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Transcript

Mane Character Energy · Relatively Stable

0:00
[music]
0:13
SPEAKER_00: Main character energy.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: It took me a quarter million words to let the horses tell their own stories.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: This big swooping realization started with a conversation about horse shows.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: Lakin, my little sister in heart,
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SPEAKER_00: and one of our instructors at my farm,
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SPEAKER_00: was preparing to take her horse to a show that weekend.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: I fully supported her dreams,
0:47
SPEAKER_00: but mid-conversation,
0:48
SPEAKER_00: I started preaching about how our farm doesn't take people to horse shows anymore.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: It had been a long time since I'd put words to that decision.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: I had a lot of things left to say,
1:02
SPEAKER_00: and it felt like it was high time to take stock of where we had started,
1:07
SPEAKER_00: where we are now, and all the ways we'd grown in the in-betweens.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: Lakin was an awfully good sport about it.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: After that conversation, I decided to revise and distribute the farm's ethos on social media.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Putting things into words helps people understand what we do and why we do it,
1:30
SPEAKER_00: but mostly it helps me study the maps in my head.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: Why we don't go to horse shows is something we may talk about
1:39
SPEAKER_00: in our daily farm life,
1:40
SPEAKER_00: but it's not something I've written much about,
1:43
SPEAKER_00: which is just weird because I write all the time.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: Since starting Stable Roots here on Substack in March 2024,
1:52
SPEAKER_00: I have written about one quarter million words.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: That's three 80,000 word books worth of writing.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: And that's not counting the life I spent riding about horses and around horses
2:07
SPEAKER_00: before making a home on this platform.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: I have touched on my farm's horsemanship philosophy in that big sea of words.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: I've introduced some horses.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: But these things typically happen in response to something unforeseen.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: After some big or small drama has occurred.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: I rarely write about the underpinning of our philosophies or,
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SPEAKER_00: stranger yet, the horses themselves.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: I overall just haven't spent enough time writing about the herd or what
2:42
SPEAKER_00: the daily care of them is like,
2:44
SPEAKER_00: their personalities and quirks, the things that make each horse an individual.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: This all changed when I spent an afternoon chatting with Lakin about a horse show.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: I finished the lesson I was teaching in the riding ring that we shared.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: Then I walked up to the house and quickly typed out some words
3:03
SPEAKER_00: and posted our farm show manifesto on Facebook.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: After that, I went about my business and spent the evening mowing.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: As usual, I just ignored all the alerts dinging on my phone.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: I just started listening to Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead audiobook
3:24
SPEAKER_00: and I was transfixed.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: Like the weird viral madness that happened when I advertised our Books at
3:31
SPEAKER_00: the Barn event the other month, I mistook the notifications for noise.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, I came in from mowing and looked at my phone.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Oh.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: I've been posting my writing on the internet since the internet was born.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: Before that,
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SPEAKER_00: in the 1900s,
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SPEAKER_00: my writing mentors trained me to collect rejection letters from literary journals.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: I still have them all in a box.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: I am programmed,
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SPEAKER_00: much like how the horses have trained us to never be late feeding dinner,
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SPEAKER_00: to simply expect that a few people might read my words and they might leave
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SPEAKER_00: a comment and then move on with their lives.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: But my little post about why we don't go to horse shows did something interesting.
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SPEAKER_00: It got people talking about their horses.
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SPEAKER_00: So many people were talking, sharing, and commenting on strangers' comments.
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SPEAKER_00: The reactions to the post were filled with love,
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SPEAKER_00: which we all know is a weird creature to find on the internet.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: As I kept posting,
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SPEAKER_00: there were one or two outliers that Like the person who asked me if I gave food
4:48
SPEAKER_00: and water to the barn cats.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, we just let them starve.
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SPEAKER_00: And the people who believe that a horse should never be ridden, ever.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: In the midst of all this lovely conversation,
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SPEAKER_00: I started to notice that people weren't talking about horse shows or barn cats
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SPEAKER_00: or farm life anymore.
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SPEAKER_00: They were talking about horses.
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SPEAKER_00: It took the internet for me to realize that I had been writing around horses most
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SPEAKER_00: of my life, but I'd only now started to write about them.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: I thought I wrote about horses.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: I used to write poetry.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: It paid my way through college.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: Then I wrote short stories.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: Then I wrote novellas.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: Then I wrote articles.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: Throughout my life, horses have been at the center of what I write about.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: For the past 15 years,
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SPEAKER_00: I have kept a blog of some sort and written about what it's like to run a horse farm
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SPEAKER_00: in a period when the world is running out of land and
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SPEAKER_00: the horse keeping has become unreasonably expensive.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: This whole time, I thought I was riding about horses.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: How could I not be?
