Silent
Silent provides the tools for seekers to recognize their path and enables self-reliance for spiritual and magickal growth.
Seekers gain insight from his work and find their inner calm from his ability to listen and help others reflect.
California’s Quiet Expansion
Silent • January 6, 2026
Veterans, End-of-Life Distress, and the Real Work of Pilot Programs
Top of Mind
If you follow the headlines, you’d think California’s efforts around psychedelic-assisted care stalled out. Ballot initiatives failed. Broad decriminalization lost momentum. The narrative is one of retreat.
That story is wrong.
What actually happened is quieter—and far more consequential. While sweeping policy grabs attention, pilot programs kept moving. Carefully. Incrementally. Often out of sight. As we move into 2026, those pilots are no longer experiments in theory. They are pressure tests. Either they mature into real care pathways—or they become symbolic gestures, cited in reports but disconnected from lived outcomes.
This is where leadership matters.
Why pilots matter more than headlines
Large-scale policy debates tend to flatten complexity. They ask binary questions: legal or illegal, approved or rejected. Pilots, by contrast, live in the gray. They force institutions to confront implementation, ethics, training, supervision, and integration.
A pilot doesn’t get credit for intent. It only earns legitimacy through outcomes: reduced suffering, improved function, durable meaning-making, and fewer downstream crises.
In that sense, pilots are closer to operational leadership than political theater. They answer the hard questions executives recognize immediately: Who owns the risk? What competencies are required? What happens after the intervention?
California’s quiet expansion is not about ideology. It’s about whether systems can do difficult work without hiding behind slogans.
Veterans and moral injury: why recreation framing fails
One of the clearest fault lines shows up in veteran populations. Many pilots were initially influenced—directly or indirectly—by “recreation-adjacent” narratives: microdosing for creativity, personal exploration, self-optimization.
That framing collapses when it meets moral injury.
Veterans are not primarily struggling with anxiety as a lifestyle inconvenience. Moral injury cuts deeper. It’s about betrayal, responsibility, grief, and meaning. It is not resolved by novelty, transcendence, or peak experience alone.
When pilots lean too heavily on recreational metaphors, they fail these populations. The container matters. Preparation matters. Language matters. Most of all, integration matters. Without structured integration, insight decays into confusion—or worse, and retraumatization.
If a program cannot hold grief, remorse, and existential rupture without rushing to “positive outcomes,” it is not ready for this population. That is not a philosophical critique; it is an operational one.
And End-of-life distress: meaning-making versus symptom suppression
The same tension appears at the other end of life.
End-of-life distress is not primarily a symptom management problem. Pain can often be treated. Anxiety can be reduced. But distress persists when meaning collapses—when identity, legacy, and unfinished business surface all at once.
Here again, pilots risk failure if they borrow models built for symptom suppression rather than existential work. Relief without reconciliation is temporary. Sedation without narrative leaves families carrying unanswered questions long after death.
The most promising pilots recognize this distinction. They treat altered states not as an endpoint but as an opening—one that must be held by clinicians, chaplains, and trained guides who understand ritual, narrative, and the human need for coherence at the end of life.
This is slow work. It does not scale easily. And that is precisely why it matters.
What “quiet expansion” needs in 2026
If 2026 is the inflection point, three conditions will determine whether these pilots mature or wither.
First: serious ethics review.
Not checkbox compliance, but ongoing ethical oversight that evolves as programs learn. Vulnerable populations—veterans, the terminally ill—require higher standards, not looser ones. Consent is not a form; it is a process.
Second: clinician involvement early, not as cleanup.
Too many pilots bolt on clinical oversight after the fact. That is backwards. Clinicians, chaplains, and experienced facilitators must shape protocols from the beginning—screening, preparation, dosing context, and integration. This is not about gatekeeping; it is about coherence.
Third: depth of integration.
A single session does not constitute care. Integration plans should extend weeks or months, involve family or community when appropriate, and connect insights to daily life. Without this, pilots produce anecdotes, not outcomes.
Executives will recognize this pattern immediately. It’s the same reason digital pilots fail when they’re treated as demos instead of systems.
How to evaluate a pilot like a grown-up
So how should leaders evaluate these efforts?
Not by counting participants.
Not by measuring media coverage.
Not by asking whether the experience was “powerful.”
Ask instead:
· Did this reduce long-term distress, not just short-term intensity?
· Were adverse outcomes tracked honestly and acted on?
· Is there a repeatable, ethical pathway—or just a one-off success story?
· Who is accountable when things go wrong?
Mature pilots welcome these questions. Performative ones avoid them.
Closing
California’s quiet expansion is a test—not of substances, but of systems. Veterans and people at the end of life are not edge cases; they are the clearest mirrors we have. If a pilot cannot serve them with dignity, humility, and rigor, it is not ready to scale.
