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On Oceans, Horses, and Feeling · Relatively Stable

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Stable Roots, my weekly collection of stories, conversations, and thoughts.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get started.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: On oceans, horses, and feeling.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: How herd wisdom invites us to drench our senses.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher and I arrived on the Big Island of Hawaii in the middle of the night
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: after a day of flights and near misses.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: When we finally secured a car and buckled in,
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: we followed the volcanic mountain elevation down to the coast from the airport to
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: the city to roads we couldn't find by GPS.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: On the drive to the apartment that we'd call home for the next two weeks,
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: there were no streetlights or landmarks.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Through my passenger seat window,
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: the knowledge of the ocean,
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: the expansive presence of the water,
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: was an intuitive sense,
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: like knowing without seeing that someone was in the house.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was something I felt.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't visualize the ocean beyond the misting rain that swirled through the
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: headlights on the bumpy,
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: narrow road,
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: but I recognized its presence,
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  SPEAKER_00: a frequency moving beyond my limited sight,
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: As the morning light filled the corners of the apartment,
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: soft and golden,
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: I heard the ocean for the first time.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: At first I mistook it for the sound of my blood rushing in my ears.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Then I noticed the rhythm came from somewhere beyond me,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: and like being shy to me to love and basking in the wait,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I procrastinated for hours before I walked down the street to find her.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: The walk took me past two stop signs and a turn,
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: and then the immensity of the sea stretched out before me.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: The land ended in water.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I looked in three directions, trying to find an end to it, but the horizon line was the only break.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'd never seen so much sea at once, and the immensity delighted me.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It scared me, and it opened something inside of me, something I don't have a name for yet.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: The sight of that much sea broke me open.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: On the second day, a place found us.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: It sought us out and pulled us from our bones.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: We had no choice but to gladly comply and seek it out.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: I know I've been discovered by places before, wondering how I got there.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: But as we drove and explored and looked aimlessly, every bend in the road revealed a new treasure.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the final stop,
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: the place that looked for us and called until we found it,
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: was a pull-off and a twisting trail of roots that led to a high overlook with a
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: bench carved from smooth driftwood.
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  SPEAKER_00: On either side of the point,
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: the waves crashed so powerfully,
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: so loudly,
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  SPEAKER_00: so constantly,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: that all of my senses experienced the water.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: My eyes, my skin, my ears, my tongue, my breath.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: The waves inside of me synced with the clock of the earth.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher and I didn't really speak for hours while we were there.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: We watched and listened and felt.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Sea turtles played in the waves.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: There was a rhythm to the sets.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Smaller crests, still massive to my Atlantic comparison, rolled in by pattern.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Smaller waves growing larger and larger into a surge of such power that made me
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: tremble in awe of the water.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like the old saying that a fear of heights is a response to the desire to leap,
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I noticed how my apprehension held the seed of desire.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's how awe works.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: It stuns you with the novelty of sensing.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: The sun sank through the wind-shaped trees along the cliffs.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Every so often,
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: one of the waves peaked as it moved towards where we sat and offered a window of
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: clarity into the ocean floor,
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: a magnified reflection,
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: a mirror into the deep.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm pretty sure that in the days since Hurricane Helene,
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Tamar Reno has said that water doesn't ask for permission.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: If she has not, she should.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds like her words as I write them.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: As I sat on the cliff in Hawaii, I let the water take me.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: I could try to write what we saw and felt as we watched the waves on the bench beside the road in Hawaii.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: I could do this a thousand times and never be able to capture an honest picture of what we experienced.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: My mother is very respectful of the stories that warn about taking a stone home as
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: a souvenir from the Hawaiian Islands.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: As we set off on our travels,
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: she was afraid we'd bring a pebble home in our shoes and incite a curse from Pele.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: My mother isn't wrong because during that trip,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: something inside of me changed or something long lost found me as I experienced the
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: magnitude of the point where the water met the lava rock cliffs.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: My take on the Pele curse is this.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: With my senses opened up,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: I could no longer hide and ignore my fears,
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: the dark impulses that have become lifelong habits.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: The water asked me to open myself up and see things for what they are.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And having your fears brought to you,
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: being asked to look at them,
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: smell them,
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: taste them,
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  SPEAKER_00: is a great task for a seeker,
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: someone like me who loves figuring internal stuff out.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But the energy must be hard for someone just looking to have a nice vacation with
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: flowery shirts and fruity drinks.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hawaii, in my experience, asked you to learn how to receive, how to take experience into your body.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Her feminine wisdom is straight, direct and brutal, like water, like fire.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me to how the horses prime me to be receptive.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Waves and particles.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: My work focuses on nervous systems, both human and horse.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: The horses are beautiful teachers for many reasons,
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: but if I'm going to talk to them,
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: I have to forget about my words.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Our communication hinges on physical, mental, emotional responses to external stimuli.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Horses experience the landscape and respond to it.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: They talk to the world through their senses.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: We cannot, despite my attempts, talk in words.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a good thing.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Humans use enough words.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I know it's rich hearing this from a rider.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: We talk to horses through our nervous systems.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Humans are so verbally dominant,
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: we like to talk,
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  SPEAKER_00: that we forget that we're also animals who respond physically,
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: mentally,
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: emotionally to external stimuli.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Our nervous systems are whirring day and night while we, oblivious, keep talking.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Last week I wrote about being oddly spontaneous, despite being a pathological planner.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how Christopher and I ended up in Hawaii.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: He told me early on in our expanded relationship that his mother was from Hilo and
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: had returned to the Big Island because of a sick family member.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: I immediately researched flights.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Not because it was Hawaii,
