Instinct vs. Reason
The intersection of faith and science -- as told to me by a horse
2024 was the kind of year that felt like a loud, crowded room filled with strangers — like everything was happening at once in a whirlwind of untethered, unfamiliar stress. Some people lost everything, others just lost their bearings.
We closed out the fourth quarter at the farm with a continuous barrage of physical ailments in the herd and a supersonic heat cycle in the mares. Most of our ladies have been together for quite a while and their seasons are synched up in cycles that follow the path of the full moon. Horses don’t experience menopause which results in lifelong cycling (bless them). Their bodies give them a little break in the winter and the first big heat happens well into the new year.
But not this year. They’re cycling now, and they’re tense and frustrated and achy and uncomfortable — a living symbol of how a lot of us are feeling.
Our veterinarian and I have gotten tight the past few months and when she was last out to examine a hoof abscess I asked if she was finding atypical cycles in mares throughout her travels. She cares for farms from the North Carolina high elevations of the Blue Ridge mountains down to where we live in the foothills of South Carolina. She agreed — horses are cycling earlier than she’s witnessed before all across the region.
After Hurricane Helene, record amounts of concentrated rainfall and flooding ended abruptly in a month-long drought. The dry spell aided recovery efforts and was hugely beneficial for those who lost their homes and were living in tents, but the storm’s massive trauma to the land created an unusual transition to the autumn season. Torrential water and winds decimated the landscape and suddenly there was a bone dry drought. As communities blinked their collective eyes and decided what to do next, they saw whole mountains stripped of vegetation on one slope and blooming into fall color on another.
Around the farm, few of our remaining trees changed colors at all. They clung to their leaves in a process called marcescence, a peculiar activity that has no discernible source but is believed to be caused by environmental disruption and damage. The autumn leaves don’t change color, they just shrivel and cling to the branches. The sound of the leaves rustling in the wind, particularly on the few white oaks that are remaining, is haunting. The autumn leaves didn’t change color, they just cling to the trees and talk.
My hunch is that humans do this too but in less obvious ways.
My marcesence looks like being afraid to ask for what I need/want, fears for the future, resistance to change, hoarding resources. I’ve started seeking out, like a scientific experiment, the moments that feel opposite to this, the times that I feel open and curious and excited, trying to find and replicate the environments that help me connect.
I’ve noticed I feel curious and open most often when I’m creating something or when I’m experiencing a sense of wonder, a feeling of awe.
The healing power of awe is a hot topic in medical literature right now. It’s weird to scroll through studies and see mention of the natural world and spirituality:
Awe engages five processes—shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning—that benefit well-being. We then apply this model to illuminate how experiences of awe that arise in nature, spirituality, music, collective movement, and psychedelics strengthen the mind and body. (Monroy, Keltner, 2022)
I’ve struggled with how to address the natural world and spirituality in the work that I do with people and horses. I’ve seen, felt, and heard things that don’t make sense to the rational world. As an industry, we call this the woo. Horses sold me on acupuncture because animals don’t experience a placebo effect. It either works or it doesn’t.
So many people I respect in the horse world are beginning to own the importance of mystery in their work, the power of the unquantifiable. I guess I’m trying to do the same by writing this post. I’ve started writing this post so many times but gave up.
This is my poor attempt at categorizing the ineffable.
I’ve made a lot of bold statements about the kind of year I want to march into this January, but I’m holding two themes close — art and awe.
Art — because we’re all freezing for the warmth that only the fire of our creative, internal spark can bring. We’re aching to tell our story.
Awe — because I don’t have a better word for it yet, we’ve overused the word magic, so I’m sticking with this one because it’s universal and encompasses the unseen.
But I want to talk to you about the magic of awe today, not sleight of hand and illusions (we have enough of those) but magic like the unseen wonders that are happening all around us, that are coming from us.
Let’s pull back the veil, and by doing so, we might also uncover some art.
Let’s get started.
