Episode Details

A weed can be growing beside you for years without causing a bit of trouble. Then somebody teaches you its name — and tells you to be afraid of it.

Suddenly, it’s everywhere.

This week, between two eclipses, I am roaming a horse pasture hunting foxtail, an ancient grass that has followed agriculture for thousands of years and that I had been conditioned to fear during my unfortunate former life selling hay.

There are horses. There are weeds. There are extremely particular hay buyers. There is a basic white girl ordering at Starbucks. There is a brief agricultural history lesson and a small amount of science about whether foxtail is actually plotting to destroy your horse from the inside of a hay bale.

But mostly, this is a story about what happens when we learn the name of something that frightens us and suddenly can’t see anything else.

Because awareness and danger are not the same thing.

And sometimes the thing taking up our entire field of vision was growing there all along.

In this week’s VoiceOver of Stable Roots: foxtail, eclipse season, the impossible human desire for nature without all the nature mess, and what the horses seem to understand about the difference between a weed and the whole damn field.

Read the full essay and subscribe to Stable Roots for a new piece every Thursday.

Relatively Stable is the VoiceOver companion to Stable Roots, written and read by Kim Carter.