Pilgrim Field Notes

Orientation I have believed elderhood came from experience alone. Lately, it feels closer to staying teachable. Letting the body speak. Listening when certainty loosens. Learning how to arrive without closing the door behind me. #fieldnotes

Practice “Warrior Monk” used to sound like a title. Now it feels like a practice. Strength without posturing. Silence without withdrawal. Service without erasing myself. Often I miss the mark. I notice. I adjust. I practice again.

Arrival I have spent most of my life embodying hard paths built for survival, loyalty, endurance. They carried me far. They kept me moving. Now the work is quieter. Standing without armor. No rank. No patch. No borrowed authority. Not trying to become anything Willing instead to be seen as I am, and step forward anyway. These are field notes from that walk. No map. No conclusions. Just what shows itself along the way.

Halfway to 50 miles for Memorial Day. Bless ‘em all.

There is grief in the laying down of old patterns. The rebellion that kept you alive. The numbness that made the days passable. The ritual of relief you reached for when nothing else would hold. This is not weakness leaving. This is a self being mourned. The one who needed what it needed, who survived by whatever means survival required. Let that be honored before it is released. I feel that grief most on days I’m at my best. The old reward system saying, “you know what could make today even better.” There is a quiet strength in holding who we are long enough to be.

I appreciate y’all. Thank you

It’s Reframe Time One thing the long walk home keeps teaching me is the quiet power of the reframe. When you’re turned around and lost, wayward, off your line, you might just need an azimuth*. Something true enough to orient by. For me, it’s been this: Three unhealthy coping patterns I know well: spend, use, scroll. Signals to read. So I reorient them: spend → structure use** → work/practice scroll → presence My goal is not to chase perfection. Just healthier directions. And underneath all of it, there’s often something deeper that still needs care. When that shows up, when I am able to identify it, I don’t try to outrun it or judge it (though I do at first, often). I go to what meets me without conditions: the outdoors + quiet + stillness A place where I remember who I am and where I am going. A place where surrender isn’t defeat. It’s a way forward. —— * A fixed direction or bearing you use to orient yourself when you’re navigating—especially when you’re lost. **Use can look like a lot of different things. To keep it simple: anything we do to cope, avoid, escape despite suffering and/or inflicting negative consequences and/or side effects.

Fire Tender to Fire Tender You don’t gather because you are whole. Sorted. Finished. You gather because something in you refused to give up. Pain is not failure or weakness. It’s evidence that something in you still knows the difference between right and wrong even when the situation, the duty, the endured, didn’t give you a clean choice. Again, that not weakness Though we might feel weak. And in the body the vigilance, the anger, the going numb that’s not damage, That’s a system that learned to survive the inhuman. Feeling is a signal we are alive. The body just doesn’t know how to stand down yet. Try not to rush each other into answers. Sit with the weight. Let truth be spoken without needing to be fixed. Tend the fires.

On Compassion We see someone looking into our car window as we come out of a store. They don’t notice us. They’re hungry. Looking for a way to survive, for a solution to their pain. I know that place from the inside. There were years after the war I couldn’t see the alternatives either. I was lost. I felt like a man without a nation, or a soul. My solution was drugs. Someone else had to hold the opportunity I would eventually occupy for me, until I was ready to step through the door, take ownership and choose to heal. I think about how many people I know right now who are starving for the smallest thing. A kind word. Someone to say, “I see you. We got you. You’re not as alone as it feels right now.” It doesn’t take much, yet sometimes it takes everything we have to offer grace. Because here’s what I believe: that window, that moment of reaching for anything just to get through, we’ve all been there in our own way. Maybe not a car window. Maybe something quieter, more private, but the desperation underneath it — that’s not as foreign as we want it to be. Compassion. The word comes from suffering with. Not watching from the curb. Not moving toward violence. Not absorbing the blow. But moving in anyway, eyes open, “Hey. What’s going on with you? What do you need?” That question costs something and it takes a bravery. I’ll be real, my first instinct isn’t always mercy. My body wants to go somewhere faster, harder. I know where that road leads and I know what it costs. Moving toward someone with compassion might not change anything for them. They might go right back to the life they’re in. But the other choice — that one changes things for certain. And it changes us. Sometimes I stand in the door with someone until they can see it. Sometimes I simply try to plant a seed. Sometimes they walk right back out anyway. I do it because of what I know. Because of what I was given once and that’s what I have to give back. To anyone going through it right now — there are still people in this world who will turn toward you and offer you grace. I’ve met them. I know them. I try to be one. Thanks to @noahgallowayathlete for the spark.

This life has many chapters. If we’re lucky, we get to work through all of them — the paradox of love and loss, grief and grace, belonging and aloneness. Some days we say goodbye. And moments later we’re welcomed into something new, saying hello to a version of ourselves we don’t understand yet. A moment where we become our own parent — learning to hold ourselves gently through what comes next. As I grow older and the face in the mirror changes, I begin to see all of them — everyone I’ve been, everyone I’ve loved, everyone I’ve lost. I learned, very slowly — as I stayed despite wanting to leave — that we carry those who are gone within us. The very grief I avoided held all the love I had left to give them. I carry it forward. I give it to others. ~Dedicated to the men of Fox Company 2/1 ‘Raiders’, USMC, who fell in Fallujah, Iraq, 2004.

He Is Me The event was simple. 5k. 90 minute cap. As much weight as you can carry. I decided not to compete with the number. I loaded 96.5 pounds (every ruck plate and filled water bottle I own) and told myself: keep your heart rate low. Keep it human. Stay inside the experience. I didn’t plan for who showed up at the 1500m mark. — Somewhere around the midpoint, emotion welled up from my heart. From something I hadn’t felt before, or maybe hadn’t allowed myself to feel. My combat load in Iraq was right around 96 pounds. That young man carried that weight across a war I am still learning to hold with dignity. And here I was — 48 years old, smiling at strangers — carrying the same weight that became a conduit back in time. I felt him. Not as a memory. As a presence. Looking out through my eyes. He is me. I am him. — I wasn’t braced for it. I was open. And because I’d done the slow work — the grieving, the sitting with it, the ten thousand small acts of not looking away — I was ready without knowing I was ready. The gap closed not because I finally understood something. It closed because I’d been quietly becoming someone who could hold it all at once. That young man I’ve pushed away so many times deserved to feel the sun on his face again. This past weekend, he did. — This is what integration looks like some days. Not a ceremony. Not a clinic. Just a road, a weight, enough stillness to let the past catch up.​​

Resistance is valuable information. It often shows up in the body. When to push, when to back off, when something is asking for attention. That instinct is honed through experience. When resistance shows up around this kind of work — the inner work, the regulatory work, the work that asks for even a slight softening of threat awareness — that’s worth paying attention to. Where do you notice it? What does that resistance point to for you? Drop it in the comments.