Relatively Stable

Kimberly Carter
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In Relatively Stable we delve into the journeys of those who have faced challenges, uncovered their passions, and discovered resilience along the way. Whether you're here for the stories, seeking inspiration, or simply drawn to the wisdom we glean from horses—and life—you’re in the right place. Let’s dive into the narratives that remind us how to stay relatively stable, no matter what comes our way. stableroots.substack.com

  1. The Invisible Altar

    4D AGO

    The Invisible Altar

    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 was in triage. Her body was running the only repair instrument it had, alone in the dark, while I lay there reading her distress as gratitude. I had been doing the same thing for months. This episode is about the place we go when the performance of wellness finally runs out of gas. Not the meditation cushion version. The real one — unglamorous, unwatched, and the only thing that actually works. It's about what the horses at Lavender Hill know about exhaling that we've largely forgotten. It's about the specific madness of being a nervous system coach while your own perimeter comes apart at the seams. It's about what two hundred years of floorboards sound like before dawn, and a cat named Indigo who fought something ancient and enormous with nothing but the instrument of her own frequency. The episode closes with two practice prompts: an audit for locating where you're performing okay while your nervous system is actually in triage, and a practice for finding the one private gesture that is purely yours — not for the optics, not for the audience, but for the bone-deep necessity of staying whole. This is the first essay in a four-part April series. Each piece stands alone. Together they form a complete arc — from the recognition of the private self, through the body's own repair, through what it means to stay in the room with someone else's hard thing, to the changed person who walks back into ordinary life carrying something new. Week 1 — The Invisible Altar: Who we are when no one is watching Week 2 — The Biological Prayer: What the body does there Week 3 — The Witness: What it means to stay Week 4 — The Return: What we carry back About 20 minutes. Best listened to anywhere you don't have to be performing anything for anyone. Read the full essay, subscribe, or share at Stable Roots, a weekly essay and audio publication written from Lavender Hill — a 200-year-old farmhouse and working stable. It lives at the intersection of nervous system work, honest writing, and what the horses keep insisting on teaching. New every Thursday. Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

    16 min
  2. The Nutrients of Disruption

    MAR 19

    The Nutrients of Disruption

    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 weeds—henbit, chickweed, dandelion, wild onion, violets, shepherd’s purse. As I paused long enough to identify them, I discovered that nearly every one of these early plants is edible and nutrient-dense, arriving at the exact moment when bodies—both human and equine—are depleted after winter. The horses noticed long before I did. Watching them move through the pasture like quiet herbalists began to change the way I thought about disruption, not just in the field but in life itself. In this essay, I explore how the natural world uses disturbance to restore balance: fire opening the seeds of pine forests, floodwaters replenishing soil across valleys, wind scattering life across landscapes, and grazing animals renewing grasslands through movement and pressure. What we often experience as destruction can also be part of a much longer cycle of renewal. This piece reflects on the strange wisdom of weeds, the forces of the elements, and the way disruption has shaped both the land and my own life here at the farm. Listen if you’re interested in: - how weeds restore nutrients to depleted soil - the ecological role of fire, flooding, wind, and grazing - what horses can teach us about seasonal nourishment - why disruption is often the beginning of renewal Subscribe to Stable Roots Stable Roots is a reader-supported publication exploring the intersection of land, horses, and the deeper lessons that emerge when life refuses to stay orderly. Free subscribers receive each essay in their inbox. Paid subscribers help support the writing and the work unfolding here at the farm. Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

    26 min

  3. MAR 12

    The Elephant in the Room

    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 to answer the only way I know how: openly and in writing. This piece explores what transparency actually means when your work is visible, vulnerable, and deeply tied to the lives of animals and people who trust you. It touches on the realities of relocating a working horse farm, the loss of a beloved horse named Sheba, and the labor that continues every day behind the scenes at Lavender Hill. Most of all, it is a reflection on community — the people who showed up when our farm needed them most and who continue to stand beside this work. If you’d like to read the full essay or learn more about the work we are building here, you can find it at Stable Roots, where I document the realities of stewarding land, horses, and a community that continues to grow. Love, Kim Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

    25 min

  4. MAR 5

    That Time I Bought a Cat

    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 stewarded for two decades, and Christopher and I signed for a historic property that would become Lavender Hill. I had never purchased a cat before. The decision felt indulgent at the time. It turns out it was something else entirely. This episode explores: - Why the Hermitage Museum has cats guarding its galleries - The difference between rescue and presence - What it means to be responsible for everyone else And why sometimes the smallest purchases anchor us through the largest transitions If you are building something that depends on you — land, family, business, community — this week's essay may resonate with you. Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

