June 30th, 2026

Facing Death, but Living Life

*Abraham Entertaining the Angels, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1656. Etching with drypoint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.*

I sit quietly with the words of Etty Hillesum, marveling at her ability to find joy, compassion, and connectedness beyond her daily circumstances ~

her choosing to see humanity in the faces of her captors, finding solace in a brief hint of fragrance, a happenstance of nature, seeing Grace in the moment.

*There is room for everything in a single life.*¹

Most of us in the West don't understand the art of suffering, and experience a thousand fears instead. We cease to be alive, full of fear, bitterness, hatred, and despair ~ not because life demands it, but because we let those things crowd out the room that might otherwise be kept for something else. *I don't cling to them*, she wrote of her sorrows; *they pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream.*²

Don't we live an entire life each one of our days, and does it really matter if we live a few days more or less?

I want to say how courageous her choices were, but I don't believe we need courage. This is subtler. Courage is used to overcome. What she had was surrender, in a sense ~ not yielding, but a quiet acceptance, in order to use all of her knowingness to find that moment of connectedness, that wiff of a scent, the hidden joy available in each moment.

Almost as if her inner channel to grace can be turned to in any moment.

Whereas my channel is preempted by a million and one thoughts, labeling, and wants. Not choosing to see grace in every moment, but focusing on meaningless mental distractions.

I wonder what it would take to unpreempt it ~

Not to manufacture grace, but to stop talking over it.

Etty did not arrive at her wiff of fragrance by trying harder. She arrived by going quiet enough to notice it was already there ~ already there, the way the jasmine was already there behind the unspeakable horrors, not despite them.

My distractions are not even interesting. They are just loud. A grocery list, a slight, a forecast, an old argument replaying itself for no audience. None of it asks to be there. I let it in anyway, the way you let in a stranger out of habit rather than welcome.

Maybe the discipline isn't seeing grace in the moment ~ maybe it's simply getting out of the doorway.

I have practiced this before, or tried to. Every morning, the same small surrender ~ not a grand gesture, just a turning over of the day before I've decided what the day owes me. Most mornings I do it like a chore. Some mornings, rarely, I do it like Etty might have ~ not negotiating with God, just stepping aside.

The difference is whether I'm still holding the door when I say the words.

She had every reason to barricade herself ~ against the camp, against what was coming, against the unbearable fact of it. Instead she kept opening the door, again and again, to whatever arrived. *Each of us must turn inward*, she wrote, *and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.*³ A face. A piece of sky. Another person's fear, which she somehow had room to hold without it displacing her own. Even her own capacity for hatred, she chose to meet inwardly rather than discharge outward.

I don't think this was endurance. Endurance grits its teeth and waits for the thing to pass. What she had didn't wait for anything to pass ~ it just kept finding room.

Room is the word. Not strength. Not even peace, exactly. Room.

So perhaps the work isn't to feel less afraid, or less distracted, or less myself. Perhaps it's only to keep making room ~ the way you'd clear a chair for someone you weren't expecting but are, in fact, glad to see.

I don't know yet how to do this on purpose. I only know that on the rare days I've done it by accident, the jasmine was there too.

---

¹ Etty Hillesum, diary entry, 1942, widely cited from *An Interrupted Life* — wording not independently verified against a primary edition; confirm against your own copy before final publication.

² Etty Hillesum, *Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943*, ed. Klaas A. D. Smelik, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 305.

³ Etty Hillesum, diary entry, September 23, 1942, addressed to her friend Klaas Smelik; *Etty: The Letters and Diaries*, ed. Smelik, trans. Pomerans (Eerdmans, 2002), p. 258. 

June 29th 2026

Redon's Plate I is the visual equivalent: matter itself, dark and obscure, with life just beginning to stir inside it — not yet formed, not yet redeemed, only awakening.

