Relatively Stable

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...

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...