My daughter's preschool teacher said it every morning, to a room full of four-year-olds.

We do what we have to do before we get what we want to do.

I understand why she says it. You want them to wash their hands. You want them to sit through circle time without dismantling it. But somewhere between preschool and adulthood, the teacher got replaced. A boss. A culture. A voice inside your own head that still has her exact rhythm.

And most of us never stopped following the rule. We just forgot it was ever a rule. We started calling it the truth.

That's what this episode is about. This one goes underneath the productivity systems, the five-year plans, the calendar — down to the belief installed before anyone was old enough to question it: obligation comes before desire, duty comes before self, you earn your presence before you're allowed to have one.

I trace where that comes from. I talk about records, and what happens to a life when the parts that made you never get written down. I tell you about a 24 year old named Lydia Lee, and the line she said that I have not stopped carrying since: the question was never whether I belonged. The question was whose permission I was going to ask.

And I get into Ram Dass, and the idea that we are all G-d in drag. Which sounds like a bit until you watch it happen in a Field Note session for the fiftieth time. Someone stops performing. Something older than the performance comes through.

At the end, I ask you to write yourself a permission slip. People have cried doing this. People have laughed like they got away with something. What they got away with was themselves.

The forgetting doesn't have to be permanent. Somebody has to keep the record of the walk.

[Listen to Episode 3: The Forgetting →]

Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I go straight for the fire. I’ve never torn anything apart first.

Maricella did.

The month she quit her job, she went home to El Salvador. She found every journal she’d kept since she was a girl. She tore them apart with her hands. Then she burned them.

For eleven years before that, people said the name of the company she worked for more than they said hers. “I didn’t have a last name,” she told me, laughing the way people laugh when they’re only half kidding.

I went looking for her story. I came home holding a mirror I didn’t ask for.

I switched up the format on this one, less profile, more like sitting at the table with her. Press play and tell me if it lands.

If this landed, send it to someone who’s been performing fine for too long. They’ll know exactly what you mean.

With gratitude,Lindsey

P.S. Save September 26th.

A full day Field Notes workshop in NYC.

A room built to hold what usually stays invisible. Strangers meeting each other as people instead of titles. Enough of them in one place that something shifts by the end.

Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

She said it like a confession. Everything she does, she does to share it. Even walking. Even the books she reads.

The whole room went quiet. Because everyone sitting there did the same thing and nobody had said it out loud before.

So I asked them when’s the last time they did something with no audience. And people actually slowed down like the question caught them.

I spent fifteen years backstage.

Tour buses at 2AM, boardrooms, the whole thing. Being useful is a seductive identity — you get praised for it constantly, people start introducing you by what you do for them, and one day the usefulness is just the whole self and you can’t remember there was someone underneath it.

That someone didn’t go anywhere. She’s still melting in the park on a Tuesday with nothing to show for it. Still the most herself in the moments she’d never think to photograph.

This one’s me catching the exact second it flips. When a true thing turns into a thing you’re doing because it’ll photograph well.

Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this episode of Field Notes from the Work (and the Wild), Lindsey Lerner sits down with Emily Pantel — career coach, facilitator, and founder of Self Over Should — to talk about the slow drift from yourself that happens when you spend years being exactly who everyone needs you to be.

Emily spent years as the star student, the first chair, the reliable one. She journaled since age six, studied psychology at Vassar, built training programs at Lululemon, and coached employees at Verizon — all while quietly wondering if any of it was actually hers.

It wasn't until she left her role, a grad school rejection, and a mantra she gave herself — follow the fun — that the path finally opened up.

In this conversation, Emily and Lindsey talk about:

- The root cause of burnout — and why Emily calls it self-estrangement

- What it means to follow the reinforcement vs. follow the desire

- Why Emily brings astrology into career coaching — and what the skeptics get wrong

- The tug of war between responsibility and aliveness

- What happened to her anxiety when her inner world and outer world finally started to match

- The practice of coming home to yourself before you update anything else

FIELD NOTES RADIO Episode 1: The Thing I Knew Before I Knew Anything

Fifteen years behind the scenes. Tour buses at 2am, boardrooms, other people's rooms, other people's work. The whole time, I thought I'd put down the camera I picked up at six years old.

I hadn't. I was just using every other instrument available to me.

This episode is the origin story of Field Notes from the Work and the Wild — Chinatown, freshman year of college, the question that changes every conversation it touches, and what it actually costs to build something honest while still paying your mortgage.

The question underneath this one, and every episode after it: when do you feel most like yourself?

Not what do you do. When do you feel most like yourself.

Majora Carter is an environmental justice pioneer, community developer, and TED Talk veteran who never left the South Bronx. In this episode, she talks about building Bronxlandia — a 1908 rail station her father used to look up at from a passing train — into a community venue, the artist question that drives everything she builds, and the invisible work of believing in yourself as hard as you believe in your neighborhood.

You can learn more about Bronxlandia here.

You can follow Majora's work on LinkedIn here.

You can become a patron here.

