagination, and the small town was deep, with people rooted in a place long enough for their lives to grow into one another.
But that is asking a lot of country people: give a FLYING TOSS about someone new. People already have their relationships, their grievances, their obligations, and their versions of what happened thirty years ago.
Arriving with children and hope does not create an empty place in someone else’s heart. The indifference I knew in the city could live perfectly well on a country road.
Still, I came prepared to work. I was wearing Duluth Trading Company to what co-workers called a forever job, and I brought ideas, experience, and an appetite for new business. I sat in a small office with the established order.
I also gave very little away in the exchanges that felt like tests. I gray rocked, withheld the expected deference, and sided with people who had less standing.
I was different in ways that made me conspicuous. I came to understand that my independence and new ideas threatened the arrangement already in place.
One day I said, “I’m new business development, not account management.” That was my job, and it was okay to name it. I was a hunter. New business development goes wide, finding opportunities and beginning relationships; account management goes deep, tending what has already been established.
I was facing serious headwind, and eventually the surface ripped.
Workplace mobbing reached into my ability to think, my place in the community, and the life my family was trying to build. I had arrived imagining a future there. The harm tore through the future as well as the day I was standing in.
The setup gave people an account of me before they had to understand me. The smear supplied a way to interpret what I said and did, and the convergence gave that interpretation the weight of a group. When I was hurt, my hurt could be folded back into the story. When I reacted, the reaction could be presented as the explanation for everything.
That is the cruelty in what people call reactive abuse.
The person under pressure becomes visibly distressed, and the room starts its account at the distress. Imagine tearing through someone’s skin and then holding up the blood as evidence that they are making a mess. That is how the reversal felt.
I needed people to understand the depth of what had happened. Instead, I heard it dismissed as country banter, as though giving it a familiar local name could make it harmless. I was trying to communicate that something had ripped through me, and the explanation being offered was that I had misunderstood the way people talked.
One neighbor had told me she married into the area and had been lonely for thirty years. We got along until I was smashed, and then she betrayed me, too. I thought her loneliness might give her some way to recognize mine. Whatever understanding or capacity she had, it did not reach far enough to meet me where I was.
Thirty years is a long time to live among people and remain lonely. I think about how much of a person can go untouched while everyone around them believes they know them.
“You’re in trouble. You’re in REALLY BIG TROUBLE.”
Those words were spoken to me crisply, with the authority of a verdict. Doors were closing locally, and someone was announcing herself as judge, jury, and bailiff.
I remember another statement that was delivered to me out of the blue just before the convergance event.
“There was a nice, <redacted on purpose> man—CLEAN—who reported to me at the <redacted>. HE HAD TO LEAVE TOWN SUDDENLY.” As the speaker stressed the last sentence, they bent sharply forward at the torso and appeared to be in a state of heightened arousal. Their whole body seemed to press the words across the space between us.
The word clean had been inserted into an assessment of a human being, and his sudden departure was delivered as the ending. I heard a story about the conditions of belonging and what could happen when a person no longer belonged.
I am interested in the role inside those sentences.
Someone takes a position in an ordinary workplace and begins to occupy it as though it were a throne. Their approval becomes a permit, their displeasure becomes a charge, and other people begin to behave as though the jurisdiction is real.
Nebraska and Missouri give me an image for that role. Fort Osage, near Sibley and Buckner, combined a military post with a government trading house, while Fort Atkinson stood above the Missouri River at Fort Calhoun. Trade and defense met at these places, along with the power to oversee movement and access.
In my map, Fort Osage is wide, reaching through trade, and Fort Atkinson is deep, establishing a presence in a place. Then I imagine a pompous regent at the gate who has begun to confuse that place with the boundaries of his own importance. He sits in judgment over who is worthy to trade, as though a whole river has been put there to serve his desk.
This is a pattern people can recognize in many settings. An office, a church, a family, or a town can make room for someone whose grandiosity grows through other people’s deference. A newcomer encounters the person and the arrangements that keep that person important.
The gate can be made of relationships as effectively as timber.
That was what I brought to the wedding scene in Matthew. I was looking at a king who noticed disrespect and acted, after living through a situation in which the people around me had treated the harm as ordinary. I wanted to understand what was being judged.
The king has prepared a wedding feast for his son. The first people invited refuse to come; some return to their farms and business, and others mistreat and kill the servants who bring the invitation. The king is enraged and responds with destruction. Then he sends his servants out to bring in whoever they can find, both bad and good.
The invitation goes wide enough to fill the hall. But when the king enters, he sees a man without a wedding garment, asks him about it, and receives no answer. The man is bound and put outside, into the darkness and the weeping and gnashing of teeth. There is nothing mild about the scene.
At first, I caught on the clothes. I was the person who had arrived in Duluth, with ideas and rough places, giving insufficient deference to someone who expected it. I could feel the old question taking shape: had I come into the room wrong?
But the hall has just been filled with people gathered from the roads, both bad and good. The invitation has already reached beyond the original guest list. What holds my attention now is the difference between arriving and entering into the meaning of what has been offered.
I read the garment as a response made visible.
Someone can accept a place at the feast while remaining untouched by what the occasion asks of them, just as a person can occupy a place in a community while giving very little of themselves to the people there. Being inside brings responsibility with it.
That is where having a care begins to deepen for me.
A wedding gathers people around something that matters to someone else. To receive that invitation fully is to let the occasion make a claim on your attention and conduct, to recognize that the room contains lives as real as your own.
The rest of Matthew 22 keeps bringing me back to that difference between a position and what someone does from it. The authorities approach Jesus with little oxbows of argument, trying to draw him into a bend where they can hold him. He keeps running truth through the questions.
“Shew me the tribute money,” he says in Matthew 22:19. The coin has to appear, and its image and inscription have to be examined. Then comes the answer about giving Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s.
Caesar is wide in the way I am reading this, extending through money, commerce, territory, and public authority. God is deep, reaching into the person who moves through all of it. The command to love God with the whole heart, soul, and mind reaches all the way inward; loving a neighbor as oneself carries that depth into an encounter with another person.
That is a demanding command when the neighbor is new. It becomes more demanding when the neighbor is inconvenient, visibly hurt, angry, or carrying a story that would require us to reconsider someone we already know. Having a care can cost us our easy place in the room.
In Matthew 23, Jesus speaks of people who say and do not, people who love the uppermost places at feasts. He says the greatest among them shall be their servant, and in verse 12 he says, “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.” I hear that against the sound of someone telling me how much trouble I am in, as though the size of their declaration establishes the size of their authority.
Verse 28 puts appearance and inward conduct into the same sentence: “Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” That gives me a way to return to the wedding garment. Looking acceptable to an established group and responding deeply to God’s invitation can be very different things.
Verse 31 names the people being addressed as descendants of those who killed the prophets. Verse 34 turns toward what will happen to the messengers being sent, including persecution from city to city. I hear a pattern carried through people and places, capable of surviving a change of address because the role keeps finding someone willing to occupy it.
I have seen enough gnashing of teeth to feel those words in my jaw.
What I keep noticing in these chapters is how much can be said about goodness while an actual person is being hurt, and how readily an institution can admire its own appearance. Jesus brings the conduct into view.
People who say and do give their words depth. Service makes that depth available to someone else. The wide is the deep, and the deep is wide, because what is held inwardly eventually meets a person outside us.
I think about the rivers again. The Platte spread its braided channels across the land, with sandbars and stretches of riparian forest along the water. Its valley became a river road for pioneers, following routes used long before them, and I picture the trees marking water and passage across the open country.
Much of the Platte has been altered and managed. Along a protected 76-mile stretch of the Niobrara east of Valentine, the river is scenic. It still has room to carry a wilder character across the landscape. In my mind, its breadth belongs beside the Amelia well, where water presses up from beneath one small place.
Near Fort Calhoun, Boyer Chute opens sideways from the Missouri, restoring a channel and habitat lost as the river was altered. Pallid sturgeon belong in this picture, fish whose armored bodies make ancient life seem suddenly close. A river organized to carry traffic still has to contain places where its living creatures can continue.
Boyer Chute is wide in my map, and the Missouri through Kansas City is deep.
The restored channel matters because life needs room beside the main current. Some kinds of repair require opening space again after too much has been forced through one route.
That is why my first thought about going wide and needing to go deep was only part of it. The city could leave me untouched, and the country could reach into me with devastating force.
A trading post could open a relationship, and a gatekeeper could close it. Depth requires care, and breadth requires a living connection to what feeds it.
The rip took me into parts of myself I had previously kept below the surface. I did not set out to write about harm, and the writing cost me more than a clean list of titles could ever show. I was trying to bring thought back into a mind that had been overwhelmed, find language for what had happened, and recover enough of myself to choose a life again.
The books grew out of that work. PROTECT and RECOVER carry the chronology of what I had to understand, and EMBODY and EXPAND carry the life I am moving into. Reading their covers as a collection can make the process look orderly. Living through it was another matter.
Then Google told me my brand was fragmented.
ChatGPT had kept encouraging me to buy more URLs, and I had followed that encouragement. I kept opening another address around another part of the work, while the connections among those addresses became harder for a visitor to see.
There was encouragement to go wide at almost every turn. What I needed was someone to think through how the pieces would lead a person toward a relationship with the work, and what all those addresses would ask of me. Advice has consequences after the conversation ends. Having a care includes staying interested in those consequences.
Fredhappy.space now redirects to shop.katefred.com. I plan to put the dance work at dance.katefred.com and redirect katefred.dance there, then retire the separate address when the transition allows. I am bringing the public routes back toward one recognizable home.
That feels different from offering an eighth of an inch at a series of separate doors. I am learning how to let someone find the connection between the writing, the books, the movement, and the person making them. I can keep the hunter’s ability to see possibility while giving more attention to what happens after a person arrives.
The well at Amelia returns here because the water already had a source.
Someone made an opening through which it could reach the surface, and we stopped to drink on our way to people and a place we knew. The small visible flow carried more than its size suggested.
I still taste that mineral when I think about it. In my imagination, the ancient sea is there, all that immense time finding a way into one mouthful of water. Something deep becomes available through a small opening.
I began with a question about whether other people needed to make it right. I still believe what happened matters, including the cost to me and my family. Having a care means allowing that cost to remain visible instead of smoothing the story until everyone can pass over it comfortably.
The wedding asks me what it means to receive a place in a living world. I want my response to reach into my work, my relationships, and the life I offer my children, with enough depth to mean something and enough breadth to reach someone.
The water at Amelia kept coming when we drove away. I think about that as I bring the work home and prepare to move again, to write, to dance, and to let people meet what has come to the surface. There is more of me in it now than an eighth of an inch.
The water at Amelia kept rising after we drove away. I think something in us can do that, too: keep reaching for life beneath the noise of other people’s judgments. If your body is still carrying the weight of that noise, Heavy Bags offers a gentle place to begin putting it down.
EMBODY
Heavy Bags
For Bodies That Survived Coercive Control
A body-centered work about carrying the residue of coercive control, reclaiming choice, and discovering what becomes possible when you no longer have to organize yourself around someone else’s control.
