Authorship
This is where I begin again.
It’s interesting to write about authorship in a world driven by AI, in a time when few people have the attention span for long-form reading — and even fewer have tended to livestock and farms.
What is authorship, and what happens when what starts with horses stretches out, slowly, into life? For me, it’s never just been about the horses.
This week I'm sharing my manifesto, the scaffolding of the system I work through, and under, and between at my horse farm in upstate South Carolina. If you live nearby, or if you're visiting, come join us! And if you live far away, this framework allows me to bring the farm to you virtually, wherever you are in the world.
We all have stories. The animals have stories. The land has stories. Stories are where we make sense of the world and the relationships we form and foster within it. This blog and my podcast are an essential part of the farm's mission: STORY.
For a long time, I thought I had to stay vague. When it came to my farm, I let the place speak for itself. I let the horses do the talking. I let people arrive and make it whatever they wanted it to be.
But there’s a difference between building something and claiming it.
Bramblewood Stables is my home, and the farm I’ve been building for twenty years. It’s weird living where you work. It presents its own set of challenges and I’ve done my part to create physical boundaries and limits.
I have done very poorly creating boundaries around my heart, the Kim that exists beyond the farm.
That Kim started out as a writer.
A writer who was building a system before I had words to describe what it was becoming — like every single one of us do by omission in our lives every day.
In the early days of Bramblewood Stables, the language of horsemanship I had inherited was still tangled with control and perfection. I believed my job was to be everything for everyone who showed up. I fall back into old habits all the time, this one being the root.
But survival is not authorship.
I was so careful not to say too much because too many words can, I’ve learned, invite misunderstanding. I’ve lived long enough in the aftermath of misunderstanding to know how quickly something beautiful can get bent out of shape when someone sees it through the wrong lens.
I’ve shaped this farm with my bare hands, with my body, with my voice, with my choices. I have spent my time and my presence (and my absence) growing it. This farm is my refusal to keep doing things the old way just because we've always been told there is only one way to spend time with horses.
It’s time I stop hiding behind the fog of hoping people figure out what I’m trying to say and intuit what's happening.
This is my farm and this is the Slow Horsemanship movement.
I hope what I’ve built at Bramblewood Stables can become a model for reimagining what a public riding stable can be. We're not just service providers or stepping stones to competition, but places of rooted relationship. In our farm, the horses are not tools, they are teachers. Our clients aren't consumers, they are participants.
Here, the land isn't a backdrop, it's a collaborator in the work.
Beneath the ground is a system of fungi called the mycorrhizal network. It exists everywhere, a web of threadlike mycelium that stretches through the soil, connecting roots, passing information, and feeding rich nutrients to the world above it.
Plants and trees send signals through this network to each other. What appears still on the surface is an immense structure of information being passed and received. There is expansive wisdom in this system that continually works within the shadows.
This is how my farm works, too. It is an ecosystem, an organism, a place that invites you to become legible to yourself. It offers a rhythm and the companionship of the herd if you’re willing to meet yourself without armor, or if you have a willingness to get to know why you have built armor in the first place.
If this system can live at this farm, it can live in other places too. And if it’s possible here, in this corner of upstate South Carolina, then maybe the future of this industry doesn’t have to look so much like its past.
The farm that I’ve built is a living system of relationships. It's a slow-moving ecology where nothing is ornamental and everything participates. The soil holds memory and the fences carry history. The water knows when to rise and when to disappear. I’m the caretaker of a system that I built from scratch because I needed it and the horses in my program told me they needed a different way.
This farm moves at the pace of belonging.
Some people notice the horses. Some fixate on the scraggly pastures. Some talk about the rhythm of the day and the way we fold things back into order. But that’s not what makes it work. What holds this place together are the unseen threads that stretch between horse and human, human and human, tree and threshold, gesture and response.
It’s the understory that holds it all together.
And it’s time to bring that scaffolding to light and list the threads that hold it.
I'm not advertising new offerings or polishing it all up to create a bigger reach. This is about my long, slow movement toward authorship. It's owning that the work has always come through me, but also owning that I’ve often stood beside it, waiting to be seen before I claim it fully.
