Relatively Stable

Bearing Witness — What It Means to Be Seen, to See Others, and to See Yourself This week in Stable Roots, Kim Carter writes about witnessing — what it truly means to be present for someone, and how our instinct to fix things often gets in the way. After a surprise visit from two of the most important people in her life, Kim found herself thinking about the kitchen table, a hidden drawer full of me...

The world is talking. It has always been talking. We are the only species that decided, somewhere along the way, to stop transmitting. This week's episode is the second in the Invisible Altar series — and it goes somewhere unexpected. We start in the barn, with the frozen silence of a person who has just been offered a list of options and can't locate, anywhere inside themselves, what they actuall...

A few weeks before our cat Indigo was diagnosed with FIP, she started purring constantly. Every night, pressed against me, making biscuits on the duvet. I thought she was finally at peace after the hardest year of our lives. I was wrong. A cat's purr vibrates between 25 and 150 hertz — a frequency clinically shown to stimulate bone density and accelerate tissue repair. She wasn't contented. She wa...

The Nutrients of Disruption When we arrived at the new farm, I thought my first responsibility would be to maintain the tidy lawns and pastures that had been carefully tended for generations. My plan was simple: mow early, manage the weeds, and keep the landscape looking orderly. But spring had other ideas. Before I could get the mower started, the fields erupted with plants most people would call...

The Elephant in the Room In this episode, I read a new essay from Stable Roots written in response to an anonymous letter that arrived at our farm. The letter accused me of harming my horses, misusing donations that supported the relocation of Bramblewood Stables, and failing the community that helped make our move possible. Rather than responding through rumor or secondhand conversation, I chose...

That Time I Bought a Cat (And Then Purchased Another) In this week’s episode, I’m reading my latest Stable Roots essay — a piece about cats, yes, but also about grief, land, financial contraction, hospice care, and the quiet investments that hold us steady when everything else feels uncertain. The year I bought two Siberian cats was the same year my father entered hospice, we lost the farm we had...

In this voiceover essay, I trace the long arc from cleaning stalls in the Dark Corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains to stewarding a farm, leading a community, and finally turning toward the book I have been circling for decades. What begins as a reflection on land loss and self-censorship widens into something more foundational: free expression, oral tradition, and the responsibility of carrying for...

Cultivating Empathy In a world that tries to drain it out of you In this reading of my weekly, Stable Roots, essay, I explore what empathy actually is — and what it isn’t. We hear the word constantly. It’s praised, politicized, misused, and often confused with emotional intensity or moral agreement. But empathy, practiced well, is deeper and more complex than that. It isn’t about absorbing everyth...

In this essay, I write from the days surrounding my father’s death and our first quiet Christmas at Lavender Hill Farm. What I expected to be rest turned into a confrontation with how my body and mind responded after months of caregiving, loss, and responsibility, and with an old folk practice that gave language to something I didn’t yet know how to name. Sin Eating weaves together farm work, folk...

Keeping Vigil At the threshold of the Fire Horse This piece was written in the slowed time of dying and published at the turning of the year. It traces what happens when clocks stop mattering, when mirrors become witnesses, and when keeping vigil becomes the only meaningful work left. Moving between hospice rooms and hay fields, folklore and neuroscience, agitation and clarity, it asks what it mea...

The Practice : How repetition, devotion, and the oldest meaning of the word keep us rooted in an unpredictable world This week’s essay is an exploration that began with the idea of creative routines and ended somewhere far more human. I'm reading the full piece to you here and bringing you into the fields at Lavender Hill: the old fencing we inherited, the hurricane debris still shaping the horizo...

Cats in the Walls Inherited ghosts, holiday garland, and being ambushed by forgiveness This week’s essay didn’t go where I expected it to go. I sat down to talk about shadow work with horses, and instead found myself inside my lived story of hospice care, old family fractures, and forgiveness coming before I'm ready to let go. You’ll hear about the move to Lavender Hill, the grief that followed us...

A Beginner's Guide to Shadow Work This week, I’m taking you into the barn aisle at Lavender Hill -- into the fog, the quiet, and the shifting inner landscape we all carry. We talk a lot about showing up for our lives, but we rarely talk about the selves that show up instead of us: the crisis-trained parts, the exhausted parts, the dreamers, the watchers, and the ones bracing for storms that never...