I draw like I heal
I wake to the sound of wind pressing the thin saplings to the ground outside my window. My phone alerts with tornado warnings and farm staff and volunteers checking in to say they’re waiting for the storm to pass before arriving for morning chores with the horses.
The sound of the growing storm mimics the brutal force of the morning that Hurricane Helene tore through these inland forests. It’s too soon. I’m not ready to examine the emotions that rise up with this too closely.
I’ll begin with the caveat that at the end of that day in September when Hurricane Helene struck, my barn was still standing and everyone was still alive, which is far better than anyone had it higher up in the hills. But that day changed me. One cannot serve in the care of a herd of anything vulnerable to the whims of nature and not always be planning for the Big One, the 1000 Year one, the One In a Lifetime — hoping that our fears are unfounded.
I worked with horses for twenty-five years before I lost water and paddocks and communication with the outside world, but I’ve started every day of my working life planning for that contingency, dreading it, feeling in my bones that something big might happen.
Will the feed store be able to deliver? (eventually) Will the hay be ruined? (just what was in the barn) Will anyone be able to get to work? (after a few days) Is the roof still in place? (mostly) Are the horses standing in water? (yes) How will we source water for them to drink? (a sixty gallon tank and a drive to the fire station when the roads are passable — or a husband who signed the marriage certificate five days before the storm hit and can wire a generator to the well pump) Can I turn the horses out in the fields? (no) If something is injured can the veterinarian get here? (no)
A horse trapped in her stall for five hours, water to her knees — can I get her out? (no)
The pony who stood in water because there was no time to get her out, here I am ninety days later, trying to heal the canker in her feet so she will survive. The storm is still taking its toll. Canker is an autoimmune response to moisture and a bovine bacteria ever present in the environment — a bacteria responsible for certain tumors. Some breeds of horses are more susceptible to canker. We suspect Lady procured it because she’s almost thirty years old and tough as nails. Her body gave a finger to Helene and said NOPE. Canker is the body’s steel will turned against itself.
A friend who reads my writing and has parents who live at the edge of our woods visited home for the first time over the holidays. He sent a message with images of sawed wood from fallen trees still stacked along the roadways, “I really had no idea it was that bad.”
There’s no way of describing Hurricane Helene if you weren’t here with us digging through the muck, hauling piles of branches into the scoured forest, grateful for hot coffee and signs of life, praying that the animals were still standing, sinking into the story of people and creatures who had it far worse.
That’s the body memory I wake to in the sound of the December storm outside my bedroom window almost a hundred days after the hurricane blew through. My heart aches for people who lost everything. The sound of thunder and wind mean something very different to them now.
In the 1985 book The Body Electric, (sponsored link) a treatise on healing and electromagnetic energy, one quote stands out in my head, “The healer’s job has always been to release something not understood, to remove obstructions (demons, germs, despair) between the sick patient and the force of life driving obscurely toward wholeness.”
The hurricane reduced me down to my essence and forced me to stop making excuses for the mystery that is at the heart of all that I do. I’m not afraid to talk about energy anymore. That’s what happens when your worst fear comes true and you’re left standing. Small talk is gathered downstream in the newly made floodplain and the candlelight of distant friends — their warm hearths and shared experience — is all that matters.
I have one session this Sunday morning after the December wind and rain but most of my clients have rescheduled because of the weather. It’s just me and Laci, taking stock of the barn.
Can I share a list of my recent worries with you?
The canker in Lady’s feet. $3500 into treatment and the daily care and wrapping and management have come down to acetone and battling Lady’s heat cycle that is making it difficult to pick up her feet (thank you, Sarah for dodging the hooves).
George is showing signs of laminitis — the prelude to founder. Caused by the body’s response to too many nutrients, George discovered the bumper crop of acorns in his paddock — traumatized trees perpetuating their species after the storm — and ate his fill. His new diet is soaked hay and tiny scoops of minerals.
Penny has Cushing’s Disease and the vet recommends a daily anti-inflammatory along with her insulin-resistance drugs. I hide her pills in her feed and sometimes offer a tiny mash of meds and grain in the palm of my hand, a disappointing faux-peppermint. She grimaces and swallows.