It’s easier to want than it is to do. And authorship implies responsibility. Responsibility is a hard thing for us humans to stomach.
So much of this work has lived below the surface. For years, I’ve let it speak through the horses, the land, the feel of the place. I’ve trusted people to sense what it was, even if they couldn’t name it. And some did. Some felt it instantly and stayed long enough for it to work on them. Others wanted a product, a protocol, or something that could be easily summed up and handed back in a sentence.
That’s not what this is. The web of this farm’s work has a shape, but it’s not a curriculum or a brand.
It’s the scaffolding — and I’ve been building all along.
It begins in the body, in the land, in the nervous system. It moves through relationships and rhythm into something deeper than language, something old. In a lot of ways, codifying a structure to the work I do at Bramblewood is like excavating an archaeological dig.
But over time, I’ve come to understand that the work at this farm lives through four steady pillars. They’re not separate offerings. They’re not sequential steps.
They’re the spine of the farm.
And the first is the one people miss most easily — because it looks like doing nothing.
Pillar 1: RESPITE
This is where restoration happens.
These are not sessions as much as they are a space to stretch into new mindsets, notice old patterns, and plot a way forward.
It's where you can let go of your urgency and sink into your curiosity. Respite is an orientation to the herd and to the farm, but it's also where you can relax and enjoy your five (or more) senses.
Respite sessions allow you to stretch into the childlike wonder that's bringing you to horses, or the natural world, in the first place. (And if you're a child in a respite session -- even better -- they're for all ages).
You might sit in a pasture.
You might walk in the woods.
You might brush a pony and say nothing.
You might dive into the old art of classical groundwork.
You might talk to your Respite guide about your day.
Respite is the first layer. It's where we drop our need to be or do or achieve.
It’s the part most people didn’t know they needed until they feel their feet underneath them and notice the sound of their own breath — maybe for the first time. The sound of the tree bugs whirring in the branches will hold you, the farm will hold you, and from there, anything is possible.
Pillar 2: RIDING
Where boundaries and movement meet
We do ride horses here, but riding isn’t the point. Riding is a language that has the power to show you where you brace, where you collapse, where you try to control, where you disappear.
It shows you how you relate to partnership when you’re not the only one with a say.
Sometimes riding is a full lesson. Sometimes it’s groundwork. Sometimes we never leave the mounting block. Sometimes you’re on the horse and suddenly you’re a child remembering what it felt like to be dismissed for speaking up. And for children, riding is a place where they can stretch into their strengths and learn to move through frustration.
It’s all in there.
Riding isn’t about equitation -- it’s about energy. It’s about learning how to stay in your seat without shrinking. It’s knowing the difference between pressure and release.
The horse doesn’t need you to be perfect. They just need you to show up honestly and ready to see them and do the work.
Pillar 3: STORY
Where memory becomes metabolized
The stories we carry live in our bodies until we make space for them to move. And even then, they don’t leave us, but they loosen and shift shape. Story becomes something we can touch instead of something that touches everything around us without our knowing.
We don’t have to craft a narrative to explore our stories — we just get curious about the ones that are already running the show, and decide if we'd like to change the plot.
The writing I do and the podcast I record are part of the system of the farm too. They’re how the stories metabolize beyond the barn with threads of reflection that stretch out into the world but remain rooted here. My stories aren't made for content. They take shape for continuation.
When we know our stories, we can write them differently or choose to honor them, in our bodies, in the field, and in life.
The horses are masters at showing us the stories we carry and how to blend them into growth.
Pillar 4: COACHING
Where presence becomes participation
Coaching is where we start listening to ourselves instead of trying to fix everything. It’s the part of the farm's work that allows you to meet yourself without a script when something in you is ready to move.
Coaching isn’t therapy. It’s not goal-setting. It’s not another system to follow. It’s a spacious, grounded conversation with your own internal rhythm — held by the land, the horse, and your guide.
Sometimes that happens here, in person on the farmhouse porch or beside a horse. Sometimes it happens in a virtual session, with a cup of tea and your bare feet on the floor. What matters isn’t where it happens. What matters is when you're ready to show up.
