26 Jun 2026 3 min read Field Notes

The Light on It

For over a week I didn't get off the floor. Yesterday the warnings were mostly gone. So I went to the creek.

Photo by S. Rolling

Exquisite intracranial hypertension escalation, skull crushing pressure. Barefoot on carpet bringing eye-stabbing pain and ball-peen strikes to the back of the dome with every footfall. I don't know what it's like for other people, but that's how my IH presents when it goes to 11.

The whole system running on fumes, I pushed anyway. Because that's what you do when you've spent years learning consistency is the thing.

The previous week I ground through it. It made it worse.

There is a voice I've learned to recognize and still mostly ignore. It said: sit it out. So for once I did. And this week sitting it out turned into its own kind of spiral: lying around cataloguing everything I was not doing, the ground I was losing while I stayed still.

Yesterday was not great, but the warnings were mostly gone.

So I went to the creek last night.

No gear, no load-out. Just moving when the body finally said it was ready to move.

When you're used to being outside a couple hours a day and you lose that, you notice the absence. Stuck in the noise of your own head, in a box with appliance hum and road rumble. You notice the narrowing, the smallness of the world. It can make you insane in the membrane, insane in the brain.

I wasn't looking for anything, just walking the creek bed.

Then a rock caught my eye.

Looked like every other creek rock, but I stopped. Planted myself in a resting squat, the body needed the stretch. And as I was moving, the light was catching it just right. Not on the rock, what was around it.

Water moving past, leaves mostly decay brown, some dark orange. Then a lone bright green leaf in the foreground away from the others in the distance

I just stayed there in the shallow flow, watching something completely ordinary.

In that moment it was all right.

No new age woo all-is-well-in-the-world, not a transformation.

A week ago none of it was possible, the pause, the noticing.

The leaf, the light, the creek, the rock.

I took four pictures eventually and they're kind of cool. Although not remotely representative of what it's really like to be there. Standing in that water watching that light. That gap isn't a failure of the camera.

That gap is the whole point, being there.