Tickets for The Human Record — a live Field Notes experience at Bronxlandia on September 26th, 11am–4pm — are on sale now here.

This essay started as a sponsored piece for Sublime. It became the first time I've written honestly about my own process — what it actually looks like to build a practice on saving things before you know why.

I've spent the last year sitting with founders, artists, executives, and community members, documenting the invisible labor underneath their work. Turns out I had never documented my own.

This is that.

In this piece:

A stranger in Chinatown who let me photograph him because I said something true. The Ram Dass quote that sat in an app for six months before it became the spine of someone's story. What fifty Field Notes taught me about the thinking that precedes the thought — and why most tools are built to ignore it.

Links mentioned:

Life Is the Curriculum — Nikita's Field Note

The Ram Dass Lectures collection on Sublime

The Field Notes collection on Sublime

Ram Dass Here and Now — Episode 175 — the episode where Emmanuel says: "You're in school. Why don't you take the curriculum?"

Field Notes from the Work and the Wild — the full archive

This essay was written in partnership with Sublime.

Use code FIELDNOTES for 20% off any paid plan → sublime.app

Today is my birthday, and the best gift you could give is helping support the future of Field Notes.

If this episode moves you, if this work has ever made you feel more seen, more human, or more connected to your own story — consider becoming a patron of the archive. Every contribution helps preserve the human record in a time when so much of it is disappearing in real time.

Because the record belongs to all of us. Support Field Notes

What gets remembered — and who gets erased?

In this episode of Field Notes, we explore the question sitting underneath all creative work, archives, and storytelling: Who gets to decide what matters enough to keep?

From a street photography moment in Philadelphia at 18 years old to building a living archive of portraits, Spoken Records, and human stories, this conversation traces the evolution of Field Notes into something much bigger than art. It’s about preserving the invisible labor, emotional truth, and human complexity that traditional systems leave behind.

I Share About: 

The moment Field Notes truly began

The difference between being looked at and being seen

Why patronage has historically belonged to the wealthy

The urgency of protecting human stories right now

How institutions shape cultural memory

Why archives matter in moments of political and social change

The philosophy behind the “human record”

Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory and how it shaped this work

Building Field Notes LIVE, Field School, and a long-term public archive

Mentioned in This Episode:

Field Notes LIVE — September 26 at Bronxlandia in the South Bronx

Spoken Records

The Human Record archive

Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory

StoryCorps

Studs Terkel

WPA Federal Writers’ Project

With gratitude, 

Lindsey

PS: Subscribe to Field Notes for documentary conversations, portraits, Spoken Records, and reflections on invisible labor, identity, creativity, burnout, belonging, and becoming.

PPS: Upgrade to Friends of Field Notes for access to The Dispatch, weekly prompts in the chat, and the digital Field Note Journal to help you document your own process in real time.

Founding Members can participate in their own Field Note experience. NYC-based. Travel not included. Reply to this email with questions.

The most advanced spiritual practice Mariya Dimov has ever attempted is a regular Tuesday.

After thirty years of ceremony, illness survived, energy healing and a life built around staying clear enough to let something real move through — that’s what she’ll tell you. The ordinary day, held all the way through.

This week’s Field Note is her story.

Put your headphones in. Sit with the photographs. And when you get to the practice at the end, give it a real minute.

I haven’t been able to put this one down since we sat together. Leave a comment on Substack with your reflections.

With gratitude,

Lindsey

PS: Subscribe to Field Notes for documentary conversations, portraits, Spoken Records, and reflections on invisible labor, identity, creativity, burnout, belonging, and becoming.

PPS: Upgrade to Friends of Field Notes for access to The Dispatch, weekly prompts in the chat, and the digital Field Note Journal to help you document your own process in real time.

Founding Members can participate in their own Field Note experience. NYC-based. Travel not included. Reply to this email with questions.

This is the audio archive of a documentary practice built around the question: when do you feel most like yourself?

Every episode is one of two things:

A Spoken Record — where founder and documentary photographer Lindsey Lerner sits with someone for up to three hours, then tells their story in her own voice. Not an interview. Not a transcript. A distillation — the work beneath the work, documented. Every Spoken Record ends with a three-step practice you can carry into your own life.

Or a Field Dispatch — observations from inside the practice. Patterns surfacing across hundreds of hours of conversation with people doing remarkable work in rooms nobody else was watching.

Every Spoken Record lives in full on Substack as a complete Field Note — portrait, audio, and a short piece of writing to put you in the right headspace before you listen.

The world keeps what you made. Field Notes keeps who you are.

Start with the origin episode. Then go wherever you're drawn.

With gratitude,

Lindsey

PS: Subscribe to Field Notes for documentary conversations, portraits, Spoken Records, and reflections on invisible labor, identity, creativity, burnout, belonging, and becoming.

PPS: Upgrade to Friends of Field Notes for access to The Dispatch, weekly prompts in the chat, and the digital Field Note Journal to help you document your own process in real time.

Founding Members can participate in their own Field Note experience. NYC-based. Travel not included. Reply to this email with questions.