The Tap Roots
Without them, nothing grows
The pillars of the farm system don’t stand on their own. They’re held together by deeper structures that reach down into the quiet. These are the tap roots of the farm’s system, the parts of the work that keep it from drifting into performance or projection. The tap roots pull us back into our body, into relationship, and into the land. When things feel scattered or brittle I return to these anchors.
These tap roots are what let the rest of the work breathe.
1. Nervous System Awareness
Regulation isn’t a luxury. It’s the root of everything real.
This isn’t a bonus feature of the farm, it's the foundation. If you can’t feel safe, you can’t integrate. If you’re in survival mode, you’ll perform instead of participate.
Every part of the work here honors what the nervous system makes possible. We slow down. We notice. We breathe before we speak. We pause before we push through. We stop pretending urgency is a virtue.
2. Mutual Relationship
The horse is not a tool. You are not a project. We are here to meet one another in integrity.
This is not a hierarchy. Not with the horses. Not with me. Not with each other.
Mutual relationship means no one’s over-functioning. It means we don’t rescue each other from discomfort. It means we stop pretending that power is the same thing as leadership.
You bring yourself. I bring myself. The horses do what they do. And we meet in the middle.
3. Land-Based Presence
The land is not passive. The work changes when we remember we are always in relationship with place.
The work doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens here, in the barn, in the field, surrounded by trees, and through the seasons.
The land isn’t a backdrop. It’s a participant. The fences break, the barn aisles flood, and we cannot control the wind. The farm isn't a studio or a stage, but it's the place that taught me how to stay.
And that’s what the land offers: not an escape, but a return.
This work has a spine
When your body becomes steady and the land holds you, forgotten energy begins to move through your system. You begin choosing your next steps differently. You let the work do what you came here to find.
It’s not magic. It’s relationship. And it’s alive.
And I’m not building anything new with these pillars and tap roots. I’m just finally building from my center instead of my edge. I’m living the work, and I’m letting it live me back.
If you feel the signal through the soil, I invite you to join me in the barn or in these written/spoken spaces and allow it to live you back too.
Some people still think Bramblewood is a riding barn.
Some think it’s a healing place.
Some think it’s a pretty backdrop for their own becoming.
All of those ideas fall short. Because Bramblewood Stables isn’t a product. It’s a practice.
It’s a living, breathing ecosystem where growth doesn’t come from urgency.
I will be sharing more—about how to begin, how to engage, what sessions are open and what’s unfolding next. But this post is the threshold. If you’re here, you already know.
And if you’re willing to walk through the gate—not just literally, but energetically—then you are welcome. You’re part of a growing network enacting change in small and large ways.
This is Bramblewood.
And this is what I made.
And when I say what I made, I don’t just mean the business or the farm. I mean the culture. The idea of slow horsemanship for people of all ages who love the land and feel the call to horses — but maybe don’t have a horse. I’ll provide the horses. You provide yourself.
It’s a movement that serves as a model for what local, public horse farms can be.
And it lives in the nervous systems of every person and horse who’s ever belonged here.
Love,
Kim
Kim Carter is the founder of Bramblewood Stables and the creative force behind Stable Roots, an exploration of story, horse-guided growth, grief, and transformation. Her work is rooted in a deep reverence for the nervous system, for the land, and for the wisdom of horses as partners—not tools—in the process of becoming more fully human.
Kim’s teaching and coaching approaches blend somatic awareness, narrative process, and grounded horsemanship to support clients through seasons of personal change, restoration, and rewilding.
After decades of study, teaching, and training—including advanced riding instruction and equine-assisted certifications, financial coaching credentials, and somatic facilitation training in the Compassion Process—she continues to refine a method that is uniquely her own: relational, responsive, and deeply intuitive.
Thank you, your words are inspiring. I love the scaffolding concept which, believe it or not I learned in preparing to teach. I sometimes wonder if anyone feels these connections, understands the relationships, so necessary to life. I know very little about horses or farming life. I do know how important it is to understand the connections to every living thing on earth. Love & Light to you & your mission. ♥