Veteran led · Land based · Built for return

The mountain
is not the point.
The return is.

Veteran Rites brings Veterans and military families into wilderness ceremony and continuing community to explore identity, purpose, and belonging after service. We prepare together, undertake demanding work on the land, and carry it home.

See What the Work Requires

Opening photograph: Matt Johnston (opens in a new tab) · 2026

Find Your Next Step

A tall wooden staff stands above gathered objects and antlers in the coulee, beneath blue sky and clouds.

The Arc

One continuing passage.

The work begins before the land and continues in ordinary life.

Preparation

Begin with care, readiness and freely chosen intention.

Severance

Step away from familiar roles and make room for the passage.

Threshold

Enter a held crossing on the land. Its meaning remains yours.

Incorporation

Carry the experience into relationships, choices and ordinary life.

Four movements of one Arc.

Understand the passage →

Why Veteran Rites exists

Military service initiates. Separation rarely brings us all the way home.

Service can give clear answers about identity, purpose, and belonging. Leaving can strip away the structure holding those answers in place.

We do not offer a return to who you were before. You have lived too much for that. We make room for the whole human being: what service gave, what it took, what no longer serves, and what remains yours to carry.

Veteran Rites is Veteran led and nonreligious. The work involves body, mind, story, relationship, community, land, responsibility, and the natural world.

Watch: Who Am I Without the Uniform? (opens in a new tab)

Lay down what no longer serves.

Remember what it means to be human in a body.

Remember what it means to be human in community.

Start where you are

Find your way into the work.

People gathered in a circle in a meadow beside the forest.

For Veterans

Explore preparation, ceremony and continuing community. Begin with a conversation about what fits.

Start here →

Sunlit basalt cliffs and sagebrush beneath broad clouds, with a fence at the right edge.

For supporters

Help make preparation, wilderness ceremony and sustained incorporation accessible.

Ways to give →

Photograph: Matt Johnston · 2026

A purple flower blooms among pale leaves and branching shrubs.

For partners

Connect Veterans with the work, share resources or help strengthen the community that welcomes them home.

Talk about partnership →

Photograph: Matt Johnston · 2026

Two members of the Veteran Rites community embracing on the land

Welcome home

A path for what comes next.

We welcome Veterans carrying questions of identity, purpose and belonging. Prepare in relationship, enter ceremony on the land, and bring the experience into everyday life.

Ceremony was never the destination. The measure is what becomes possible in family, work, community, conflict, service, and the first ordinary Tuesday after coming home.

Explore the Rite of Return

The life after ceremony

“Vision is not vision until we are able to take it back into our lives and live it.”

Meredith Little

Wilderness Vision Questing and the Four Shields of Human Nature, 1996 lecture booklet, printed p. 5.

Three offerings · One continuing return

Three offerings.
One continuing return.

Roots of Resilience

A six week online course exploring whole identity, values, purpose, resilience, and belonging.

Explore Roots

Rite of Return

A 12-day outdoor ceremony with a four-day and four-night solo and food fast at its center, followed by welcome, witness, and the continuing work of return.

Explore the Rite

Circles of Return

Ongoing gatherings rooted in Council, deep listening, shared experience, and belonging without performance.

Find a Circle

Organic Four Shields teaching map: North and winter above, East and spring right, South and summer below, West and autumn left, with an open center.

The Four Shields

A living map.
Not a label.

Seasons help us notice the different parts of being human.

New beginnings. Belonging in a body. Honest reflection. Service in community. The Four Shields offer a way to locate ourselves without reducing a person to one part of the map.

This teaching comes through Steven Foster and Meredith Little and the School of Lost Borders, carried in Veteran Rites practice. It is distinct from our four-part Arc.