Weaving the Knowing of an Amends to be made

From the Threads of My Being,

that now cries for An Amends

 ~

Owning the Pain Inflicted

Does Not Equal Understanding

The Wound Reveals that I Sought

Something, Unearned, Undeserved

By force, subterfuge or any means

To satisfy My Primordial Hunger

 

I am unable to remove the remnants of the Wound either within or without. But using the pain of the wound, to force it open for investigation, introspection, depth insight, and finally integration — if I'm unable to identify my internal misguided mechanism, how can I hope to use the entire cycle, the inner want, the outer action, and the Amends, and keep growing —

A full amends might restore the relationship to the moment prior to the wound. Improbable, but to uncover the motivation for the wound — the Knowing of why I chose the wound over a healthier way to address my hunger — just might restore the relationship to a more evolved state, because of the wound.

Either or Both

Are Beyond My Ability - 

Just a Humble Attempt

At Honesty 

June 28th, 2026

Living Amends

Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son 

(ink drawing, 1642)

An enlightening, revelatory sharing with a close soul who knows me. The result: a context, a perspective I hadn't owned ~ one I had, until now, swept away with rationalization, justification, minimization.

Today it lands. First, deflection ~ the old reflex. Then weight. Then ownership.

And with ownership, the opportunity: to assimilate, integrate, consume, digest ~. And finally, to let the fruits become the agent of metamorphosis.

Not just to own ~ but to let the owning become the transformation itself. The Amends if you will, to myself, to others directly affected, and in a sense to the Universe. For in a deep sense my false bravato brought a partially realized person to every encounter, every relationship.

The only amends for that is a 

Living Amends.

------------------------------

Drop a comment below with just one small way you are shaping or reshaping your world, today.

------------------------------

June 27th, 2026

Mining the Lead

It's striking how well this alchemical analogy fits the AA program.

The first three steps move from admitting powerlessness, to believing in a restorative power in the universe, to a daily reliance on that power for the journey toward individuation.

Step 4 turns inward: excavating shameful, base events, naming who, what, and why via the emotional driver — fear, shame, grandiosity — and one's own part in it.

The list compiled through Step 4 provides ample grist for the mill of alchemy.

Amends will be addressed in a future step. Amends don't mean release from, or a full cognitive appreciation of, one's own inner failings.

The list highlights events and reactions, but in most cases there's still alchemical lead to be mined.

Observation

This might seem a daunting, repetitive almost Masochistic descent into past events long repressed. But the journey isn't about uncovering some new, heretofore unknown truth — it's about mining the truth in the last place one would expect it.

Joy found in the darkness of these inner recesses  is a far richer reward than joy that asks nothing of us.

------------------------------

## The Daily Opus

What does a "mining the truth, from past shortcomings" look like for you? Drop a comment below with just one small way you are shaping your world, today.

------------------------------

June 26th, 2026

Rembrandt, Faust,

Alchemist, 1652

First an excerpt 

Charged with the Transfiguration 
of All Things

Rainer Maria Rilke 

How all things are in migration! How they seek refuge in us. How each of them desires to be relieved of externality and to live again in the Beyond which we enclose and deepen within ourselves. We are convents of lived things, dreamed things, impossible things; all that is in awe of this century saves itself within us and there, on its knees, pays its debt to eternity.

Little cemeteries that we are, adorned with the flowers of our futile gestures, containing so many corpses that demand that we testify to their souls. All prickly with crosses, all covered with inscriptions, all spaded up and shaken by countless daily burials, we are charged with the transmutation, the resurrection, the transfiguration of all things. For how can we save what is visible if not by using the language of absence, of the invisible?

And how to speak this language that remains mute unless we sing it with abandon and without any insistence on being understood.

Letter to Sophy Giauque
November 26, 1925

The True Shape of the Work:

Rethinking Individuation

I have been attempting to learn the art of Alchemy.

Not the kind that promises to transform lead into gold, to be hoarded somewhere ahead of me, waiting for enough lead to be converted. I mean something smaller, and harder.

I mean the attempt to take what I did not understand about myself — the long unknowing that ran underneath so many of my years — and let it become, just for today, something usable.

