Mane Character Energy

Main character energy.

It took me a quarter million words to let the horses tell their own stories.

This big swooping realization started with a conversation about horse shows.

Laken, my little sister in heart and one of our instructors at my farm, was preparing to take her horse to a show that weekend.

I fully supported her dreams, but mid conversation, I started preaching about how our farm doesn't take people to horse shows anymore.

It had been a long time since I'd put words to that decision.

I had a lot of things left to say, and it felt like it was high time to take stock of where we had started, where we are now, and all the ways we'd grown in the in-between.

Lakin was an awfully good sport about it.

After that conversation, I decided to revise and distribute the farm's ethos on social media.

Putting things into words helps people understand what we do and why we do it, but mostly it helps me study the maps in my head.

Why we don't go to horse shows is something we may talk about in our daily farm life, but it's not something I've written much about, which is just weird because I write all the time.

Since starting Stable Roots here on Substack in March 2024, I have written about one quarter million words.

That's three 80,000 word books worth of writing.

And that's not counting the life I spent writing about horses and around horses before making a home on this platform.

I have touched on my farm's horsemanship philosophy in that big sea of words.

I've introduced some horses.

But these things typically happen in response to something unforeseen.

After some big or small drama has occurred.

I rarely write about the underpinning of our philosophies or, stranger yet, the horses themselves.

I overall just haven't spent enough time writing about the herd or what the daily care of them is like, their personalities and quirks, the things that make each horse an individual.

This all changed when I spent an afternoon chatting with Lakin about a horse show.

I finished the lesson I was teaching in the riding ring that we shared.

Then I walked up to the house and quickly typed out some words and posted our farm show manifesto on Facebook.