Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 1
And one time I said yes
At a time when the world is most connected, we’re bombarded with an epidemic of loneliness. We developed a club for adults at our farm to address this problem head-on, but it’s time for me to do the same with my writing.
I covered some heavy subjects last month. None of which were planned but when I sat down to write, the information arrived with immediacy that begged for attention like my recent experience with the American healthcare system and my response to horse training abuse at the end of an Olympic great’s whip.
Several exciting projects were placed on the back burner as I wrote my way through the madness of the past few months. The world is back to normal (or as normal as it gets around the farm) and I’m excited to announce two things this week:
The launch of my podcast, Relatively Stable, details coming soon. I have every hope that it will be ready to roll next week. My very first guest is the enigmatic Sarah Farris herself.
AND
August is the month of love. My love. Because of this, I’ll be sharing chapters each week of a project I’ve been puttering around with for a while. The working title is Ten Times I said No To Love: And one time I said yes.
Writing about love is hard for me because my early training with lofty writers trapped this subject like an unruly bull into a do-not-write list. Love was too trite, they said, too base, too boring, too cliche. In the exclusive club of the academic mind, it was imperative that we stay away from subjects that entertained the masses. It’s hard to be exclusive when emotions are flying around.
Being opposed to love doesn’t inoculate us from loneliness.
Though it feels like I’m still asking for permission, love is the only subject I’ve ever wanted to write about. I like to read about love. I like to hear about love. And I think the world is hungry for love now. We’re yearning for connection.
Being a proponent of love, as I am, hasn’t kept me from heartache.
But it’s worth it. It’s made me who I am. Heartache has prepared me, like surviving a horrible takeoff from a Russian airport, for the peace of my destination.
As I work through my internal censor that booms with the voice of my professor telling me to scrap the project entirely and come up with something that has more meaning, something that is more relevant and powerful — I ask myself, what could possibly have more meaning than love?
At the end of this post, you’ll find a list of all the events that are taking place online and around the farm during the month of August. If you’re allergic to love, feel free to scroll down past my story, but even if love isn’t your favorite subject, I hope you’ll join me on the journey that changed my life. Let me rephrase that — the journey that showed me how to live.
Let’s get started.
Ten Times I Said No To Love
1. I’m not afraid of flying; I’m afraid of standing still
My mother drives me to the airport.
There is a black elastic hair band around my wrist and I snap it periodically to keep myself on task. I found the band hiding between the curved scrollwork tabletop on the front porch as we walked out the door.
The airport is close. This drive shouldn’t take long, but the traffic is halting in a metered dance of pauses and my mind swirls with checklists and alternate routes. I have a short connection in Atlanta where I’m picking up a friend who will travel with me to meet with colleagues as I give a little talk in Denver.
It is summer and the air that streams through a sliver of the passenger side window is steam-hot mixing with the cold breeze of the car vent. I work outside most of the time and my body has reached the point in summer where it has reverse-acclimated. The outside air is too hot and the inside air is too cold. I’ve forgotten what comfort feels like, or maybe I never knew it at all.
Grabbing the hair band was an unnecessary compulsion. I have six other elastics in my bag. As we left the house, I stared at the porch table while my mother locked the front door and I saw the black elastic where it was wedged within the swirls of the black metal table like an opportunity hidden in plain sight.
The table on the front porch is ornate and expansive, on loan from the landlord who discovered it nestled among piles of boxes in the storage building beside the farmhouse.
“Can you use this table?” he asked.
“I don’t know, let me try,” I said, wondering what I’d do with a table so big and sumptuous and important.
I rolled its massive weight to where it currently rests, where, like the last number in a combination lock, the table’s presence spontaneously began sprouting gatherings: dinners, staff meetings for the farm, coaching sessions with clients.
The table created a space for people to talk. I wasn’t aware before I rolled it into place on the barren porch that a table needed to be intentionally set for people to share stories and fears and longing. Like an invitation that arrives before the event, the table showed me how intentions craft solutions, how our imaginings supply the reverse engineering of life.
Stories are the coordinates that orient me to the world. It’s like that for most of us, but we’ve forgotten that we need them. Our stories have been lost in the slippery news cycles of living. They’re spun out in words that are suspended, floating, excessive. Our stories wait patiently in the corner for us to offer them a seat.
Before this table, there were no plants in pots and wind chimes marking the hours in air time. The porch was a blank, barren space that simply did its job, a transition point from outside to inside, a place that took a person somewhere instead of offering them a destination to stop. The table changed all that, transforming the porch into a secluded jungle of draping vines and conversations.
Transformed into a natural room of possibilities, the porch, with the table, became the sort of place where it was worth adding a blanket to your lap in winter or sweating in the summer shade. Because manufactured comfort cannot soothe our exposed wires of disconnection like the sounds of the katydids in the trees, whirring like a symphony of correspondence, sharing their stories across the trees.
The porch is a character in my story.
When the table appeared, a white barn cat retired from rodent service in the stables. He took up residence on the newly placed seats like a white, too bright, throw pillow that doubled as a medium with the prescience of knowing when a person was about to breathe and let go.
Days before this drive to the airport, the cat stared at me with his uncanny, ancient, eyes as a friend petted his back.
The cat looked at me in agreement.
The friend diverted my questions about what to order from a to-go menu. There were other people with us around the table on the porch, but their conversations were separate from the stories passing between me, this friend, and the cat.
At some point, this friend left his black hair elastic on the table.
And when the wind picked up speed with clanging wind chimes, I took my friend’s hand that was petting the cat, and pulled him up to help me bring a horse into the barn.
