The World's On Fire

Let's build fairy houses

Kimberly Carter

Mar 27, 2025

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1. Folklore

I’ve been sharing stories recently about buying a big, black truck and taking off to the mountains to study with a trainer raised by the founding fathers of natural horsemanship. That journey was as much a reckoning with my ancestors as it was a path to understanding a better way of working alongside horses. Mistakes are the compost for future seedlings. We are, through and through, the accumulated actions of everything that’s come before us.

When we know better, we can do better.

The roads I took to visit The Cowboy each week followed peaks and valleys at the juncture of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. This region was decimated when Hurricane Helene moved inland and leveled great swaths of forest. Most of the suburban neighborhoods around my farm are still waiting for the county to pick up fallen debris from roadsides. Huge sections of the farm’s forest are littered with massive, fallen hardwoods.

Helene wiped out over 20 percent of this region’s woodlands — 187,000 acres tallied so far. Most of those trees are still lying on the ground and the wood is curing and drying into a kindling that is currently fueling wildfires. We need rain — badly.

Nearby, the ancient face of Table Rock is swallowed in a line of fire that has been raging all weekend and has consumed 1000+ acres of parkland as it creeps toward the Greenville watershed.

And that’s not counting the three fires raging in Polk County, NC, our equestrian home base to the north.

Edit: after polishing this piece and doing the voiceover, the Table Rock Fire and surrounding fires transitioned into extreme behavior and has consumed over 5,500 acres of forest. The Polk County fires are still burning and have consumed over 6000 acres. My phone is constantly buzzing with people looking for evacuation options for their horses in the northern edge of our county and we have taken three evacuees into our farm. Send prayers for rain.

I don’t have any solutions for this continuous onslaught of madness, so I spent the week marking fairy houses with barn kiddos. We collected bark and moss and spring flowers and mixed clay and sand to make mud walls. We are living in a time when folklore is being created.

We are writing the stories that will shape the future.

What if folklore is another word for resilience, the way we search for meaning where none seems to exist? What if it’s the way we rewrite what’s been broken into something that feels like hope? Because when everything feels scorched and unsalvageable, it’s often the act of creation that pulls us through.

Let’s get started.

a mushroom growing in grass — Photo by Heather Wilde on Unsplash

2. Scripted in Skin

I’m back with The Cowboy. My farm knows I may stay one day or three and everyone pulls together to cover the work I leave behind.

There is a breeze flowing through the hallway of his barn. It’s situated on a hilltop with a big field behind it where the horses are munching from feed buckets attached to their halters, an ingenious solution to guarantee everyone gets their predetermined rations. There’s always that one opportunistic horse that gobbles up their food quickly to buy time to steal from the others.

I watch as The Cowboy gathers supplies to freeze brand a horse on the shoulder.

He draws a syringe of sedation and waits for the horse to settle into a sleepy daze before priming the fur with clippers and alcohol. The branding iron is interlaced with his initials.

He’d dared me with the prize of a border collie puppy that I couldn’t guess his real name. He hadn’t banked on my sleuthing abilities when back in cell range.

“What’s this horse’s name?”

“I don’t know,” he says and readies the branding iron in a box of dry ice.

Freeze branding works by altering the pigmentation of the hair beneath the brand causing it to grow back white. It’s a means of identifying horses that are grazed over vast distances or animals that have completed trials for registries, but in this closely populated region branding is a totem of ownership, a nod to the past and the traditions that brought us here.

He applies the brand to the mare and holds it in place until the iron begins to cool. As he pulls away, an unmistakable mark is left on the smooth skin of her flat shoulder.

“What do you plan to do with her?”

“I don’t know yet.”

It’s like he’s writing his story on the mare’s skin, but she doesn’t know what ownership means, and I don’t yet have the tools to make out the words, to know the language. The mark claims her, but it doesn’t change her bones, or her breath, or her way of watching the world with her dark eyes.

When I figure it out — when I finally learn to translate what we’re etching into their bodies — it’s the mares I’m apologizing to first.

gray and brown animal — Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

3. Be Still and Know

I’ve dismounted from the horse and my hands are flying as I explain to the cowboy how I feel culpable. How I’m to blame. How every decision I make for me and for the horses and for people who come to me to ride in my care reverberates out like an imperceptible pebble dropped in the ocean. How my ripples rock with time and space into a tsunami that drowns me in the interconnectedness of this thing people do in relation to each other. How the horses are pawns in an eons-deep game of humans.

Here we are.

My steady horse that The Cowboy mounts me on each week drowses behind me as I rant. The reins hang loosely between us.

I’m crying now.