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SPEAKER_00: Horses stand behind my thoughts every time I sit down at the computer.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: When I grab my notebook to jot down ideas with respect to consent and control,
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SPEAKER_00: the horses guide my pen.
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SPEAKER_00: They wander through my essays about grief and money and land and weather.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: The horses hang out with me as I write about getting older.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: They hide in the shadows as I write about Christopher or my mother
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SPEAKER_00: and how we're building a fresh chapter at this farm.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: The horses guide my hand as I study the nature of farming itself,
6:44
SPEAKER_00: what it's like to frame your life around a concept that eats all disposable income
6:50
SPEAKER_00: and plants that wilt because it rained too much or not enough.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: The horses are everywhere.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: But as I read each comment and began posting a new photo each day,
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SPEAKER_00: accompanied by the life story of one of our herd members,
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SPEAKER_00: I started seeing a difference between a horse appearing in a story and letting
7:11
SPEAKER_00: the horse be the story.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: Until now, I've used the horses as illustrations.
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SPEAKER_00: I've written about Max showing me something about myself
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SPEAKER_00: or Penny helping me understand something about the world.
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SPEAKER_00: And the horses always become the hook I used as a mirror
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SPEAKER_00: to understand what it's like to be more fully human.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: I deserve to be shamed a little for using the horses as subjects to reveal humanity
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SPEAKER_00: because my farm's horsemanship philosophy is based on asking humans
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SPEAKER_00: to stop making everything about themselves.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: As these posts of the horse's individual stories and quirks began to spread like
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SPEAKER_00: a blaze,
7:56
SPEAKER_00: I realized how little of my horsemanship philosophy had filtered upstairs to
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SPEAKER_00: the writing department in my brain.
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SPEAKER_00: The horses in the comments.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: For the most part,
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SPEAKER_00: answering comments on anything I share on social media is a giant chore
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SPEAKER_00: that I dread.
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SPEAKER_00: This is paradoxical to all the times I ask people to share and engage with my words.
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SPEAKER_00: I just have, like so many of us, so little time.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm pleased as punch to hit send and share a fun or serious story about my life at
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SPEAKER_00: the farm, but everything I write happens between bookkeeping, emails, and chores.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: I don't have enough time to write in general.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: Commenting back to people who generously spend their time with me becomes,
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SPEAKER_00: sadly, another task on my to-do list.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: Nothing could be further from the truth of what I experienced
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SPEAKER_00: when my horse stories began spreading around the globe this week.
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SPEAKER_00: Each notification became a little gift.
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SPEAKER_00: I eagerly sought out new comments and stopped whatever I was doing to respond
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SPEAKER_00: when someone wrote.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: Why was there such a difference?
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SPEAKER_00: People were telling me their horse stories.
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SPEAKER_00: I learned about ancient geldings and complicated mares.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: I read about horses that had transported readers through childhood and the horses
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SPEAKER_00: that had saved people's marriages and pulled them through years
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SPEAKER_00: when just getting out of bed was an accomplishment.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: I read about horses that had been dead for 30 years but were still described in
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SPEAKER_00: the present tense.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: Over and over, I read comments from strangers who repeatedly said the same thing.
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SPEAKER_00: I knew a horse like your Penny or Max, and they saved me when nothing else could reach me.
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SPEAKER_00: I know this feeling.
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SPEAKER_00: I am one of these people.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: As the comments kept coming,
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SPEAKER_00: I started to see that my horses connected me with a herd of horses that had passed
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SPEAKER_00: through strangers' lives for decades and decades.
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SPEAKER_00: The way these creatures changed our lives spanned the world several times over.
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SPEAKER_00: My stories about my horses became a gateway to other people's stories
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SPEAKER_00: about their horses and their joy in sharing these memories was apparent.
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SPEAKER_00: No matter how sad they were for the years that had passed
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SPEAKER_00: since they last laid their hands on a warm, huge neck.
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SPEAKER_00: My Max and Penny and Hero and Pepper were opening doors for people to walk through
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SPEAKER_00: and find a horse waiting on the other side.
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SPEAKER_00: Their horse.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: I think that's what stories are supposed to do.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: Every week I post a little video for all paid subscribers.
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SPEAKER_00: It's a peek over the fence at the big and small things that captured my attention on
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SPEAKER_00: the farm each week.
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SPEAKER_00: You might see a horse doing something lovely or hear me wandering around talking about grass.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: The production value of these videos won't win a short film award,
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SPEAKER_00: but I invite you into our world as I walk around the farm and notice stuff
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SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to come along, I'd love to have you.
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SPEAKER_00: Paid subscriptions support the work we do at the farm and give me the time and space
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SPEAKER_00: to keep telling these stories.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: Consider this your invitation to come through the gates and stay with me for a while.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: Why did this take me so long?
