Fierce Things Have Feelings, Too

Fierce Things Have Feelings, TooWhy We Mistake Emotional Coldness for StrengthWhen did being unaffected become something to admire? And why do we so often mistake emotional coldness for strength?In this week's Stable Roots, Kim Carter explores the complicated relationship between emotional intelligence, ambition, vulnerability, and the cultural expectation that strong people should be impervious to their feelings.Drawing on her childhood in the horse world, decades of business ownership, and some difficult lessons in leadership, Kim examines the difference between emotional regulation and emotional suppression. From a frightening accident at a jumping barn to decisions that challenged everything she thought she knew about being a capable leader, she considers what it actually means to be formidable without becoming indifferent.And then there are Gideon and Indigo, her two opinionated Siberian cats, who have their own ideas about affection, independence, and personal boundaries. Their approach to life raises an intriguing question: What if emotional intelligence has less to do with being agreeable and more to do with knowing ourselves well enough to choose how we respond?This episode explores the strength of feeling deeply, the importance of emotional literacy, the difference between compassion and accommodation, and why autonomy doesn't require emotional isolation.Perhaps the world doesn't need more ice-cold people. Perhaps we could all benefit from being a little more like cats.Read and subscribe to Stable RootsWritten and narrated by Kim Carter from Lavender Hill Farm, home of Bramblewood Stables in South Carolina. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

I Did Not Expect to Fall in Love with a ChickenStable Roots | Audio EditionWhat 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 the holiness of dawn when you've spent the night tending a sick animal.There's also a nine-year-old with a better understanding of mortality than most adults, a dearly departed chicken whisperer whose ghost I suspect is still hanging around, and the unfortunate timing of learning that Christopher will be away for most of November.Somewhere in the middle of all this, I've rediscovered the pleasure of writing by hand after bilateral carpal tunnel surgery, developed a rather expensive stationery habit, and begun wondering whether it's finally time to write the book I quit my real jobs to write nearly thirty years ago.It's a story about love, anticipatory grief, the things we cannot save, and the peculiar ways we find ourselves again.And yes, I would like to know what kind of pen you use.Read and subscribe to Stable Roots:https://stableroots.substack.comWritten and narrated by Kim Carter from Lavender Hill Farm, home of Bramblewood Stables in Simpsonville, South Carolina. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

Oxytocin Has Entered the Chat: Dopamine Is So YesterdayWhat 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 terrible advice that helped inspire Bramblewood, a memorable lesson from Rupert Isaacson's visit to the farm, and why emotional safety deserves as much attention as physical safety.I'm also looking back at three very different Halloweens, from a time when I wondered whether I'd ever feel well again to an evening at Lavender Hill filled with ridiculous horse costumes, old friends, laughter, and a sweetness I'm finally learning to trust.After decades of fighting for the life I wanted, I'm beginning to ask a different question: What happens when I don't have to fight anymore?Perhaps it's time to put dopamine in the back seat and embrace the cozy.Read or listen to the full essay at Stable Roots. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

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 epinephrine, and the realization that we're super glad to tell others how we're feeling without taking a good look at ourselves.In this episode of Relatively Stable, I explore the uncomfortable similarities between the way we treat human pain and the way we interpret horses. We admire endurance, reward cooperation, and often mistake our ability to compensate for evidence that nothing is wrong.Maybe the more important question isn't how much pressure a horse can tolerate, but why we're asking it to tolerate that pressure at all.Read the accompanying essay at Stable Roots.Love,Kim This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

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 make us who we are, and what it means to look honestly at the life behind you without either wishing it away or wanting it back.And it all comes down to four words given to me by a reader: Hope always goes clean.For most of my life, “going clean” meant getting a horse around a jumping course without dropping a rail. These days, I have a very different idea of what constitutes a successful round.Written and read by Kim Carter for Stable Roots, from Bramblewood Stables at Lavender Hill Farm, Simpsonville, SC This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

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, and one long walk toward the Secret Meadow where something is moving through the dark Appalachian woods.From there, we wander into the stranger territory of obsessive-compulsive disorder: the miserable little feedback loop that makes checking feel like safety, the usefulness of a hypervigilant brain when you manage a farm, and the line between responsibility and the impossible pursuit of certainty.And then, naturally, we get to witchcraft.Because after you’ve checked a gate you already know is closed five more times, you may have to admit you’re no longer practicing farm management. You’re bargaining with the universe.A story about OCD, ritual, intention, Appalachian haints, practical farm magic, and learning to trust what you’ve already done.And if I ever do look back one too many times and turn into a pillar of salt, at least the horses will know what to do with me.Love,Kim This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