My friend was gentle with the horse and allowed her to eat grass instead of walking into her stall. He’d never led a horse before.
We later sat in silence on the porch and were mesmerized by the rain and wind as the hungry, hanging ferns spun and the hard breeze whipped mist like discarded jewels across the table.
Later, as he and I drove together to pick up food, I wondered if I could hold a conversation by only asking questions.
Do you notice what I’m doing? I asked. (The window button is right there, he said.)
Will the restaurant still be open? I asked. (We’ll figure something out if not, he said.)
How old were you when you moved here? I asked. (I moved back and forth a lot, he said.)
Why are you driving so slow? I asked. (I never speed in neighborhoods, he said.)
Do you like your job? I asked. (I love my job but I don’t love airplanes, he said.)
Do you worry that airplanes will crash? I asked. (I have no problem flying in them, he said.)
Do you believe in ghosts? I asked. (I do but I haven’t seen one, he said.)
What’s your favorite season? I asked. (I don’t have one. Each has its pros and cons, he said.)
Where’s your favorite place? I asked. (I don’t have one, he said, and later he would add— actually, that’s not true, it’s with you.)
Do you ever tell untruths? I asked (Nope, he said.)
I snap the black hair tie against my wrist. I sit on the passenger seat as my mother drives me to the airport.
“Just don’t do this with someone who looks like an aged rock star. Go to Colorado. Hook up with a stranger. Find someone rich, someone you haven’t known since childhood. This never goes well for you,” my mother says.
The problem is that my mother’s intuition is an elemental force. She knows my thoughts and motivations without me speaking them, but her pre-flight checklist surprises me.
“I haven’t said I was considering him.”
“I know what you’re doing.”
“At least one of us does.”
My mother drops me off in a heap of carryons at the airport entrance. I’m early so I take my time getting to the gate.
I order a coffee with cream. Settled in my seat at the gate, I scrutinize the other travelers and try to guess their stories, where they’re going, what they’re feeling.
I love airports and flying.
My earliest memories are of me sitting on my grandfather’s knee as he flew a plane over the blue-green rolling mystery of the Appalachians. After Sunday lunch we’d drive to a small airport lined with small planes and I listened to him speak a secret language to the familiar men around us as he prepared his plane for flight.
The air blowing from the vents inside the plane smelled like cigarette smoke and fuel. The heat from the runway pavement rose up through the thin floor and settled against my dangling feet. My grandfather and I rated our takeoffs and landings on a scale from 1 to 10. Much later, flying out of Russia on a commercial flight we would look at each other wide-eyed and raise single fingers to signal 1.
Near my seat at the gate in the airport that will take me to Denver, a door to the tarmac opens and the scent of fuel floods my memories.
Where is the little girl who took the wheel in her hands at her grandfather’s bidding, hands that could not yet write, and as the plane leveled off, suspended and weightless and awed into the clouds, he would laugh and say, “You fly now. We’ll call it rockaby baby.”
Where is the girl who acted without always weighing her options into a landlocked immobility of choices?
When did I start holding entire conversations in questions?
Questions are the opposite of wind, they’re like excuses. Questions breed into layers of stagnated air — still, heavy, motionless.
Am I frozen or am I gliding?
I stare down at the hair elastic on my wrist and take a photo. I open Messenger on my phone.
“I found this super grounding hair tie on the front porch,” I write. “About to hop on a plane.”
I breathe out as I send the message.
Maybe Icarus was right and the whole point is to burn from the heat so we can plunge into the water.
I won’t know unless I try.
|| Chapter 2 ||
August Events
Every week this month I will be building on my love story. But seeing as how it has ten parts, I expect it will go past August (unless we have a weird time warp and I’m not completely sure this won’t happen).
Before I fill you up with the August calendar, I want to tell you how I’m doing something different this month with our Subscriber Zoom on Friday, August 16th. I’m merging this with my monthly online writing workshop so bring your pens and paper when you log on.
We’re going to be exploring free-writing. The results were mind-boggling as I wrote with everyone who joined me on the front porch of the farmhouse last month and I can’t wait to see what happens when we take this energy to our gathering space on Zoom.
I’ll send login info to all paid subscribers as we get closer to the date.
If you’re thinking of upgrading your subscription to get paid perks like online meet-ups, workshops, and access to the full archive, now is the time to do it. Listen, you don’t even have to like my writing. Every cent of paid subscriber’s generous gifts goes to supporting a tiny, urban horse farm with a global reach. It’s win-win. Help us bring the gift of horses to more people.
Here’s the full calendar of my online and in-person offerings this month:
BRAMBLE BUDDIES: our farm kids’ club: August 9th @ 5 PM EST
THE HALF HALT: our farm adult club: August 15 @ 6 PM EST
STABLE ROOTS: online gathering/workshop for paid subscribers: August 16th @ 6 PM EST
FREE-WRITING WORKSHOP: at the farm on August 23 @ 6 PM EST
APPRENTICE GROUP: Live Call August 28 @ 6:30 PM EST
I’ll be back next week with another chapter of my love story. I spend so much time writing for the farm or writing for a purpose that it is dreamy to be able to write because I want to and share it with you here.
I have never given you a subject more appropriate for the heart button on this post. Tell me your thoughts in the comments, and if you like my words, share them with others. Help me spread the word(s) — literally.
Love,
Kim
A friend gifted me with a subscription to Stable Roots. I am so taken in by your writing, sensitivity and approach with horses. I believe I must visit the farm soon and experience this energy first hand. And I definitely want to step onto the porch and sit at the table...
No words. 🥹🥰🖤🥀🥹 I’m excited for more.