Flagged, Stolen, and Still Not Silenced This week’s essay weaves together two moments, years apart, when something I relied on to hold my words was taken from me: a stolen teenage journal and, more recently, an unexpected stint in Facebook jail after an algorithm misread a comment to my friend. These aren’t the deepest or most dangerous forms of silencing. Many people know far heavier versions. Bu...

In this week’s episode, Kim reads her newest Stable Roots essay, We’re Still Standing — a piece shaped by loss, loyalty, and the beauty of still being here. This is a story about this year where everything shifted: the exits that cracked the foundation, the people who stayed and held the beams in place, and the web of horses, history, and human hands that keeps rebuilding Bramblewood Stables, thre...

From Desperation to Thanksgiving: All That Talk of Harvests Isn’t Just Poetry In this week’s episode, Kim reflects on what it means to move from desperation into gratitude—through fence lines, fallen seasons, and the lessons of the herd. From the haunted stillness of a fallow field to the calm after a lost horse is found, this piece traces how forwardness doesn’t come from pushing harder, but from...

Stable Roots : Don’t Look Too Far Into the Woods: Notes from a haunted year at the edge of the trees This week’s episode moves through fear and faith, fences and timing, and the lessons that live at the edge of the pasture. After a year marked by loss, transition, and rebuilding, Kim reflects on how the land at Lavender Hill continues to reveal its magic through the neighbor who calls at just the...

In this episode, Kim Carter reads her latest essay from Stable Roots —a meditation on land, belonging, and what it means to build something that lasts in a culture obsessed with moving on. As she reflects on the pressure to relocate her horse farm, the rise of rugged individualism, and the quiet wisdom of living beside a herd, Kim traces how our collective disconnection from land mirrors our growi...

Even the Ordinary Days are Holy : What the move, the herd, and the sink at Lavender Hill are teaching me about rest In this episode, I explore how the rhythms of work, loss, and renewal intertwine at the new farm — and how tending to the ordinary can become a kind of prayer. From Sheba’s legacy to the clatter of feed scoops and the quiet companionship of chickens, this story circles back to what i...

In this episode, I read my latest Stable Roots piece, The Ghosts of This Farm Speak to Me — a story about loss, land, and what it means to finally arrive. It begins with Sheba, the brave black mare who didn’t survive the move to our new farm, and unfolds into what she left behind: a lesson in trust, belonging, and the ways the land holds us when we let it. This episode isn’t just about grief. It’s...

Every day the farmhouse is emptier as the storage containers are packed. What does it mean to move something that feels fixed? What does it mean to move a whole herd, to pack stories like boxes, and to listen for what the new land will say back? This piece traces the weeks leading into our first wedding anniversary, the closing on Lavender Hill, and the beginning of Bramblewood’s move. It holds an...

If you’ve been following our journey, you know Bramblewood Stables is in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime move to Lavender Hill farm after losing our lease of 20 years. Keeping this herd and this mission intact is not possible without collective effort. This week’s episode is a voiceover of my latest piece, moving through four sections: The Herd, The Land, The Work, and The Hope. It’s about what...

Hearing Our Ghosts: Walking the Threshold from Grief to Hope This episode is a voiceover essay on living at the edge of loss and still choosing to move forward. From my mother’s kitchen therapy sessions, to memories of my grandfather, to the community angels helping Bramblewood find a forever home — it’s about how grief can open the way toward action, clarity, and hope. In the coming weeks, I’ll b...

🎙️ Relatively Stable — Special Voiceover Episode This episode is different. It’s not an interview or a roundtable conversation. It’s a voiceover—me, in the quiet of the barn, speaking from the middle of a transition that has turned my world upside down. Three weeks ago, I learned that Bramblewood, the farm we’ve called home for twenty years, would no longer be ours to lease. In that moment, it fel...

A Last Chance to Save Bramblewood Stables The land we stand on is being sold to the highest bidder — and the highest bidder will almost certainly be a developer. For 20 years, Bramblewood Stables has been my home, my work, and my community. Before me, this place served the public as a riding stable for more than 50 years. Before that, it was farmland. Now, it’s at risk of disappearing forever. In...