Find a comfortable position.

Lying down is best, but sitting works if that's where you are.

Close your eyes.

Take one breath in through your nose.

Hold it for just a moment.

And let it go slowly through your mouth.

Don't try to breathe perfectly.

Just let your body breathe.

We're going to move through your body now.

Noticing. Releasing. Not forcing anything.

Start at the top of your head.

The muscles around your eyes.

Your forehead, if it's holding something.

Let it soften.

You don't have to smooth it out. Just breathe into it, and it releases on its own.

Your jaw.

Let it drop just slightly.

Your tongue can rest.

Your neck. The back of your neck.

The place where you carry the weight of the day.

Let your head feel heavy, supported.

You don't have to hold yourself up right now.

Your shoulders.

Let them drop. Just whatever they're willing to give.

Your arms. Your hands.

Let your fingers uncurl.

Your chest.

The breath moving through without effort.

Your heart doing its quiet work. You don't need to manage it.

Your belly. Let it be soft.

Your lower back. Let the surface beneath you take that weight.

You can give it away for a little while.

Your hips. Your thighs. Your knees.

Your calves. Your ankles.

Your feet. Your toes.

Your whole body is heavy now.

Warm and heavy and held.

Now I'll count down from ten to one.

With each number, a little deeper.

Not asleep. Just quieter inside. More open.

Ten. Feel yourself beginning to settle.

Nine. A little heavier now.

Eight. Thoughts might float past like clouds. Let them go.

Seven. Deeper.

Six. You're doing this exactly right.

Five. Halfway down. The chatter is getting quieter.

Four. Notice how much of you is already at rest.

Three. Very deep.

Two. Quiet. Still.

One.

You're here now.

In the place where suggestion becomes experience.

Let's go somewhere.

It's early morning. A Colorado morning.

Late summer, or early fall.

You're standing at a trailhead.

The air is cool and thin and smells like pine resin and something mineral. Like warm stone.

The sky is just turning from charcoal to that particular blue that only exists at altitude.

Feel the ground under your feet.

The firm packed dirt. The gravel crunching softly.

A light breeze touches your face. You breathe it in all the way down.

This is your place. You can come back here anytime.

The word is Colorado.

One word, and you're back.

Stay here a moment. Just stand in it.

The trees. The light. The thin air. The quiet.

Good.

I want to say something true to myself.

Something I've had backwards for a long time.

For as long as I can remember, I've measured my worth by what I produce.

If I'm building something, I matter.

If I'm not, some quiet voice says I'm wasting time.

That voice has followed me onto the trail.

It says: you could be home, making a difference. This isn't productive.

I know that voice well.

It built companies. It built a life. It's not my enemy.

But it's wrong about this.

Here's what's actually true.

The most important thing in my life right now is not a project.

It's Bob.

And the thing Bob most wants is simple. He wants to be outside, with me.

So when I'm on a trail beside him,

I'm not stealing time from something that matters more.

I'm doing the thing that matters most.

This is the work. This is not the thing that's keeping me from the work.

My worth was never my output.

I was put here to love, and to serve, and to be present with the people I've been given.

Standing on a mountain next to the man I love is not a lesser use of my life.

It might be the truest one.

So I can set the productivity voice down for a while.

Not silence it. Just set it down, gently, like a pack at the trailhead.

It'll be there when I come back. I don't need to carry it up the mountain.

Here's the thing about my mind.

It doesn't like to be idle. It never has.

On a plain walk, with nothing to work on, it gets restless and reaches for the old worry: what should I be doing instead.

But my mind isn't the problem. It just needs the right thing to hold.

And the trail is full of the right things.

I spent years in laboratories and biology classrooms.

I know how to look at a living thing and ask what it is, how it works, what it's doing here.

That knowledge didn't go anywhere. It's been waiting for exactly this.

So here, my attention has somewhere to go.

That isn't just a shrub. What is it? What family?

Why does it grow on this slope and not the one across the valley?

