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’re home isn’t peace. It’s the sound of a frequency you spent years monitoring, suddenly empty.
In the archive soonYou can decide you’re fine. Your shoulders have already filed a different report. This is about the gap between the two.
In the archive soonYou can cross back over the wire, sleep in your own bed for years, and still not have come home. Geography is the easy part.
In the archive soonSome of the weight you carry was issued to you. Some you picked up off the ground because someone had to. Setting it down isn’t pretending it wasn’t heavy.
In the archive soonYou can know exactly what’s wrong and keep doing it for years. Knowing was never the hard part.
embodiment →A short, unglamorous list for the seven days when the experience is loud and your life hasn’t caught up yet.
In the archive soonHe wrote it to himself, in the field, with no intention of being read. That’s exactly why it holds.
In the archive soonOdysseus 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 →Someone wanted to begin who wasn’t ready, and was willing to pay to skip the part that makes it safe. Turning it down was the most useful thing I did that month.
In the archive soonWe’re trained to treat every hard feeling as a problem with a fix. Some of them aren’t problems. Some are just the shape love takes when it has nowhere to go.
In the archive soonYou can take a hill under fire. The order you can’t follow is the one that says: stop. Put it down. Rest now.
In the archive soonThe work doesn’t pay off in the session. It pays off in how you make coffee, and whether you’re actually there for it.
In the archive soon