An afternoon alert from Sarah tells me that Bentley is having a colic. Gas has displaced his colon in the past and the signs appear suddenly and are unmistakable. I spend the night giving him small meals and keeping him moving to pass the gas. When morning comes and he is still standing, I thank all my guardians and protectors for one more season with him.
Sheba is in heat. Her back is tense and she is not having it. She melts under Carol’s touch — because Carol spends an hour believing in faith and science before each ride. Sheba tells us when to push and when to back away.
Julian rips the skin above his eye. The mares are in heat and he is tense and not having it. Since birth, Julian has worn his nervous system on top of his skin, like a sleek, muscled coat.
Moose is brewing an abscess in her foot. She is in heat and her hind end hurts and she is not having it.
Every other day we apply a poultice to Moose’s foot to draw the abscess to the surface. After being hunched over Lady’s diminutive pony legs, I barely have to bend to meet Moose’s tall, warmblood stature. Her foot is still wrapped from the previous day’s doctoring but as I watch Moose move I have the sense that something else is happening.
Laci and I decide to spend the morning asking Moose to show us what we need to know. Without any force or rush, without a goal or expectation, we walk beside her like tiny sentries guarding the steps of a reactive queen.
When Moose pauses, I scan her topline for signs, the mountain ridges of her vertebrae, the slope of her face, the pinch in her hips. I want to believe in reiki and chakras and enlightenment. I want faith healing to be real. But I’m afraid that if I say any of this out loud, people will think I’m an idiot — and that’s on me and not them.
Laci doesn’t care if I’m an idiot and horses don’t experience the placebo effect. I skim my fingers along the invisible ridge of Moose’s bladder meridian. She blinks and I hover my hand in a space of combined warmth, my skin, her skin, my palm, her back. I step away and come closer like a painter trying to find the right perspective to put my brush on the texture of Moose’s canvas.
I draw like I heal — haltingly, nervously, second-guessing.
Nerves, nervous, nervous breakdown. It’s in our bodies. We relive the past in the blueprint of our nervous system, but our bodies react as if it’s happening in the now. If my nerves carry this much information, how can I use them to connect with Moose?
Show me where it hurts.
I shove my awareness from the habit of thinking inside my head to a spot farther down my body, the other thinking space that whirs inside my gut. I watch the space where Moose’s hind legs join her body. I do this from a distance and I do this standing beside her. When we’re close she turns her neck and curves her big, steady gaze to me. She shuffles her hips closer to where I stand.
There.
Laci is quiet and gives me the space I need to figure this out, to figure me out. Moose is patient, responsive, and breathes out a big sigh of relief as I let go of my humanness and join her in the stretch of feeling between our nervous systems, our ancient, internal guidance that’s been shelved with pseudo-science and rapture, that mutli-sensed birthplace of awe.
“She’s sore in the front from the abscess, but she’s sore in the back from her heat cycle,” I say, with certainty but needing confirmation, needing validation (I always need validation). Moose stretches her neck down and begins to walk forward again between Laci and me. Our feet press into the wet ground in the rhythm of the earth’s clock. We step together.
For just a moment in the silence of my questions, I feel the place where Moose and I connect from the heart.
And this is enough — it may very well be all that there is.
And that too is enough.
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
- Julian of Norwich
Igniting the Creative Fire
In a recent session with a young client who is testing his newly formed, adult wings in the world I asked, “What ignites your creative fire — where do you find your divine spark?” I’d never asked anything like this before. I almost held myself back from asking but as the question left my mouth, my whole body breathed in relief and I knew I’d found the right one.
He lit up with the promise of purpose as if he’d been waiting, like me, for permission to navigate through awe.
In the session, we’d talked about faith and we’d talked about science and I realized as we spoke that his generation, launching into college and careers, the ones who are actively building the blueprints of their lives, the ones who get slammed for their expectations and desires, are the place where our Enlightenment scientific skepticism and awe-inspiring hunger for mystery and the unseen converge.
