The Returning Way
Table of contents
  1. The floor
  2. Attention and Love
  3. The Ten-Second Returni
  4. The Sittingii
  5. Metta and Tongleniii
  6. One Thing Eateniv
  7. The God Unfedv
  8. The Ruined Ordinaryvi
  9. The Bird Gatevii
  10. The Open Windowviii
  11. Boundaries and Thresholds
  12. The Hearth Boundaryix
  13. When Intensity Speaksx
  14. True Namingxi
  15. The Two Shoresxii
  16. The Rite of the Near Otherworldxiii
  17. The Width of the Roomxiv
  18. Relation and Repair
  19. Feed the Guest, Keep the Doorxv
  20. The Bowl of Namesxvi
  21. The Watchxvii
  22. The Mending Tablexviii
  23. Who Answers to Youxix
  24. Be Beside Mexx
  25. The Webxxi
  26. The Mirror at Four in the Morningxxii
  27. Coming Back Inxxiii
  28. Direction and Uselessness
  29. The Letter to the Guardianxxiv
  30. The Star Ledgerxxv
  31. The Map Without a Permitxxvi
  32. The Feast of Enoughxxvii
  33. The last pages
  34. Other ways throughxxviii
  35. When the practice must endxxix
  36. A blessingxxx
Practices

Small Practices for the Great Work of Returning

If you have ten seconds and nothing else, here is the whole book:

Say where you are. Say the day. Touch one thing that is holding you up.

Everything after this is that, with more time in it. The rest of this page can wait.

Every entry opens into the same room.

A body that lies down is not farther from the sacred. A body that needs help is not less sovereign. A voice through a device is a voice. Rest is a practice. If no one has ever steadied you, you still have standing here.

Some take ten seconds and some take a season. Start wherever you can reach. If none of them is the one you need, make one.

The sitting is Buddhist. The search is twelve-step. The tonglen is Tibetan, capped here at four people where its tradition extends it to all beings. The manners at the threshold are Irish and Scottish. The spiral came out of Reclaiming. The guest is Rumi's, by way of parts work. The stop word and the traffic light come from consent exercises I have used in contact improv and in kink workshops. Who the touch is for is Betty Martin's wheel of consent. "Whatever the thinker thinks, the prover proves" is Robert Anton Wilson's. The two shores and the wait through intensity borrow from distress-tolerance skills.

The Great Work, the crown, the star, and the Guardian are Thelema's, and the alchemists' before that. I took the vocabulary and refused the grades, the prophet who cannot be wrong, and the ecstasy mistaken for a permit.

I changed all of them, and where the change matters I say so in the practice. Where a practice belongs to a living community, that community can refuse it, correct it, and set limits on it.

The four groups

iAttention and Love. The Ten-Second Return · The Sitting · Metta and Tonglen · One Thing Eaten · The God Unfed · The Ruined Ordinary · The Bird Gate · The Open Window

iiBoundaries and Thresholds. The Hearth Boundary · When Intensity Speaks · True Naming · The Two Shores · The Rite of the Near Otherworld · The Width of the Room

iiiRelation and Repair. Feed the Guest, Keep the Door · The Bowl of Names · The Watch · The Mending Table · Who Answers to You · Be Beside Me · The Web · The Mirror at Four in the Morning · Coming Back In

ivDirection and Uselessness. The Letter to the Guardian · The Star Ledger · The Map Without a Permit · The Feast of Enough

The last three pages are not practices. Other ways through is what to do when a practice asks for a door you do not have. When the practice must end is the one page that outranks the others. The blessing closes the book.

