Here Comes The Rain Again

Memory of a quiet neighborhood after dark, away from the streetlight. Windows fogging, slowly drifting to the hollow pings of rain on the roof.

Seventeen, homeless and trying to finish high school without coming apart. Sleeping in a rusty, beat-up 1963 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. It leaked when it rained. 1986, no teachers, no explanations, just survival.

When you don’t have a home, you don’t borrow calm from anyone else’s nervous system. Whatever steadiness you have, you’ve built from nothing.

From moments that ask as little of you as possible.

Nine Months

I’d planned to leave at eighteen, already working multiple jobs and lining things up. I thought I had time. On the morning of my seventeenth birthday I was put out, unprepared in every way that mattered.

For nine months I lived out of my car and worked before and after school. Showered where I could. Cleaned up in school bathrooms after PE. I finished high school, barely. Not because I was resilient. Stopping would have cost more than continuing.

There was no drama in it. No cinematic hunger. No triumph.

What I didn’t have, then or ever before, was external regulation. No stable adult, no place to stand down. Nobody was watching the perimeter. Just the constant calculation of where to park, how to stay unnoticed, how to stay functional.

My body did what bodies do. It felt like tension and vigilance, a readiness that never fully powered down.

Even the hardest system needs a place to come down from red alert.

For me, that place was the woods.

Finding Ground

Late in month nine, I connected with others who’d been in the same kind of trouble. Six people in a tiny two-bedroom house in Martinez. Cramped and noisy, but I was relieved to get inside and catch my breath.

Once I felt a tiny sliver of stability, spring arrived, and I started hiking again.

Not casually, obsessively. Washington, Oregon, California.

Back then I might have said I was "getting out of my head." What I was actually doing was giving my nervous system something that made sense.

Every chance I got, I was out there, often alone.

The trail didn't require explanations. Clear inputs and feedback: weather, terrain, fatigue, hunger. Attention could open instead of locking down.

Breath could find its rhythm. The woods held no history of abuse or violence that I needed to manage.

I could breathe, think, and feel differently out there.

Pattern Recognition

Most of my practices were born long before anyone called them anything. Clumsy, somehow intuitive, shaped by need rather than philosophy.

But it worked.

I watched how certain people moved, how they breathed in the cold, how they stood still without stiffness. Nobody explained anything to me. They didn’t have to. My body was paying attention to the patterns.

One woman spent long stretches barefoot, even when the weather was rough. At dawn she’d stand in the wind, breathing sharply, deliberately, like she was stoking a fire from the inside. An older man had a stillness that wasted nothing, his mind placed gently, like a hand on water. Another just watched, taking in sensation without commentary.

Just patterns my nervous system recognized as useful.

Years later I learned the names: Pranayama and Tummo for the breath, Samatha for the stillness, Vipassana for the watching. At the time, none of it was spiritual. It was fieldcraft.

Tools for functioning.

Fieldcraft, Not Spirituality

These weren't spiritual practices to me, it was fieldcraft. I wasn't seeking insight, more like tools for functionality.

The trail was an unforgiving but honest teacher. If I pushed too hard, my body told me. If I ignored fatigue, it corrected me. If I fought discomfort, it escalated.

There's no reward for dissociation out there. No benefit to pretending I was fine when I wasn't.

Presence wasn't a virtue. It was required.

Decades On

In an ICU at 4:27 a.m., my body failing and medicine out of answers, I reached for the same things.

Not hope or belief. Breath, observation, presence without expectation. They didn’t come from a studio or a teacher or a book. They came from necessity.

When my body learned, quietly and stubbornly, how to stay.

Some practices aren’t chosen. They’re inherited, by a body under pressure. Sometimes they save you, sometimes they cost too much, often both.

What I call inner trailcraft isn’t learning new techniques. It’s recognizing what your body already carries and where it came from.

Not heroic memories, just the origins of tools I still reach for when everything narrows.

They appeared in parking lots and the narrow strip of trail between panic and breath. Forty years later, I’m still using them.

Not because it’s spiritual. Because it’s practical.

What did your body learn to do before you knew what to call it?

→ Share this with someone who might recognize a piece of their own trailcraft in it.

Connective Tissue:

→ Dead Reckoning
→ Dance of Memory and Mirror

Trail Crossings & Waypoints:

→ Wim Not Woo
→ Survival Settings

Outlooks & Vantages:

→ Oh, the Water
→ Blue and Gold

← Back to Inner Trailcraft

* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *