A memoir by Katrina Mintz

ABOUT THE BOOK

There are places that shape us before we know we are being shaped. A horse farm in North Carolina. A barn in Alabama. A trail that wound through loss and came out somewhere quieter, truer, and more alive.

Horses and Holy Ground is about those places and the horses who walked through them with me, the quiet teachers who refused to let me pretend. Horses can't be fooled. They showed me the gap between the woman I presented and the woman I was, and they walked me back across it.

The book moves through five practices: Presence, Authenticity, Reverence, Integrity, and Stewardship. Together they form P.A.R.I.S., a path back to an undivided life. Each chapter pairs a horse's story with a reflection, a practice to try, and a prayer.

Part reflection, part field notes, part prayer, this book is an invitation to slow down, listen closely, and discover that the ground beneath your ordinary life is holy, and has been all along.

Written across seasons of grief, transition, and unexpected grace, it is for anyone who has felt the pull between the life they are living and the life they were made for.

This book is for you if:

You have spent years building a career and a life that look right from the outside, and you are quietly wondering what you set down along the way.
You are moving through a season of loss, transition, or becoming, and you are searching for language to name what you are experiencing.
You believe God still meets us in ordinary places, like a barn aisle at dawn, and you want to learn to notice.
You have always felt more yourself outdoors, near animals, or in motion than behind a desk or a screen.
You believe the truest things often arrive quietly: in the rhythm of hoofbeats, the smell of a barn at dusk, the moment a horse rests its forehead against your chest and just stands there.
You are ready to stop performing and start inhabiting your own life.

A Taste of the Book

For years, I have lived between two worlds, one dressed in power suits and polished language, the other in worn leather cowgirl boots, dust, and truth, telling myself we all must balance work and life. I am successful in my profession because some of those gifts and talents have always been part of my core identity. Yet life’s transitions call forward an internal reckoning: marriage, divorce, motherhood, empty nest, title after title, loss of both parents. Who am I now, God? Long before I could name it, I was living in an authenticity gap, performing competence while longing for congruence.

Chasing achievement was, at times, a “dry lot”; other times, it yielded blue-ribbon outcomes. I joked about the costume change, about my suits-to-boots routine, shifting from university compliance administrator to equine learning facilitator, changing in the bathroom of the covered arena before heading to an Equine Facilitated Learning (EFL) lesson in a stall with a horse and a child. Children and adults just laughed when I showed up with perfect hair and makeup, then promptly shed it all for jeans, boots, a t-shirt, and a ball cap. The humor made it seem harmless. But the facade that made this routine possible no longer serves me.

Then one Tuesday afternoon, the truth made itself plain. I was held late in a meeting with the university president and the council of deans, seated at the long conference table, composed in posture if not in mind. The conversation had long since gone unproductive, but no one stopped it. One voice pressed forward in a heated argument about institutional relevance, circling the same ground again and again, while the rest of us watched the momentum stall without intervening. It is a familiar pattern in leadership rooms, authority present, but unclaimed.

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A memoir by Katrina Mintz

A Taste of the Book

In the Mean time...

Passionate Writer

A memoir by Katrina Mintz

A Taste of the Book

In the Mean time...

Passionate Writer

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