Field Notes
What I’ve learned holding the frame for people coming back. Read in any order. Nothing here is advice. Some of it is just true.
The first quiet after you are home is not peace. It is the sound of a threat that never comes, in a body that cannot stop listening for it.
silence →You can decide you are fine. Your shoulders have already filed a different report.
the body →You can cross back over the wire, sleep in your own bed for years, and still not have come home. Geography is the easy part.
return →Some of the weight you carry was issued to you. Some you picked up off the ground because someone had to. Setting it down is not pretending it was not heavy.
grief →You can know exactly what’s wrong and keep doing it for years. Knowing was never the hard part.
embodiment →The thing you have spent your life fighting gets stronger every time you win.
the demon →A young man stands in the one castle where the wound could be healed, and says nothing, because he was taught that a knight does not ask questions.
the wounded king →Odysseus is gone twenty years, and the poem spends half its length on the part after the war. We’ve had the oldest story about coming home for three thousand years.
the Odyssey →Some of it is the shape love takes when it has nowhere to go, not a problem to be solved.
anger →I run a legal psilocybin practice, and the medicine is the least important part of it.
integration →You can take a hill under fire. The order you cannot follow is the one that says stop, put it down, rest now.
surrender →The work does not pay off in the session. It pays off in how you make coffee, and whether you are actually there for it.
ordinary life →