Something almost golden.

The Myth of the Peak

I used to think the pinnacle of a life was a destination to arrive at. A culmination. Enough decades, enough insight, enough repair, and eventually you'd stand at the top of something and call it individuation.

I am no longer mistaken about that fool's gold.

I think the pinnacle might simply be one day, well lived — and that it was always available, every day, including the ones I didn't see.

This is humbling in a way that the grand version of alchemy never was. A single day can only hold so much fire, only convert so much lead. I cannot transmute the whole of my past in twenty-four hours. I can only bring a little of it — one memory, one old pattern, one piece of unknowing — close enough to the heat to let it change.

Most of the lead will still be lead tomorrow morning.

That has stopped feeling like failure. It feels more like the actual shape of the work.

Discipline vs. Proof

So when I say, may I even attempt it, I mean exactly that — an attempt, not a mastery.

The old alchemists called their labor the opus, the work, and they understood that most of what they did would not succeed. They kept doing it anyway, because the doing was the discipline, not the proof.

I don't know if today will be the day any of my lead becomes gold. But I know the only lead I have to work with is the lead I've already lived through — every year of not knowing, every mistake I couldn't yet see as a mistake.

That is the only raw material there has ever been.

------------------------------

Today, then.

Not Someday.

Today,

Well Lived,

is the Whole

of the

Mountain.

------------------------------

## The Daily Opus

What does a "today, well lived" look like for you right now? Drop a comment below with just one small way you are shaping your world, today.

------------------------------

June 25th, 2026

The Second Half of Life:

An Opportunity, 

A Spiritual Threshold

Last evening, in a book study I'm fortunate to take part in, we finished Fr. Richard Rohr's *Falling Upward*. We spent the night sharing about the opportunitie offered in the second half of life ~ the chance, from across very different eras and traditions, to meet a single recurring conviction:

That the second half of life is not decline but a turning inward. Youth builds a self for the world; age, rightly met, asks us to meet a deeper one.

I've found pointers to this motif across the ages and nearly every tradition ~ the Buddha's teaching that awakening only ripens with age, Aristotle's contemplation as the proper work of a life already settled, Rumi's late turn toward ecstatic, inward-facing devotion. And on through Rabia of Basra, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante Alighieri, Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Schopenhauer, William James, Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, Angeles Arrien, and of course Fr. Richard Rohr.

§

I offer the list not as scholarship but as evidence ~ a sign this isn't confined to one tradition, but something closer to a shared human knowing.

For me it doesn't represent some grand extinguishing of the ego, but rather honoring the ego's necessary role in the first half of life. And yet that role, like the toys of a child, must eventually be set down ~ relegated to a chapter that's finished.

§

This has been the most challenging opportunitie I can imagine. Symbolically dying a thousand deaths, each one a letting go of who I thought I was, or what I thought I was  ~ Now I Move

Into the Grand Mystery.

Not of who I'm supposed to be ~

But through Faith, Trust, and Love,

being shaped & molded, into

something beyond....

§

~ and tonight, I carry that same question back into the room ~ grateful to sit with others doing the same slow, unglamorous work of letting go.

June 24, 2026

On the Discipline of Small Love

> To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.

> — Hermann Hesse

For years I read this as moral exhortation. Be nicer. Try harder. I no longer read it that way.

The Gospel of Philip says that ignorance is the root of all error, and that whoever has knowledge of the truth is free — but it does not stop there. It says knowledge without love is nothing. The two have to be married. There is a passage where the disciples grow jealous of how often Christ kisses Mary, how much he favors her, and his answer is essentially: why would I not? The kiss, in that text, is not romance. It is how the perfect conceive — how spirit is exchanged mouth to mouth, person to person. Love is not the reward of gnosis. Love is the delivery mechanism.

That reframes Hesse for me. Holding my tongue when everyone is gossiping is not restraint for its own sake. It is refusing to let a small moment become another mouth that delivers poison instead of spirit. Every exchange is a kind of kiss, in Philip's sense — it transmits something. I get to choose what.