11:59
SPEAKER_00: I've spent most of my life, adult and otherwise, with horses.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: Many times I have fed them before feeding myself.
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SPEAKER_00: Literally, I spent most of my 20s and 30s forgetting to eat.
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SPEAKER_00: From vacations to relationships, my whole life has revolved around horses.
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SPEAKER_00: As a riding instructor, I've spent so long shouting, heels down!
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SPEAKER_00: In frigid and blazing riding rings that I suspect those may be my last words.
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SPEAKER_00: I've collected a lot of little details about spending my life with horses
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SPEAKER_00: because they shape my days.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: I'm not just taking notes because I'm a rider.
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SPEAKER_00: The farm doesn't function without me noticing what is happening
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SPEAKER_00: and taking timely action to support the herd's health.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: Somewhere in the middle of all those chores, I stop seeing the horses as stories.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: I stop noticing how extraordinary the average horse is.
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SPEAKER_00: A horse that has been a part of my life
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SPEAKER_00: for 20 years doesn't show up one morning radiating narrative significance.
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SPEAKER_00: He just wants breakfast.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: I once spent so much of my life immersed in stories that I made in my head,
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SPEAKER_00: a survival tactic I'd honed since childhood,
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SPEAKER_00: that any song was a sweeping orchestral soundtrack to
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SPEAKER_00: the alternate reality I was living inside my mind.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: At some point over the years, I stopped doing that.
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SPEAKER_00: Without the soundtrack,
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SPEAKER_00: I stopped seeing that the ordinary accumulation of knowing
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SPEAKER_00: about another creature was itself a story.
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SPEAKER_00: I never overlooked the horses in any detail that mattered
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SPEAKER_00: to their balanced living lives,
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SPEAKER_00: but I learned to overlook their stories because I was too busy staring at
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SPEAKER_00: the horse's physical reality.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: All this interest in the stories of the horses I'd finally taken time
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SPEAKER_00: to write helped me recognize something else.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: For a very long time, I haven't had much time to look around me and be amazed by anything.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: It's not a Thursday post in Stable Roots without me mentioning this at least once,
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SPEAKER_00: so bear with me.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: It has been one whole entire giant slash tiny year since we packed up and moved
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SPEAKER_00: the herd and our lives to the new farm at Lavender Hill.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: Before that, we had money to raise, a new farm to find, and impossible decisions to make.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: When we landed safely,
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SPEAKER_00: I had a whole new world to learn and figure out how we might all belong to it.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: There has been grief.
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SPEAKER_00: There has always been something.
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SPEAKER_00: And when I was trying to keep my life from falling apart or busy assembling
15:01
SPEAKER_00: the next version of my life, the thing that I wrote about was what was on fire.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: I was becoming.
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SPEAKER_00: Survival necessitated me being the main character for a while.
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SPEAKER_00: Steadily and almost eerily, things began to slow down.
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SPEAKER_00: We've had enough time now at Lavender Hill to feel mostly organized and flowing in our days.
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SPEAKER_00: We have habits and new rituals.
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SPEAKER_00: The fences are beginning to take better shape.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: And the horses don't blink at the way the shadows fall from the tree branches
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SPEAKER_00: as they walk back and forth to the fields.
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SPEAKER_00: We finally slowed down enough to graduate from, holy shit, we bought this.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: To asking ourselves if we remembered to turn off the hose.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: In the newfound stillness that remains,
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SPEAKER_00: Lavender Hill is starting to feel like a place we live in instead of
16:04
SPEAKER_00: an enormous thing that we did.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: For the very first time in my life, I've finally found Stable Roots.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: In that safety, I'm beginning to see the horses again.
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SPEAKER_00: I can remember the histories that brought them to me
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SPEAKER_00: before I started extracting lessons from them.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: It's immensely humbling to build a program around horses having their own opinions
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SPEAKER_00: while writing about them as if they were just supporting characters
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SPEAKER_00: in my personal story.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: These horses get to have a story that isn't only about me.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: Now that I've written that, it seems embarrassingly simple.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: But now that I've seen it, I can't erase it.
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SPEAKER_00: I walk through the pasture and there are stories everywhere.
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SPEAKER_00: Not lessons, stories.
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SPEAKER_00: There's a difference.
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SPEAKER_00: People don't just want more horse content.
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SPEAKER_00: All the stories being shared with me of individual horses
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SPEAKER_00: that are unforgettable parts of people's lives are evidence to me that we're sick
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SPEAKER_00: of horses being a symbol of something.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: Horses don't have to be something.
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SPEAKER_00: They're somebody else.
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SPEAKER_00: I don't know how long any of this will last.