Finding a return

If the question is…Begin with…
I have been away a long time and the house does not fit.Coming Back In
I have no one to call.The Open Window, then The Bird Gate. Both are built for one person. The book will not pretend this is the same as company.
I have ten seconds.The Ten-Second Return
The day has taken everything.The Ten-Second Return
I want to train attention on a day when nothing is wrong.The Sitting
I need to stop improving myself.The Sitting
I cannot feel anything and my body is a long way off.The Sitting, the door of no object. Or The Ruined Ordinary, which asks nothing of your feelings and only that you stand there for a fixed time.
I cannot hold a good wish for anyone, including myself.Metta and Tonglen
I want to know what I am eating and who it cost.One Thing Eaten
Something has been eating my days.The God Unfed
I am not the only one feeding it.The God Unfed, the last movement
I want to say something to whatever exceeds me.The Open Window
People cannot refuse me and I decide what happens to them.Who Answers to You
I need to stand somewhere that is not beautiful.The Ruined Ordinary
I want to set a frame for one day and see what comes through it.The Bird Gate
I need a boundary with someone.The Hearth Boundary
My life has become too available.The Hearth Boundary
Intensity is demanding a decision.When Intensity Speaks
A bond has started to speak like fate.True Naming
Somebody has made this an emergency and is offering me the only way out.True Naming, the last movement
The old map no longer matches the ground.True Naming
I cannot stop returning to one question.The Two Shores
I met an image, a dream, a presence, or a strange coincidence.The Rite of the Near Otherworld
I am caring for someone I cannot leave.The Width of the Room
A state has taken over the whole house.Feed the Guest, Keep the Door
I keep doing the thing I said I would stop.Feed the Guest, Keep the Door
I am grieving.The Bowl of Names
A hard season has ended and I do not know what I am now.The Bowl of Names
The grief is not new and it has not stopped.The Bowl of Names, the last movement
Someone is making the last crossing.The Watch
An animal is dying — mine, found, hit, or one I killed.The Watch, the animal movement
I caused harm.The Mending Table
I do not know what I have not looked at.The Mending Table
I want company without merger.Be Beside Me
I am about to refuse something, alone.The Web
I need to be heard and nobody is awake.The Mirror at Four in the Morning
I cannot trust my own read of what happened.Say it to a person first. Then The Mirror at Four in the Morning
A decision is stuck.The Letter to the Guardian
I am asking what is mine to do.The Star Ledger
I think I have awakened, attained, or gone deep.The Map Without a Permit
Life has become only work.The Feast of Enough

Keeping time

Some occasions on which I have found these useful. It is not a schedule and there is nothing here to fall behind on.

The reason to keep any time at all is that something else already keeps it. The quarter, the performance year, the roster, the feed, the second shift nobody counts — those have a working calendar and it is the only one most weeks are told about. This is not a rival year to join. It is a way of not letting the report be the meaning of the weeks.

vMost days. Say where you are, say the day, touch one thing that is holding you up. That is the floor and it is the whole of what a day requires. Sit for ten minutes if you can sit. Open a window and ask for nothing if you can speak. Keep no count of days.

viOnce in a week, if the week has an hour in it. One pleasure that owes no result, before the roster has claimed every hour. If there is no unworked hour — and for some lives there is not — the peach over the sink is the law and it is not a lesser feast.

viiWhen the house changes. Use the table above. Grief, harm, dying, refusal, a bond that has started to speak like fate: these do not wait for a season and they outrank everything else on this page. People die in June.

viiiAcross eight to twelve weeks. Keep a ledger page while life happens, and end it with the lamp, the loaf, and the page between them.

Start the page when you notice something, not when a calendar says you may. What you are watching for is a hinge day — a day the material world turned, and not a day an office agreed to. The first frost. The first morning you do not need the light on. The day the rent is paid, or the day it cannot be. The day the debt clears. The day the last of them moves out. The day the thing has a name. A birthday or a Thursday will also do, and so, pointedly, will the first day of a fiscal quarter — starting a ledger then is a way of starving the quarter of its meaning while still filing the report.

Hinge days are not a wheel and there is no set of them to learn. You will not notice the same ones as anybody else, and the ones you notice will change. There are no named seasons here. A season is eight to twelve weeks that you dated yourself, and the date is only there so you know when to read the page.

ixOnce in a year, or late. Go out and come back in through the door. Put the map down and act unpermitted. Read what repeated across the pages; that is the star, and it revises.

No consecration of the next self. Utility counts forward. This counts back in.

And when a practice makes the world harder to return to, the last page of this book outranks every line on this one.