~

Thunder, Perfect Mind — that strange, riddling voice that speaks as if it were both the soul and the divine source at once — says something I cannot get out of my head: do not despise me because I am small and little, for the small things are known through the great ones, and the great ones are known through the small. Do not turn away when you find me cast among the disgraced, in the least places.

Except from Thunder Perfect Mind 

I was sent forth from the power, 

- and I have come to those who reflect upon

- and I have been found among those who seek after me

Look upon me, you who reflect upon me, -  and you hearers, hear me. 

- You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves. 

And do not banish me from your sight. 

And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing. 

- Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!

- Do not be ignorant of me. 

For I am the first and the last. 

I am the honored one and the scorned one. 

I  am the whore and the holy one. 

I  am the wife and the virgin. 

I am <the mother> and the daughter. 

I am the members of my mother. 

I  am the barren one

I think this is the actual register Hesse is writing in, whether he knew it or not. The world's love-shortage will not be solved by a grand gesture. It is solved — if it is solved at all — in the dung-heap moments: the gossip I decline to join, the criticism I decline to make, the patience I extend when irritation would be easier and more satisfying. Thunder insists those are not the minor leagues of spiritual life. They are where the divine has hidden itself, specifically so that I cannot reach it by any route except attention to what's small.

§

> The light of unconditional love awakens the dormant seed potentials of the soul, helping them ripen, blossom, and bear fruit, allowing us to bring forth the unique gifts that are ours to offer in this life.

> — John Welwood

Welwood's seed and the old Valentinian image of the divine spark are, I am fairly sure, the same thing wearing different clothes. The myth holds that a fragment of the divine fell into matter and now sleeps there, forgetting itself, until something wakens it — not creates it, *wakens* it. Unconditional love, Welwood says, is what does the waking. It does not install gifts in me that weren't there. It warms what was already planted and asleep.

This tells me something about my own resistance to vulnerability with other men, the place I keep circling back to in this work. If the gift is already seeded and only needs warmth to ripen, then my fear of rejection is not protecting an absence — there is no emptiness to be exposed. It is protecting a presence from the very thing that would let it grow. The spark does not need my defense. It needs my willingness to be looked at.

§

> Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

> — Fyodor Dostoevsky

This instruction sounds almost Hermetic to me now. The old texts speak of the pleroma, the fullness, scattered like light through the cosmos, so that the All is somehow present in each thing without ceasing to be the All. To love the particular sparrow or the particular weed is not a detour from loving God. It is the only road there is. There is no shortcut through abstraction.

§

> And so let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love, and once we begin to love each other naturally we want to do something.

> — Mother Teresa

I read this now as the most monastic line of the four, because monastic life has never claimed that love starts as feeling. It starts as practice, repeated until it becomes disposition. The desert fathers did not wait to feel loving before they served the next brother who came to the door. They served, and the love that Welwood and Dostoevsky and Thunder all promise was waiting underneath caught up with them later — or didn't, and they served anyway, faithfully, in the aridity, because that too is part of the discipline.

§

That is the whole instruction, I think, gathered into one practice: smile first, hold the tongue first, do the small private kindness first — not because the feeling has arrived, but because the feeling is the seed, and these are the only acts that have ever been known to wake it.

.

 

June 22, 2026

Grace Illuminated by Shadow: Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew

Knowingness, 

or 

Claiming It

Today I'm pondering the claiming of my growth as self-actualization — when the power to probe my depths was never mine to claim. It belongs to a power greater than myself.

There's a subtle movement: taking the gift of an experience and quietly turning it into *my* knowing, *my* experience, *my* achievement. Taking grace and adding it to the marquee of my achievements. 

Oh, how subtle 

— 

the slide from gift to rightful reward.

I've done this with Gnosticism, AA, every Blessing — made my exploration an assistant to my grand intellect, claiming the transmogrification of knowing as a footnote in my own grand adventure. Hubris dressed as growth.