Call to Action
If you’re a clinician or a chaplain, this is your lane. Step in. These programs do not need more hype. They need grounded leadership willing to do the unglamorous work of care, integration, and ethical accountability.
That’s what turns a pilot into a pathway
Onward.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walk into any forest in the Cascades and you are standing on the dead. The fir that fell forty years ago is now the nurse log feeding a row of saplings. The salmon carried uphill by an eagle became the nitrogen in the cedar's needles. Nothing in that forest is wasted, and nothing in it is afraid. We have built an entire industry on pretending we are exempt from this. We drain the body of its blood, fill it with preservatives, seal it in lacquered hardwood, and lower it into a concrete vault—as if the earth were a contamination to be defended against rather than the place we came from. Cremation, for all its simplicity, burns fossil fuel and sends the body skyward as carbon. There is another way, and it began here in Washington. Human composting—the law calls it natural organic reduction—was legalized in this state in 2019, the first in the nation. The process is unhurried and honest. The body, unembalmed, is laid into a steel vessel and surrounded by wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. No chemicals are added. The microbes that already live on the plant material, and on us, do the work they have always done. Over eight to twelve weeks, the body becomes soil—about a cubic yard of it, dark and alive. Families may take some home for a garden or a tree, or donate it to forest conservation land. What was a person becomes, quite literally, ground for new growth. I have sat with the dying, and I can tell you that the question underneath most deathbed fear is not what happens to me? It is did I matter, and will anything of me remain? The Hávamál answers plainly: cattle die, kin die, the self dies too—but what one leaves behind endures. We usually read that as reputation. I have come to read it more literally. A body that becomes soil leaves something behind that you can hold in your hands. Something that feeds. For those of us who keep the old ways, this is not innovation. It is restoration. Our ancestors were returned to barrows and bogs and burial mounds, given back to the land that fed them. The vessel and the alfalfa are new; the covenant is ancient. The earth gives, and the earth receives. Every harvest festival we keep is built on that exchange. It would be strange to honor the cycle all our lives and then opt out of it at the end. This choice is now legal in a dozen states and counting. If it speaks to you, say so—out loud, in writing, to the people who will one day carry out your wishes. Death plans left unspoken become burdens; death plans spoken become gifts. A leaf falls. A seed sprouts. The tree does not grieve the leaf, and the soil does not refuse the seed. When my own time comes, I intend to be useful one last time. That, too, is a kind of prayer. —Silent
For the Pagan and Contemplative Community
There is a grief that arrives before the death. It does not announce itself. It does not have a name that anyone uses at the dinner table, or in the waiting room, or in the parking lot of the care facility where you sit in your car for a few minutes before going in, gathering yourself. It lives in small moments. The first time they didn't recognize you. The day you realized you were making decisions for them that they would have hated. The night you caught yourself hoping — just for a second, just once — that it would be over soon, and then spent the next three days punishing yourself for the thought. This is called anticipatory grief. And it is real, and it is heavy, and almost no one will name it for you while you are living inside it, because you are the strong one, and the person you are losing is still here, and grief, we have been told, comes after. It doesn't always come after. Sometimes it comes alongside. Caregiving is one of the most demanding things a human being can do. It asks you to be present to someone else's diminishment, day after day, while managing your own fear and your own exhaustion and your own sadness — and while the world around you continues as though nothing unusual is happening. You go to the grocery store. You answer emails. You show up. You are praised for your strength, which is a kindness people offer because they don't know what else to give you. What you actually need is someone who will let you put the strength down for an hour. Not fix you. Not give you a plan. Not tell you that you're doing a great job, or that they couldn't do what you're doing, or that everything happens for a reason. Just someone who will sit with you in the weight of it. Who will not be frightened by what you are carrying. Who will let you say the unsayable things — the anger, the ambivalence, the love that is so tangled up with loss that you can no longer tell them apart. That is what I offer. I am a death doula and spiritual director. I work with caregivers who are in the middle of it — not at the end, not after, but now, in the long middle stretch where the grief has no official start date and the world has not yet given you permission to feel it. We meet, usually by video, for an hour at a time. I listen in a particular way — not for problems to solve, but for what is actually present beneath the exhaustion and the competence and the careful management of everyone else's emotions. You do not have to have it together when you come into this space. That is the point of it. A few things I will not do: I will not tell you how to grieve correctly. There is no correctly. I will not rush you toward acceptance or silver linings. Some things do not have silver linings, and pretending otherwise is a small violence. I will not give you more to manage. You are already managing too much. What I will do is be present — fully, unhurriedly, without an agenda — for whatever you bring into the room. If you are a caregiver and you are reading this and something in you recognized itself in these words, that recognition is an invitation. I have a small number of spaces available for caregivers who are navigating the approach of death alongside someone they love. The intake questions at tokeepsilent.me are where we begin. Or you can reach me directly. There is no script for this conversation. We simply start. — Silent