The Gravity of Being Here

Finding something sacred in the wreckage, the breath, and the everyday grace of staying

Over the past year, this space has been called Enlightened-ish — a place to explore the uneasy, beautiful work of becoming. But names change, just like people do. Today, I’m renaming this Substack Seeking: Letters to the Restless — because if I’m honest, seeking has always been the real thread running underneath everything I write. Not easy answers. Not finished stories. Just the raw, restless desire to find something sacred, and to stay alive to it.

This space will always be free to read. But if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is deeply appreciated — and helps me keep building what we’re making here.

Also, stay tuned for news about a Beginning Memoir class I'll be offering this summer — a space for diving into your own stories, with curiosity, courage, and care.

This essay feels like the right place to mark the shift. It’s about a younger version of myself — restless, aching, still trying to outrun the silence — and a flight over the Colorado Rockies that stayed lodged in me longer than I could have imagined. It’s about Capt. Craig Button, an Air Force pilot who disappeared into the mountains without a word. And it’s about the long, slow work of learning how not to disappear from yourself.

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Years ago, when I was a contributing editor to George magazine and living inside a former version of myself, I rented a single-engine Cessna at a small airfield in Rifle, Colorado, and climbed into the northern Rockies. I was retracing the final flight of Craig Button, an Air Force pilot who, in the spring of 1997, broke formation during a training mission out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona and flew silently for hundreds of miles before crashing his A-10 Warthog into the side of Mount of the Holy Cross, near Vail. No radio call. No distress signal. Just a long silence—and then impact.

I told myself I was chasing a story. But even then, something deeper was pulling at me, a hunger I was trying to silence with speed and ambition.

The pilot that morning was a long-haired, easygoing guy who queued up a Grateful Dead bootleg through the headset as we taxied down the runway. Jerry

Garcia’s voice rang through the static as the wheels left the ground.

If you get confused, listen to the music play…roll away the dew…

We followed Button’s rough path south across the sawtooth ridges near Telluride, east across the dark ribbon of the Gunnison River, north past the snow-crowned Maroon Bells. I kept a notebook open on my lap but stopped writing

The Mount of the Holy Cross, near Vail, Colorado

The A-10 Thunderbolt aka the Warthog, the type of aircraft Craig Button flew in the Colorado mountain

after a while. The mountains leaned against the sky, the valleys opened below us, and somewhere in the quiet of it all, that old longing stirred again.

As we neared Holy Cross, Mike, the pilot, glanced over at me and asked, “Close enough?”

I shook my head. “Closer,” I said, forehead against the glass.

He dipped the wing lower, banking us tighter around the mountain.

“Ok, man, you got what you need?”

“No,” I said. “One more time.”

Mike looked over at me confused. Then he grinned. “Ok, then.”

I nodded.

The song changed as we circled and then approached the massive granite wall again.

Stella Blue, soft and cracked around the edges, lilted from the headphones.

All the years combine, they melt into a dream…

In front of us, the mountain spread wide, broken and slashed with streaks of snow, stray pieces of the wreckage still clinging to the rock like ghosts. Inside the plane, Jerry’s whine bled into the low hum of the engine.

It all rolls into one, and nothing comes for free.

Inside my chest, a heavy feeling pressed against my sternum.

Stella Blue. Stella Blue.

I wasn’t just circling the wreckage of another man’s flight. I was circling an ache inside my heart.

Craig Button had grown up inside a strict Jehovah’s Witness household, taught to believe in a God of obedience and exclusion. Later, he entered the rigid structure of the military.

Somewhere between those two worlds, the old certainties must have collapsed. Maybe he reached a place where silence felt safer than speaking, where flight

Capt. Craig Button

felt safer than trying to land. I can’t know what haunted him in those final hours. But I know what it feels like when the story you built your life around collapses under its own weight—and no new story appears to take its place.

I had built my own rigid God as a boy—a God of ledgers and punishments,

promises and conditions. And then life grew wider and messier than the story allowed, and I didn’t know how to stay inside it. So, I did what many do. I left religion, and then I ran from

A friend snapped this picture of me, at 21, atop Maine’s Mt. Katahdin in 1987, around the time I was leaving behind my rigid childhood faith in Jesus.

Mystery itself. I ran from prayer, too. I tried to fill the absence with work and motion and ambition.

I’ve written about those years—the collapse, the addiction, the long exile from myself—in my book Into the Soul of the World. I don’t need to linger on them here. What matters is that the hunger I buried with ambition never left me. It was waiting, quietly, underneath the noise.

That day, that flight over Mount of the Holy Cross, lodged in me. I didn’t solve the mystery of Craig Button’s death, but I noticed something. I felt the way I was, and had been, circling my own spiritual hunger.

It would take years to come back to the sacred. Years of letting the old life fall away before I could trust anything like a higher power.

Today, my relationship with God is wide, unfinished, and threaded with imperfection, even doubt. I find God in my own body—in the steadiness it takes to hold a difficult yoga pose. I find God in the breath of a lover, in the fragile meeting of two people willing to stay. I find God in the wild sprint of my dog across the prairie outside my adopted hometown of Boulder, his whole body leaning forward into the day. I find God when the road lifts out of a slot canyon

and a 14,000-foot wall of granite rises. Awe tightens my chest until there’s nothing left but breath and trembling. I find God standing beside rivers in spring, the snowmelt roaring over stone, the earth remembering how to begin again.

I don’t find God in dogma.

I find God the way a poem or a song points to the unnamable.

Sometimes it’s the Jesus of my youth I feel. Sometimes it’s a Hanuman statuette on my altar grinning through the thick incense haze.

Sometimes it’s no figure at all—just the bright, impossible feeling of being alive.

I don’t pretend to understand it anymore. But I don’t think understanding is the point. Longing is the point. Relationship is the point. Maybe you’ve felt that too—the stubborn, aching pull toward something larger, even when you can’t explain why.

Last February, almost exactly twenty-five years after that flight, I was driving west through the canyons toward a birthday weekend in the mountains. Near Minturn, the road curved open, and there it was: Mount of the Holy Cross. The sky stretched cold and endless overhead. The couloir still held its scar of snow. The mountain stood just as it had then—vast, silent, magnificent.

I stared for a long time, watching the ridgeline where our plane once circled. I thought about Button. About the boy I was. About the stubborn way we eventually, with luck—fate?—come home to ourselves.

I didn’t feel lost.

I felt the tires steady under me.

The sun warming my arm.

The breath moving easily in and out of my chest.

I didn’t need to chase anymore.

I didn’t need to solve the silence.

Maybe you don’t either.

Maybe what you’ve been chasing has been here all along—in the breath you’re already breathing, in the ache.

What are you finally willing to trust?

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If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”