Field work
Tuning into truth
What is a space?
Does it begin with the walls?
Our hearts, minds, bodies?
Or still, something deeper?
3-5am used to torment me in my 2010s.
Fuck, why can’t I sleep? Why can’t I be normal even on this dimension?
I’d shout into the void.
(Was it a void?)
2010s me was a different beast.
Headstrong.
I’ll take a course on it.
I learned algebra, why can’t I learn to sleep through the night?
…
In 2018, I was making tech money
I found a wonderful trainer.
Connection to my body. Joy.
Healing, abundance where there once used to be starvation and scarcity.
Pleasure in effort and exercise.
Just when everything was perfect, the sleeping pills stopped working.
It turns out when meds stop working, 3-5am would still be a place of dread.
Oh no oh no oh no.
Biphasic sleeping, it came up so casually, matter of fact, at the next workout.
“It’s rare, because everyone’s on their phones…,” something about my trainer’s discipline, consistency, felt like a form of authority itself that held him, “But that’s how we used to be hundreds of years ago. It’s common in cave people, too.”
We switched me from vegan to paleo diet that week.
He was into dream work, so I got into dream work…
I remember lying in bed, wide awake, convinced I was doing something ancient and enlightened.
I’d find myself in a lot of uncomfortable, impossible, unwinnable, compromising corners like this before the baptism of my mid-thirties.
And the softening I’d paradoxically, necessarily, struggle into…
Months into 2024, it happens again.
“Oh you mean the witching hour?” She says through blue glasses.
The glasses shield from rays emitted by screens.
I’m into energy; these folks are really into energy.
Could they be any worse than a shitty PM or eng partner?
I learned that psychics, mediums, witches, speak fondly of this 3-5am time.
“I get my best downloads at this time,” someone in the circle affirmed, matter-of-factly.
“The Moon speaks to me when everyone else is sleeping,” another fairy-like member chimed in.
Huh. Interesting…
I’d soon learn it as Brahmamuhurta and Amrit Velā, too.
In 2025, it came to me, natural as breathing.
One day in July. It was hot indoors.
Too hot. I couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t sleep.
I kept hearing it whispered: it’s the witching hour, the witching hour.
I sat outside on the roof.
The air was thick. Electric.
Quiet. Easy to read.
Interesting.
It’s a blank canvas. Wide.
Like a dog sniffing an invisible path, in the silence, I could read the city.
People’s stored energy, buzzing… unfulfilled, most of it.
So hot with desire that the smoke from it billowed up, funneled by the buildings, finding release past the rooftops, mingling with the rest of the NYC air.
Am I doing this right?
Somehow it didn’t matter.
It felt like swimming and I love to swim…
I roamed a bit longer. It was fun, I couldn’t resist.
Felt like hours. It was 25 minutes.
Sated, I crept back into bed, and fell sound asleep…
Late 2025
This hour and I found a honeymoon phase.
I’d wake up naturally around 3am.
Jot down whatever I have lingering from the first set of dreams in my bedside dream notebook.
Slide out of bed, into my comfy robe. Glide into my meditation room.
Just me and the navy blue shadows of leaves and hedges, the moon and outdoor lights shining through the windows.
The incense danced around the room; its smell cleared my mind.
I closed my eyes, settled into my psychic space (the “screen” between the eyes).
I take a few breaths.
Something pops on the screen.
He was my professor in university.
Search his name, is all I got. And so I did.
An article he wrote popped up.
Have I ever read this? Guess I will now… I never just went easily. Always with the questions and vigilance.
I felt another metal detector moment.
Something was waking up, remembering.
Specifically these lines:
“… Most of us think of a gift as a vector, something with a point on the end, like an arrow, that travels in a specific direction from one person to another. But look more closely. Who is the giver? Who is the receiver? And just what, in truth, is the gift?
These are stubborn questions unless we recognize that giving and receiving are not two different things at all. They are expressions of one fundamental, directionless force — not a vector but a field. The gift is not something we do to or for each other. It is something that happens to each of us as we enter into relationship.
… Those that are most alive and vibrant have in common a kind of blessed confusion about who is giving to whom…
A doctor enters an examining room, preparing to be cared for. A professor wonders how her students will teach her to understand the world in new ways. A soup kitchen volunteer is ready to find her spirit nourished by the person she is serving.”
The whole article is all of seven humble paragraphs.
And although he’s speaking of giving fields, I heard something from deep within stir:
what if I became a field?
What kind of field would I be?
What is the difference between an observer and a shepherd…?
The questions made no sense.
My whole body responded, yes.
I breathed them in and out.
The incense was done, and so was my session.
I’ve come to find that the best thing for a confusing download is a good second sleep…
Let the seeds settle.
Blessed confusions
That line echoed deepest.
Were there others?
One blessed confusion was my reading spaces and my research sessions.
It’s hilarious and curious that I’d be doing both.
In my tech job, I get into 1:1s with strangers. I ask them questions. They give me answers.
In my psychic readings, I get into 1:1s with strangers. They ask me questions. I give them answers.
In both rooms, I think my job is to get somewhere.
Is it?
I’ve regularly seen my own questions surface in a stranger’s mouth.
And answers I don’t quite understand come from my mouth and be perfectly right for them.
Huh, interesting…
These days, I’ve been thinking
Maybe my job is not to seek anything at all.
Maybe it’s simply to let the truth linger long enough that we both recognize it.
If communion cannot be forced, only hosted…
What kind of host am I?
Which communions do I seek?
