Relatively Stable

I Did Not Expect to Fall in Love with a Chicken Stable Roots | Audio Edition What do a dying chicken, a fountain pen, a small funeral, and an alarming amount of stationery have in common? Apparently, my nervous system. This week in Stable Roots, I'm writing about the ways grief announces itself before we even know what we're grieving, the unexpected heartbreak of loving a tiny Silkie chicken, and...

Oxytocin Has Entered the Chat: Dopamine Is So Yesterday What happens when you've spent most of your life preparing for danger and suddenly find yourself somewhere you feel safe? This week in Stable Roots , I'm exploring the biology of belonging, the role of oxytocin in our relationships with horses and humans, and how our brains can learn new ways of experiencing the world. I'm sharing the terribl...

What happens when we become so good at tolerating discomfort that nobody notices we're suffering? After three years of being told the numbness in my hands was anxiety, a nerve conduction study revealed severe damage that required surgery on both hands. Along the way, I encountered some rather strong opinions from my longtime shavings delivery guys, an unexpected lesson in the effects of epinephrin...

What happens when you find an old version of yourself in a box of dusty photographs, and realize you don’t miss her, but you’re awfully glad somebody took her picture? This week in Stable Roots , I’m turning a forgotten little building at Lavender Hill into a home for thirty years of Bramblewood Stable's history. Along the way, I’m thinking about the power of photographs, the people and horses who...

What if Lot’s wife had OCD? My mother has been asking this question for a long time. Maybe Lot's wife wasn't longing for Sodom. Maybe she was simply halfway down the road when she thought: Wait. Did I turn off the stove? This week in Stable Roots, I’m taking you with me while I close the farm at night: a ritual of cats and chickens, old horses and water buckets, gates checked and checked again, an...

It took a quarter million words to let the horses tell their own stories. This week in Stable Roots, I’m talking about what happened when I accidentally stopped writing around the horses and started writing about them. It began with a conversation about horse shows, a Facebook post I mostly forgot about while mowing and listening to Demon Copperhead , and a phone that would not stop dinging. Then...

What’s the difference between being in control and being controlling? This week in Stable Roots , I’m thinking about all the ways I’ve confused the two — from spending four hours trying to convince Max to get on a horse trailer, to watching well-meaning humans become complete doormats in the name of giving horses a voice, to one very opinionated chestnut gelding who spent an entire thunderstorm ex...

The Four Seasons: An almanac for those who are emotionally dependent on mowing grass Kim has a problem. Summer isn’t even over yet, and she’s already worried about what will happen when the grass stops growing. After one full trip through the seasons at Lavender Hill, mowing has become more than another farm chore. It’s three uninterrupted hours on a machine, moving slowly enough to notice things,...

Alpha is a Misnomer: On horses, wolves, the Cold War, and our need to know who is in charge Who is actually in charge in a herd of horses? For a very long time, we thought we knew. We built entire systems of horsemanship around dominance, hierarchy, and the idea that a good human needed to establish themselves as the leader. Somewhere along the way, the language of Natural Horsemanship became tang...

A weed can be growing beside you for years without causing a bit of trouble. Then somebody teaches you its name — and tells you to be afraid of it. Suddenly, it’s everywhere. This week, between two eclipses, I am roaming a horse pasture hunting foxtail, an ancient grass that has followed agriculture for thousands of years and that I had been conditioned to fear during my unfortunate former life se...

But Will There Be Riding? A social media post that took five minutes for me to write reached more than 40,000 people in a couple hours. It wasn't my weekly essay, nor a podcast. It was just a little announcement for an introvert-friendly book club held in the hallway of a horse barn. As strangers began signing up for an event built around silence, I found myself wrestling with an unexpected questi...

This week in Stable Roots, a rug becomes much more than a rug. As I begin clearing out the room where my father died, I unknowingly prepare my heart for the loss of a dear friend. A conversation over Middle Eastern food, a horse covered in mysterious welts beneath the moonlight, and an old hospice nurse's wisdom all converge into a single realization: we almost never understand the purpose of our...