    18 min

  5. FEB 26

    The Book Beneath the Barn

    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 forward knowledge that lives in land, animals, and lived experience. I speak candidly about fear, second-guessing, and the temptation to edit myself in a cultural moment that rewards sound bites over substance. This episode explores: - The erosion of expressive freedom — and how self-censorship takes root - What farming teaches about leadership, identity, and endurance - The difference between polished expertise and embodied knowledge - The pandemic-era shift in horsemanship toward connection over control - Why complex, relational work cannot be reduced to a flow chart - The accumulated wealth of oral tradition inside barns and back fields - The decision to stop waiting for a “clean” moment and begin writing the book now I reflect on the poets and horsemen whose words survived because someone chose to write them down — including 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi — and ask what stories we are responsible for preserving in our own time. At its heart, this episode is about remembering why we started, reclaiming voice, and meeting one another in the field beyond right and wrong — where land and story endure. Listener Reflection: - What work has been shaping you, even if you didn’t recognize it at the time? - Where are you editing yourself out of your own story? - What knowledge are you carrying that deserves to be written down? Thank you for taking these journeys with me. Love, Kim Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

    9 min

  6. FEB 12 ·  BONUS

    Cultivating Empathy

    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 everything or proving how deeply we feel. It’s about listening carefully enough to receive another person’s experience without overtaking it. Through stories of caregiving, frozen pipes, horses, projection, and grief, this piece traces the difference between empathy and assumption — between standing beside someone and bracing against them. It looks at how unchecked empathy can turn defensive, how misdirected responsibility leads to burnout, and why boundaries are not the opposite of care. At its core, this is an exploration of listening. Of what it means to be accurately received. Of how warmth, when applied patiently and in the right place, allows what’s frozen to move again. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the demand to care about everything at once, or if you’ve ever mistaken reaction for connection, or if you’re learning how to stay soft without losing yourself -- you might find something useful in this piece. Love, Kim Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

    21 min

  7. JAN 8

    Why Not Me?

    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, folklore, and a Christmas Eve medical scare with one of our mares. I reflect on the impulse to take responsibility for loss, to keep internal ledgers, and to hold what feels unbearable in the hope that something else might be spared. The piece moves between grief in the human body and illness in an animal body, asking where responsibility begins, where it ends, and what happens when we try to carry too much. This is an essay about embodied grief, stewardship, inherited wisdom, and leadership fatigue. It’s about how attention and simple acts can become containers in moments of crisis, and how some forms of knowing arrive without explanation—through touch, repetition, and attention. Stable Roots is reader-supported. Subscribing directly supports my writing and the ongoing care of the horses and land at Lavender Hill. Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

    21 min

  8. JAN 1 ·  BONUS

    Keeping Vigil

    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 means to stay with someone all the way to the edge—and how to know when staying gives way to letting go. Keeping Vigil explores end-of-life presence, terminal lucidity, the nervous system’s role in dying, and the ancient human instinct to watch so no one crosses alone. It is also a reckoning with control, grief, land stewardship, and the kind of light that follows mourning rather than resolves it. Published on New Year’s Day, at the approach of the Fire Horse year, this piece stands at a threshold—between endings and motion, between what must be released and what insists on moving forward anyway. Thank you for reading, for witnessing, and for being here. Love, Kim Links & References Subscribe to Stable Roots: Essays, reflections, and field notes from Lavender Hill Bramblewood Stables at Lavender Hill: The land, the horses, and the work that holds them Relatively Stable Podcast: Conversations about grief, land, horses, and grounding in the midst of chaos FX – Dying for Sex: Nurse Amy’s explanation of the biological stages of dying Terminal Lucidity (End-of-Life Phenomenon): Overview and research on clarity near death Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Fire Horse: Cultural context and meaning of the Fire Horse cycle Get full access to Stable Roots at stableroots.substack.com/subscribe

    21 min
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About

In Relatively Stable we delve into the journeys of those who have faced challenges, uncovered their passions, and discovered resilience along the way. Whether you're here for the stories, seeking inspiration, or simply drawn to the wisdom we glean from horses—and life—you’re in the right place. Let’s dive into the narratives that remind us how to stay relatively stable, no matter what comes our way. stableroots.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Kimberly Carter
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    60
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Kimberly Carter
  • Show Website
    Relatively Stable