That tree. I might know its name. I might not yet.

Either way I can look at the bark, the needles, the shape of it, and start to learn.

There's an insect working the flowers.

What is it doing? What does it need? What needs it?

Everything out here is connected to everything else, and I'm someone who genuinely wants to know how.

And the rock.

Bob loves the rock, and he's teaching me to see it.

The layers that tell you what this place was, long before it was this.

The compression. The color. The time.

Actual geological time, folded into a hillside I'm walking across.

When I look at the world this way, something happens.

The restless part of my mind goes quiet.

Not because I forced it quiet.

Because it finally has something worthy to do that's right here, and can't be done anywhere else.

This is what being in the moment actually feels like for me.

It isn't emptying my mind. That was never going to work for a mind like mine.

It's filling it with what's in front of me.

The name. The system. The story in the stone.

And this kind of attention only exists here.

I can build things at my desk. I do, and I love it.

But I cannot stand inside an ecosystem at my desk.

I cannot read a rock face at my desk.

This is knowledge I can only gather with my boots on the ground and my eyes open.

That makes it its own kind of productive. The learning kind. The growing kind.

The kind that's been mine since I first fell in love with biology.

I fell last week.

I slid on gravel, and it frightened me, and there was so much happening at once that I couldn't keep up with all of it.

That's alright. That was learning.

Every hiker has a first fall. It doesn't mean I don't belong out here.

It means my body is still learning the ground.

Right now the trail asks a lot of my attention all at once.

Where my feet go. My breath. Bob. Everything around me.

That's why it can feel like too much and like not enough at the same time.

But footing is a skill, and skills become automatic.

The better my shoes, the more I use my poles, the more my balance quietly improves,

the less I have to think about where my feet go.

And here's what that frees up.

When my feet know what to do on their own,

all that attention comes back to me.

Back for the names, and the stone, and Bob's voice, and the light through the trees.

The safer I feel on my feet, the more present I get to be.

They're the same thing.

I'm going to give myself a few simple plans.

Not goals. Plans. If this happens, then I do that.

I decide them now, here, while it's quiet, so that later I don't have to decide at all.

When my mind says "this isn't productive,"

then I find one living thing I can see, and I name it, or I wonder what it is.

When the trail gets hard,

then I say the word Colorado, and I look for the next interesting thing.

When my footing feels unsure,

then I plant my poles, slow down, and let my body find the ground.

When Bob stops at a rock formation,

then I stop too, and I let him show me what he sees, and I see it with him.

And the first one, the one that starts everything:

When it's our morning to go,

then I put on my shoes and meet Bob at the door.

No debate. No weighing it. The plan is already made. I just follow it.

These plans are already inside me now.

I don't have to remember them. They'll be there when the moment comes.

Let me move forward a little.

A few weeks from now.

I'm on a trail I've walked before.

My feet know it now. I'm not fighting the ground.

I'm breathing with the climb, and my eyes are free to roam.

I spot something I don't recognize, and instead of walking past it, I lean in.

Bob catches me looking and comes over, and now we're both crouched down over the same small mystery.

This is the thing. Not the summit. This.

Move forward further. Next season.

There's a longer trail Bob has wanted to do.

I wake up that morning and something in me is ready. Not reluctantly. Actually ready.

We pack the night before. I know the names of half the plants we'll pass, and I want to learn the rest.

This is mine now. This is us.

Move forward further. Years from now.

I'm in my sixties. My mind is sharp and full.

Someone at a trailhead asks how long I've been hiking.

I think about it. "A few years," I say. "Since I moved to Colorado."

And it's true. I moved here and I became someone who reads mountains,

and knows the plants by name,

and does it beside the person I love.

Now let's come back.

I'll count from one to five.

With each number, back to the room. More awake, more alert.

Carrying all of this with me.

One. Starting to return.

Two. Feeling the surface beneath you.

Three. Aware of your breath, your hands, your body.

Four. Almost fully here now.

Five. Open your eyes.

Welcome back.