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PODCAST

Relatively Stable

Kimberly Carter

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

society & culture relationships

All Episodes

26:00

Hope Always Goes Clean

Relatively Stable ·

2026/10/01

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

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28:42

Practical Farm Magic

Relatively Stable ·

2026/09/24

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

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23:27

Mane Character Energy

Relatively Stable ·

2026/09/17

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

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28:44

Julian Thinks the Barn Is Stupid

Relatively Stable ·

2026/09/10

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,

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30:00

The Four Seasons

Relatively Stable ·

2026/09/03

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

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34:30

Alpha is a Misnomer

Relatively Stable ·

2026/08/27

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

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20:01

A Total Eclipse of the Foxtail

Relatively Stable ·

2026/08/20

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 selling hay.There are horses. There are weeds. There are extremely particular hay buyers. There is a basic

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17:10

I'm Sorry, Please Forgive Me

Relatively Stable ·

2026/08/13

I'm Sorry, Please Forgive Me(I love you, thank you)This week, I’m thinking about all the things we apologize for that might not require an apology at all.Things like: talking to ourselves, talking to horses, taking up space, having bodies that change. Things like having feeling things we would rather pretend we don’t feel.It begins with a client asking me if it’s okay to speak to a horse and Penny, our resident Amish unicorn, once again refusing to walk over a pole. It wanders through the strange

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17:35

But Will There Be Riding?

Relatively Stable ·

2026/08/06

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 question: How do you protect something whose greatest value is that almost nothing happens?This week, I'm writing

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17:01

A Time for Everything

Relatively Stable ·

2026/07/30

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 ordinary moments until they're behind us.This week's essay is about grief, timing, horses, and the

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18:14

Horse with a Pearl Earring

Relatively Stable ·

2026/07/23

Horse with a Pearl EarringWhat 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 necessary, why humans so often invent extra ones, and how living on our new farm is teaching me the difference

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17:23

The Trees Speak

Relatively Stable ·

2026/07/16

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, forestry, science, and one unforgettable South Carolina forester who seemed to live on an entirely different

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23:15

The Joy of Mowing

Relatively Stable ·

2026/07/09

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 ditches, and why Johnson grass might have more to teach us than we'd like to admit.Sometimes the most ordinary

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28:50

Granny Magic

Relatively Stable ·

2026/06/25

Granny Magic: A witness statement from the Blue Ridge MountainsWhat 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 Appalachian folk traditions, the rise of cottagecore and grannycore, the tension between faith and

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25:08

Shut Up and Listen

Relatively Stable ·

2026/06/18

The Ability to Be TaughtWhy 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 research in the pre-internet era to a stubborn girth buckle, fragmented attention, working memory, and the

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19:25

A Future Me Problem

Relatively Stable ·

2026/06/11

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 itself as a product of modern technology, expectations, and endless decision-making?Through stories from life

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17:17

I'm So Glad I Was Evicted

Relatively Stable ·

2026/06/04

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 reflects on the long, overlapping histories we leave on borrowed ground, the difference between a grand

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27:50

The Dreaming

Relatively Stable ·

2026/05/28

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 science of REM sleep, the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript — a fifteenth-century illustrated codex full of

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17:41

The Grass Isn't Always Greener

Relatively Stable ·

2026/05/21

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 much bigger — the difference between forcing compliance and allowing recovery, in the land, in our horses,

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16:00

We Don't Save Old Farms

Relatively Stable ·

2026/05/14

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 more intimate: a meditation on stewardship, memory, and the feeling of stepping into a conversation

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