Horse with a Pearl Earring What do a missing pearl earring, a flea-bitten gray mare named Penny, and three teenagers sleeping in a horse pasture have in common? This week in Stable Roots , I follow a story that began with the certainty that one of my horses had swallowed an earring and ended somewhere entirely different. Along the way, I explore why horses instinctively take the fewest steps neces...

A few weeks before my wedding, a tree started singing. Christopher and I were standing beside an old pond, preparing to say our vows beneath its branches, when we heard a sound neither of us could explain. We listened. Then we moved our ceremony. Days later, Hurricane Helene forever changed the landscape around us. This week on Stable Roots , we follow the language of the forest through folklore,...

What if mowing wasn't a chore? This week in Stable Roots , Kim Carter reflects on why climbing onto a tractor has become one of the most restorative parts of life at Lavender Hill. What begins as a story about bush hogging pastures unfolds into a meditation on attention, empowerment, Elizabeth Gilbert's All the Way to the River , the surprising history of lawns, the secret language of roadside dit...

Granny Magic: A witness statement from the Blue Ridge Mountains What if the old women knew something we've forgotten? This week, I'm taking you back to one hot summer afternoon when I ran into a burning kerosene heater, my cousins called Aunt Daisy, and she "talked the fire" out of my burn with a prayer passed down through generations. That memory opens the door to a much larger conversation about...

The Ability to Be Taught Why horses care less about what we think we know. What if the most important learning skill isn't intelligence? This week, Kim Carter begins with a one-minute drone video of horses running across a field in Upstate South Carolina and follows an unexpected thread into a much bigger question: What does it mean to pay attention? From horse-crazy barn rats and child labor law...

What year is your problem from? In this week's Stable Roots, Kim explores a simple thought experiment that came to her in the wee hours between waking and sleeping: What happens when you take a problem you're facing today and place it in another time period? Would a fallen tree have felt different in 1825? What about a dead mouse in a feed bag? Would the problem still exist, or would it reveal its...

The best solutions often come at the worst cost. For two decades, Kim grew a business and a life inside the protective casing of fear—terrified of what would happen if she were ever forced to leave the farm she called home. But human time moves fast, and when an eviction notice arrived to signal that the land was being developed, a twenty-year tenancy vanished in a blink. In this audio essay, Kim...

This week's essay started as a dream about a house I didn't know I owned. Then, it became something bigger — an investigation into why the nature of my dreaming changed the moment I moved to Lavender Hill Farm, and what it means that I'm finally, for the first time in my life, sleeping straight through the night. In this episode I'm reading the full essay, which traces the dreaming through the sci...

This week's episode is the audio companion to the Stable Roots essay — and it starts with Hero, my little chestnut Quarter Horse, army-crawling under an electric fence in the middle of the night to graze the forbidden rushes by the pond. I thought he was being a pain. Turns out, he was a prophet. What begins as a pasture management problem in the middle of a Foothills drought opens into something...

We Don't Save Old Farms: (They Save Us) In this week’s Stable Roots, Kim Carter traces the layered history of Lavender Hill — the 200-year-old farm in Simpsonville, SC now home to Bramblewood Stables — through old letters, photographs, buried spring stones, and an antique hand plow that may have originated from the land itself. What begins as research into the farm’s past slowly becomes something...

In 2020, the world tilted on its axis. For the Upstate of South Carolina, that tilt sent a wave of 100,000 new residents crashing into our pastures. As we cross the milestone of one million neighbors, the infinite horizon of the American South has officially hit a bottleneck. This week, Kim dives into the canyon between agricultural value and development prices. From the ingenious survival strateg...

We Are All Watching the Same Shoreline This week I did something I don't usually do — I went down a rabbit hole that started with my clients asking about rain and ended at a United Nations report declaring global water bankruptcy. I work outside every day. I watch the same fields, the same fence lines, the same pond across the street from my kitchen window. And what I've been watching all winter i...

You're Not Lost, You're Just Relocating We’ve been taught that running is a sign of weakness, a character flaw, or a symptom of fear. But if we look at the architecture of the horse, we see a different story. A horse doesn't run to disappear; it runs to gain the distance required to turn around and face the threat. In this episode, we dive into the "biology of the turn." We explore why we feel so...