YES!

I said yes to Nebraska without a reason I could explain to anyone. The Heart Protocol was the name of an invitation and a pull in my chest, and I have learned to trust the pull more than the reason. The reasons come later, if they come at all. The intuition arrives first, and my only job is to say yes before my mind has time to build a case against it.

The sanctuary was a Mongolian yurt, vast and perfectly made, warm enough to hold eighty + people through a windy afternoon. In the middle of my journey I understood that I could not stay inside it. Psilocybin has always turned me toward the living world, toward soil and weather and the particular grace of trees, and a sealed room could not hold that longing. So I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and walked out onto the terrace, out to where the cornfields ran to the tree line.

The day was doing something I will never forget. Clouds raced across the sun so that the light kept arriving and withdrawing, warmth on my face and then a traveling shadow crossing the plain, the whole valley breathing in and out of brightness. The trees bent with the wind, and waved me hello. Everything out there was in motion and nothing was asking to be kept. I stood inside that movement and felt myself becoming part of it, and that is when the grief came up through the floor below me.

I have Akane (my 11 year old daughter) half of her life. Half the mornings, half the light, half the ordinary Tuesdays. The arrangement is clean and I carry no regret about how my life is built, and still there is a truth underneath it that no gratitude dissolves. She is completely mine, wholly and without division, and then she goes, and then she returns a different person, grown by one or two weeks I did not witness. Every reunion is also an introduction. I stand at the threshold and meet the newer her. I love the newer her but I mourn the one I did not get to hold in the days between.

I wanted her with me on the field, to let her meet beauty on her own terms. I wanted to give her the light that was falling on me. I wanted the half I do not get, and I understood, standing there, that wanting it is not a problem to be solved. It is simply the shape of loving something you were only ever meant to hold and release, hold and release. I cried to the sky. I said I AM SORRY and I LOVE YOU into the wind, loud, the way you can only say things when no one is close enough to comfort you.

This is what the river teaches, and what the old traditions have said in every language. Nothing that is alive will stay. The light would not stay. The trees would not stop moving. My daughter at seven would not stay, and my daughter now will not stay either, because next week she becomes someone slightly new and the week after that she is newer still. Impermanence is not a lesson you absorb once and keep. It is a current, and you are always in it, and the practice is to stop clawing at the river bank for sheer survival.

At the peak of it I looked down to see what was playing in my headphones. The photograph on the screen was Akane and Roberta laughing, one of the truest images I’ve taken. The song was called “When It Hurts to Remember.” 3 songs prior, had been carrying me toward that grief for a long time before I looked. It built the room I was weeping in. The title was simply waiting at the bottom, and I found it there when I finally surfaced. The synchronicity was real.

My intuition walked me out to that terrace, wrapped me in that blanket, pointed me at the moving light, and the music met me exactly where my own surrender had already carried me. My favorite picture of my loves and the name of a piece of music stating what now felt like the most perfectly timed moment of my life.

Yesterday I saw Akane for the first time in 2 weeks. I started crying before she reached me. One remains very sensitive after a weekend like the one that just passed at the ranch. Two weeks of absence not seeing her had done something I am almost ashamed to admit, which is that some part of her had gone faintly unreal to me, and then there she was, entirely real, entirely here, hugging me. I have not learned to let go. I do the letting go every week and I never get good at it. I am starting to understand that never getting good at it is the point. The tenderness lives in the reset. If it stopped hurting, it would mean I had stopped holding her fully in the first place.

I went to Nebraska for no reason I could name and it gave me back the thing I most needed to feel, which is that saying yes to the pull in my chest keeps depositing me exactly where I am supposed to stand. The field was already there. The light was already moving. The song was already queued. All I did was walk outside, and let it happen, and grieve, and be grateful, in that order, in a cornfield, half a father and wholly one, holding what I cannot keep.

The walk back, phone in hand, still carrying everything the field had given me. Hammock playing again. I moved the camera the way the wind was moving the trees and let myself believe the music was scoring the world in real time.