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SPEAKER_00: The algorithms are fickle and will soon wander off to find someone making sourdough
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SPEAKER_00: in a bikini or a raccoon that operates heavy machinery.
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SPEAKER_00: I've been writing on the internet long enough to know
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SPEAKER_00: that fleeting attention doesn't mean something is permanent.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: But something deeper than the number of views has been at work in
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SPEAKER_00: the success my recent stories have found.
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SPEAKER_00: People started bringing me their horses and thankfully,
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SPEAKER_00: unlike what happened with Pepper,
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SPEAKER_00: and you can check that out on Stable Roots last week,
18:11
SPEAKER_00: thankfully not in a tactile way that leaves me with the feed bill.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: They bring me their horses to notice and admire in these comments.
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SPEAKER_00: They tell me the names of their old lesson horses or the ones that buck them off
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SPEAKER_00: and they can't stop thinking about her 50 years later and They tell me about
18:31
SPEAKER_00: the gelding that carried them through a brutal divorce and
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SPEAKER_00: the horse they regret their parents selling.
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SPEAKER_00: Again and again,
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SPEAKER_00: someone will read about one of our horses and get in touch to say,
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SPEAKER_00: I had one like that, or your story reminds me of my horse, or I miss him.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: I'm beginning to see that by sharing Penny's story,
18:56
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't just introducing them to a gray ex-Amish mare with a stiff shoulder and
19:02
SPEAKER_00: an ability to hold space for people's grief.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: Instead, I reminded them of someone they already knew.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: Recognition is a lot bigger than a story going viral.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: Most of us carry around a small census of animals that matter to us.
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SPEAKER_00: Horses and dogs and cats,
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SPEAKER_00: whose names mean nothing to the majority of the earth,
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SPEAKER_00: lived an existence that altered the underpinning of many people's lives.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: The world may not know them, but we do.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: It's important to write their names out loud.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: I'm never going to stop writing about all the things that horses teach humans.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: But as I settle more deeply into this farm,
19:52
SPEAKER_00: I have all this spooky space in my life now that I'm no longer surrounded
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SPEAKER_00: by other people's constant hungry fires.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to take more time to give attention to the horses' ordinarily unremarkable stories.
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SPEAKER_00: The story can be as simple as, you should know this horse.
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SPEAKER_00: I do.
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SPEAKER_00: And I think you might love knowing them too.
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SPEAKER_00: On the ground at Bramblewood Stables at Lavender Hill,
20:23
SPEAKER_00: there are horses that built the farm when the reality of the farm was just an idea
20:27
SPEAKER_00: in my head.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: I've met horses only to bury them,
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SPEAKER_00: and others I've known long enough only to witness them passing through.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: Right now,
20:37
SPEAKER_00: as I write these words,
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SPEAKER_00: horses are grazing outside who are unaware that strangers on
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SPEAKER_00: the internet have opinions about them.
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SPEAKER_00: They don't all have lessons for us.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: They have personalities.
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SPEAKER_00: Thank God.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: In three years and a quarter million words,
20:56
SPEAKER_00: it's time for Stable Roots to get closer to its roots.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: I will never stop writing about land and grief and making one more pass with
21:04
SPEAKER_00: the mower so that the world appears balanced and right again.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: My stories aren't going anywhere.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: But for 30 years, I've made a business of asking the horses to tell me what they think.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: My entire philosophy focuses on listening for their answer.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: But it's taken me this long to realize that I should probably write it all down.
21:30
SPEAKER_00: This whole time, I've been living in a pasture filled with main characters.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: Field Notes.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: On a completely unrelated note,
21:45
SPEAKER_00: I'm currently in the process of shopping for a new insurance policy for the farm
21:50
SPEAKER_00: because the carrier we've been with for decades decided to get out of
21:54
SPEAKER_00: the horse farm business.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: Want to know which one of our services gives underwriters the most pause?
22:04
SPEAKER_00: Books at the barn.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: Of all the things we do beside and on top of giant horses,
22:12
SPEAKER_00: but it's the ponies you've got to watch out for.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: And the tractors and electric fences and mud and thunderstorms.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Not to mention my personal relationship with my zero turn mower.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: It's the program where all the introverts sit quietly reading in the barn aisle way
22:29
SPEAKER_00: that raises the underwriting eyebrow.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: I knew books could be dangerous, but I wasn't aware until now that they were an insurance risk.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: This is ludicrous, but we've learned to never expect the normal around here.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: I hope you all have a great week.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: Tell me about your main characters and your weirdness in the comments.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: As always,
22:56
SPEAKER_00: if you know someone who needs a little bit of horses in their lives,
23:00
SPEAKER_00: send me their way.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: Love, Kim.