When I told him that I needed to learn the things he had to show me, when I stressed how important it was, I hadn’t planned on having a breakdown. And yet — here we are. This is how the tsunamis work. They start as one thing and end in another.

“What I’m hearing is that you need to just let it go,” he says.

“Let what go? My responsibility to the people and the animals around me?”

“Sure thing. You care too much about things that shouldn’t concern you.”

I sniff hard and look at him. I feel my eyes tense up in indignation. The horse on the loose end of the bridle reins behind me breathes deeply and shuffles his feet.

“You don’t care enough,” I say.

“What?”

“I said — you don’t care enough. You’ve been trained to sell a lie to the highest bidder. I’m done with masking the horse I’m with so that it will perform and sell and make the person craving him feel important. I didn’t come to you to learn tricks. I came to you to figure out a better way.”

“Then you came to the wrong place,” he says.

It’s a heavy moment when the student learns her teacher is mortal. It’s heavy because she’s reached the end of the line and has no one else to blame but herself.

I have to take responsibility.

This drive to the mountains every week, tracing the map of the people who brought me here, started out as a ghost story and has formed into a weird tree of life.

I am the root — and I have to figure out how to own this.

green leafed tree — Photo by Lucas Myers on Unsplash

Later The Cowboy and I ride out in silence through a field of kudzu and past a line of trees marking the edge of a forest.

I watch the light slant through the trees as we wind down a sharp bank and settle nose to tail in a quiet creek where cool water flows over smoothed stones. The horses shift their feet through the wet carpet of coarse sand, ground down from mountains over eons.

I’ve lost my questions so I keep quiet and watch the soft tail flicks of The Cowboy’s horse in front of me. I watch the movement of his hat as he stares at the trees above us. Wherever he looks, I look. Wherever the horse looks, I look.

We’re talking by observing. And so far, this feels like the only language a human can translate into horse.

We stand so long in the silence of the little creek that we move past the need to try to fill the air with words, past the awkwardness of sharing space without commentary. The longer we stand there on our horses, the more I become aware of the doing becoming the being. How when we’re with the horses, we act out the questions through our bodies — how the answers come through motion and breath and tension.

All this time we’ve tried to prove our worth by teaching the horses tricks, as if wildness was able to hold a brand.

I close my eyes and listen to the water flowing between the horse’s hooves and I know in that deep way of knowing that the answers have always been written inside of me, a shared code that the horses have patiently watched me, waiting, seeing if I’d ever stop striving enough to find.

And for a second, this is more than enough as I’m finally still enough to know.

And by knowing, I can try to do better — because no matter how many miles I travel or how many teachers I chase, the journey will always lead me back to myself.

The motionless moment that changed the way I go

4. Field Notes

We took the kitten on a hike in the woods this weekend. Since the day we brought him home, we’ve been training Gideon, the little Siberian forest cat, to walk on a leash. Beyond a few cameos to visit his fans around the farm, we haven’t put his skills to the test yet.

I heard a massive tree come down in the forest around the barn in the high winds the other day so Christopher and Jolene, the border collie, and I went off in search of it with the kitten in a backpack.

Gideon explored the creek and I felt bold so I placed him on the top of the backpack. He rode on my shoulder for a while — and then he leaped down and started running and exploring and keeping up with the dog. Gideon aced his leash test. I tried to tempt him back into the pack a few times but he was having none of it. You can watch an adorable video of him exploring here.

Gideon is resting now, his small chest rising and falling in steady rhythm. The air is thick with the smell of smoke and pollen, a sharpness that pricks at my throat. But even as the world burns, life continues. We go searching for fallen trees in the aftermath of the storm but the forest gives us something else.

It’s the noticing that matters. Listening to what the animals are showing me, taking their language and letting it rewrite mine. We are all carving stories into the world — some with brands, some with words, some with observation and care.

The world is on fire. But I’m still here. And there are stories to tell.

As I’m traveling beside any animal, I’m continually amazed at how much information their bodies give us — how I’ve been blind to their clues most of my life, and how I have so much more to learn.

My trips to work with The Cowboy marked a turning point in my noticing, in my taking responsibility for the cause and effect of my presence in the landscape.

Listening is its own frequency and one that I learn more about every day.

I wonder what I’ll notice next.

I wonder what the rest of this week will hold.

Wherever you are in whatever part of the world, keep your heads up and your heels down and tell me your stories. Let’s go out into the world and gather our supplies and use the collected treasures to build fairy houses.

Love,
Kim

And if you’d like to join our paid subscriber Zoom this evening, I would love to see you. Details for signing on can be found in a post that will open up beyond the paywall on the Stable Roots homepage when you subscribe. We’re going to be talking about what it means to do better once we know better and how that’s played out in our lives.