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: a chance for a tropical vacation in the month that the farm in the foothills of the
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Blue Ridge Mountains is coldest.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: That was a sincere bonus.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I seriously felt the call to go.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was a sense that welled up inside of me, a surge that pushed me to act.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: It started near my feet and rose up through my body.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like waves, the desire crashed where it met the land of my thoughts.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Everything I'm supposed to do in my life has started this way.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Applying to programs to study writing, selling art, starting a farm, buying certain horses.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: I love bookkeeping and forecasting, but I've never made a major decision for any reason except intuition.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: I decide by feeling, not by thought.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that's probably how the horses found me.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sensory drenching.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: On the beach in Hawaii,
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: the magnitude of the sensory stimuli quieted my mind and brought my awareness into
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: my physical body.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: I allowed awe to shift my perspective from inside to outside.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's off-putting to ask my internal narrative to shut up.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Traveling anywhere can do this for us,
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: but I don't think it would be half as easy to make that shift,
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: even on a sensory-drenching cliff like the one we accidentally discovered on the
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Big Island,
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: if the horses hadn't for years been wearing away my internal chatter like a scrubby
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: field of brown clover.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Horses rip plants up by the root.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: They don't shear the tops like cows.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: They pull the whole plant up and toss the roots to the side because they have no use for them.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: This skill is how they get through to me, past my hard head.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Noticing can be acquired anywhere in the natural world,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: but horses work for me because I'm with them all the time,
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: and as my co-workers,
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: being aware of their bodies helps me in the most primitive way.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Awareness keeps me safe.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I could share space with my Border Collie and accomplish the same thing,
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: but it's easy to check out from my surroundings with cats and dogs because I'm
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: comfortable in their presence and I forget they're near.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: But if you've ever encountered an aggressive animal of any species,
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: you know how fast your mind gives way to action.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Horses don't need aggression to remind me.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're big and fast and their nervous systems are primed to act.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is true for the most docile horse.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: When I'm near them, I must stay aware of what's happening around me.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much that's out there now about horses help humans heal.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: This question has guided most of my work,
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: but in our search to fix our nervous systems gone haywire from modern life,
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: we can't forget the horse's autonomy.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: They're not our medicine,
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: but we can find a clue of how to get over ourselves through the resonance of their
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: frequencies by noticing how our nervous systems speak to the environment.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Noticing begins as I approach a horse.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Does the horse blink or flick an ear?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Do the little wrinkles above their eye change, the ones around their nostrils?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: I can spend all day with this minutia and only maybe sometimes see it, maybe not.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Am I here to understand or am I here to see, to sense, to notice this?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding or trying to grasp is where I stop feeling in my body and I get lost inside my mind.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Back to what's in front of me.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: The horse dips ahead to eat, lifts the neck to see what's moving in the shadows of the tree line.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's like that exercise for when you're anxious about something.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Name the things you can see.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Mailbox.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Tree.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Are the one where you count down the numbers through your senses.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Five things you can see,
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  SPEAKER_00: four you can feel,
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: three you can hear,
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: two you can smell,
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: and one you can taste.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're washing our minds clear of the chatter,
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: and the horse,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: sensing that I'm noticing,
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: stops eating and watches back.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not to speak for the horses, but I'm speaking for the horses.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: How crazy they must feel dealing with us and knowing that most humans are so
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: removed from their environment that they can hardly realize they're present at all.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: In the golden moments of shared space, my internal chatter fades away and I'm present with the horses.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Just our skin and blood moving through the rhythm of the earth's clock.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Present and allowing.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Ready to receive.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing big is happening.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're just here.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Nature can do this for us all the time if we allow it.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: As I sat on the cliff in Hawaii and allowed myself to be transported by the power
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: of the convergence of water and land,
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: my chattering mind slowed and I was present.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Rhythms.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: As the light fades, Christopher and I feel our way back to the car.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Our skin is scaled and dry salt as the roaring of the waves and rocks recede behind us.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Every action, every moment feels deliberate.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I notice the strap of the bag on my shoulder,
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: the ball of fishing twine scavenged from the hill in the palm of my hand.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: I feel how the stones bruise my feet.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: I taste the dry grit in my mouth.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: The tree frogs sing a rhythm that sounds like coffee, coffee.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: I have changed, but nothing has happened.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Everything has happened.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I am here.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me here.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Next week, I'm going to tackle the psychology of giving.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: This week,
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: I needed to spend some time revisiting Hawaii with my words because so stinking
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: much has happened since we arrived home in March.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: We lost two horses.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: One of them was like a second limb to me.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: I became sick.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: We got married.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: The hurricane blew through.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: I became sicker.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thanksgiving was postponed by a virus.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then my father went into the hospital.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Since we were married,
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: it feels like we've been riding a sea of brutal waves with barely time to gasp for
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: breath before the next wall of water engulfs us.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: I needed a palate cleanser, a little sensory dripped break from the continuous chatter inside my mind.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: But the work still remains.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm lucky because I have the horses to remind me of my presence every single day.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for letting me bring the horses to you, wherever you are.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: In this season of giving,
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: if you feel the call to help people whose lives have been irrevocably altered by
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: the devastation of Hurricane Helene,
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: you can click on Stable Roots and find a constantly updated list of vetted sources.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: More than 70 days have passed since the storm blew through the mountains,
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: but people are still rebuilding their lives as winter makes living harder.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Please help if you can.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to talk about this even more next week.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me here and being a part of my herd.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Love, Kim.