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 I started telling the individual stories of the horses at Bramblewood—Penny, Max, Hero, Pepper, Moose—and something unexpected happened.People started bringing me their horses.Not literally, thank God. I have enough feed bills.They brought them into the comments: ancient geldings, complicated mares, childhood ponies, horses they lost thirty years ago and still talk about in the present tense.After three years and roughly a quarter million words of Stable Roots, I realized I’ve spent an awful lot of time writing about what horses teach us and not nearly enough time simply telling you who they are.Maybe not every horse needs to be a metaphor. Maybe they don’t need to teach us, heal us, win something, or accomplish anything extraordinary to deserve a story.Maybe sometimes the story is simply: You should know this horse.All this time, I’ve been living in a pasture filled with main characters.Also this week: apparently Books at the Barn—our program where introverts sit quietly in a barn aisle and read—is giving insurance underwriters pause. Giant horses? Tractors? Electric fences? Fine. Books? Apparently dangerous.Welcome to farm life.Join me at Stable Roots where I bring you stories from the farm every Thursday morning. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

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 explaining exactly what he thought about being put in a stall.We’ll talk about consent-based horsemanship, horse training, groundwork, boundaries, and what it really means to listen when a horse says no — without assuming that respecting another creature requires us to surrender our own voice.But, as usual, Stable Roots isn’t really just about horses. The horses simply give us a place to practice the things that are harder to see in ourselves. How do we listen without disappearing? Hold a boundary without needing someone else to agree with it? Change our minds without feeling like we’ve lost? And stay grounded when another person — or horse — sees things very differently?Maybe being in control was never about getting the horse on the trailer, winning the argument, or arranging the world into the ending we’ve already decided upon.Maybe it’s knowing what belongs to us — our reactions, our boundaries, our choices — and becoming a little more comfortable with everyone else having an opinion about them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

The Four Seasons: An almanac for those who are emotionally dependent on mowing grassKim 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, loudly enough that nobody can talk to her, and leaving behind the deeply satisfying evidence that something has been accomplished.So what happens when winter takes that away?This week, Kim creates her own slightly unhinged almanac for the year ahead: winter rye grass, mulched leaves, soil biology, forest paths, a deeply justifiable need for a PTO wood chipper, and eventually, the glorious resurrection of the grass in spring.Along the way, The Four Seasons wanders into bigger territory: the difference between owning land and knowing it, our human compulsion to improve and control the natural world, and why a farm may be one of the best places in the world to avoid writing.Twenty-seven years ago, Kim quit her real jobs to write a book and promptly discovered a thousand jobs that needed doing around a barn instead.Maybe she wasn’t procrastinating after all.Maybe she was taking field notes.In this episode: winter rye grass and the journey of a bag of seed; why mowing leaves can feed the soil; the Four Season Tractor Avoidance Program™; learning the bones of the land in winter; the ecological case Kim has constructed for buying a wood chipper; why mowing has become a spiritual practice; and what 27 years of barn chores have taught her about writing, paying attention, and the work we think we’re avoiding.Read Stable Roots for the original essay, photographs from Lavender Hill, and the weekly subscriber video that takes readers beyond the page and behind the fences. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

Alpha is a Misnomer: On horses, wolves, the Cold War, and our need to know who is in chargeWho 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 tangled up with Alpha wolves, Cold War thinking, and our very human desire to arrange the world into neat little pyramids with somebody firmly planted at the top.There was just one problem.The wolves weren't actually behaving the way we thought they were.And, if we pay close enough attention, neither are the horses.In this episode, I follow the Alpha from David Mech's early wolf research through the Cold War and into the rise of Natural Horsemanship — and then back out into my own pastures, where Bentley, Max, Pepper, and one world-class dork named Julian have been quietly dismantling some of the things I thought I knew.Because horses certainly have dominance relationships. They move each other. They compete for resources. They have friendships, alliances, preferences and grudges.But dominance isn't necessarily leadership.Sometimes the horse moving everyone away from the hay isn't the horse anyone follows when something strange appears along the fence line. Sometimes the big, bossy gelding is actually the anxious wingman. And sometimes the horse you are absolutely certain is terrorizing a mare is, in fact, desperately trying to hide behind another horse because she will not leave him alone.Twenty-six years into making horses my profession, I'm becoming considerably less interested in deciding who is in charge.I want to know who knows something.And Julian, world-class dork that he is, is still trying to teach me how to pay attention.In this episodeDavid Mech and the history of the Alpha wolf • what captive wolves taught us — and didn't • the Cold War and our cultural obsession with dominance • the rise of Natural Horsemanship • Pat Parelli and the commercialization of leadership • dominance versus leadership in horse herds • what Bentley taught me about Max • the unfortunate prosecution of an innocent Julian • confirmation bias in the pasture • and why changing our minds may be one of the most important things we can learn to do.Written and read by Kim CarterStable Roots on Substack: Seeing the understory in our everyday lives. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stableroots.substack.com/subscribe