They’re the ones that will tear down the wall that separates faith from science. They grasp the tangible and the intangible and hold opposing viewpoints simultaneously without needing to destroy one to prove the other.
The balance between the rational mind and the subconscious — they get it.
When the primitive wisdom of our reptilian brain — our old operating system that sprouts from our brain stems — is working kindly in tandem with the logical, forward-thinking imaginings of our forebrain, we’re in balance.
This is where we access flow states, those times when we’re so immersed in what we’re doing, what we’re creating, that we forget to be self-conscious.
We also do this when we play.
Some words from others:
I think we need to openly talk and explore more, not less, about energy. Animals are so keyed into it, it is at the essence of how they live, how they survive - and so it makes perfect sense to me to learn how to “speak” this language better (I believe we are born with greater fluency and lose it over time), not ignore it, in order to help them, help their bodies, and help our partnerships be more meaningful for everyone involved. Maybe we are denying our core nature when we are all head and little or no heart/gut/spirit. Maybe we need to think less, feel more, let the two dance together. At least that’s what the horses tell me. — Sue Lomenzo of True Nature Equine Bodywork and Wellness, December 2024
A rock does not rise from the Earth and question how it looks, what is its purpose and is it doing a good enough job? It rises and stands strong and elemental knowing and playing its part in the landscape and environment. Likewise I shouldn’t be pontificating about if how I work is the right thing to do, is it good enough or is it acceptable? I am here for a purpose. I know my purpose. I just need to go BE my purpose. — Kathy Price of Point of Balance, December 2024
I’ve written before about how I love the sweet spot between waking and sleeping when my brain is packing theta waves and I’m half in a dream state, half awake, and able to drift and envision and create.
I went in for an EEG of my brain last week and I had more questions than the technician was willing to put up with from me, but the results were fascinating (all is well from what I can discern, no seizures, yay!) At the end of the test, you lie there with 28 electrodes on your head and drowse for twenty minutes. My theta waves were kicking.
We think through energy. We feel through energy. We exist through electrical impulses.
If energy is that important to life — we must be able to talk to it. We’ve just misplaced our ability to communicate through frequencies — but part of us still remembers how to do this. If something is lost, it can still be recovered.
When I reach a flow state with clients or with the horses a sense of awe wells up in me and I’m not thinking about the clock or worrying about what happened yesterday, I’m in energetic coherence with the creature I’m in conversation with. This is the place where deep wisdom wells up, unbidden. I don’t have to go looking for it. It just is. This is the place where we share stories and information. This is the place where we heal.
I want my New Year to be filled with that sort of magic.
I want YOUR New Year to be filled with that sort of magic.
So I’ll leave you with this question: what ignites your creative fire?
Let’s forget the old year that felt like a room filled with strangers. 2025 is asking for us to connect, to create, and to wonder at the beauty that is in front of us all the time.
May your awe and your art find you.
Love,
Kim
The Mountains Still Need Your Help
An Arctic blast is bringing unusually cold temperatures to the mountains. Scrolling through the comments on the local weather pages you’ll find two camps: those who are thrilled about the plunging temps (it could bring snow!), and those worried about the people living in tents, campers, and sheds after their homes were destroyed by Hurricane Helene.
The terrain in the hardest-hit areas of the mountains is still unstable after the landslides and flooding of Helene. Heavy rainfalls like what we experienced last week in the southeast inundate the already fragile waterways and destroy temporary bridges and roadways, complicating an already complicated cleanup. Each new fragile balance that is reached can be compromised with the next weather pattern.
Bookmark my ever-evolving list of people and agencies that need your help today and visit it often. Spread the word so that the world can remember the victims of the storm who still need your assistance. Many are just beginning the long, slow process of rebuilding, grieving, and healing.
And the world needs more love 💙
If you’re new to Stable Roots and I haven’t filled you up with horses and farm woes and introspection yet, take a journey through my rebellious love story. You can find the first chapter and link through to all ten chapters here:
Love this! The moment you go into the natural knowing...joy!
Thanks for the voice over. It is very helpful for my lazy eyes!