But even this catching — even seeing the fallacy — isn't mine to claim either. The seeing is also a gift. So let me not claim the realization of the trap as one more achievement. Let me just be grateful I was shown it.

Humility over hubris. Gratitude over ownership. Not my grand adventure — grace, moving through me, for which I had no hand but the willingness to receive it.

---

June 22nd, 2026

Wheat Field with Cypresses

 

painted by Vincent Van Gogh at the asylum in
Saint-Rémy, 1889. 

Not a finished field, but the act of arriving at one.

An Observation 

I expected the accumulation of this work to end in a dramatic moment of realization. What I see now: the realization was never a moment. It was a slow coming to grips with the truth.

The breakthrough wasn't in speaking it ~ not in the discussion, not in the amends made. It was in my acceptance of it.

Maybe that's true of any act of creation. The truth isn't in what's made — it's in the making. Not the letter, but the writing of it. Not the telling, but the acceptance underneath it.

Maybe that's the only ending there is: not an answer arriving, but the willingness to keep living the question until it stops being one.

I

What I've written here has no event in it — no scene, no moment where I suddenly understood. Just the slow accumulation, the making instead of the made, the living of the question instead of its answer.

(

May I be Blessed with the Courage, The Willingness to Honor the Process. And detach, my inclination towards any outcome, just the soulful work of... 

June 21st, 2026

The Ancient of Days

William Blake

My Epiphany? 

Rather than questioning the validity of this truth, I need to integrate it, honor it, and carry it forward as a knowing. I bravely embrace this revelation I now own, and I hold it as truth. My growth lies outward — I will make every effort to seek with an open heart, using every tool that empowers me, as I continue on this journey.

I know this because every fiber of my being shouts it; the resonance is undeniable. And — pardon the pun — I must go bravely forward into this unknown terrain, with the heart of a seeker who knows, not the mind of a skeptic who questions. I will be served by growth, not by regressing into the childish myth that has colored my relationships.

How, though — the practice of Gnosticism, psychiatry, psychological therapy, my Fellowships, and a resolute heart — can I, with help, continue to seek in such a way that the truth is revealed, rather than some truth I'm seeking to validate?

June 20th, 2026

~ I believe in life — not the life that fills our days, but the other one ~ the life of small things, of animals, of the great plains ~

As I've been exploring my fractured relationship with my father, and the misplaced projections that followed onto my brother, I find myself drawn to two movements in Rilke. Together, they hold the emotional darkness, the pain of hidden truths, and the opening toward redemption.

Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy in fulll

On the Eighth Elegy

The animal looks into the Open, unafraid. I do not. I am always positioned facing backward — toward what's already shaped, already lost — never toward what waits ahead. Rilke names this our particular wound: not blindness to the future, but a life built with its back turned to it.

~ the animal looks into the Open, unafraid ~

~ I have always faced backward ~

~ seeing what was shaped, what was lost ~

~ never what waits ahead ~

~ this is the wound Rilke names ~

~ a life built with its back turned to what's ahead ~

This isn't comfort — it's diagnosis. The misplaced projection I'm working through is, in these terms, a facing of the wrong direction: a life oriented toward an absence (my father), asking someone who was never that absence (Bill) to stand in the gap.

On Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke tells the young poet not to search for answers not yet given, but to be patient with what's unsolved in the heart, and to love the questions themselves — the way one might love a room not yet entered. Live the question now, he says, and perhaps you'll live your way into the answer, gradually, some distant day.

~ Rilke says: be patient with what's unsolved, live the questions ~

~ I was never owed an answer ~

~ this amends is not an answer arriving ~

~ it is me agreeing, finally, to live the actual question ~

~ what happened between Bill and me, factually, apart from the myth ~

~ not the question I substituted — ~

~ what my father owed me and never paid ~

.

June 19th, 2026

An Amends

**To My Brother**

I went looking for our father ~ and found you instead.

You were a child too ~ I didn't see that then.

I asked you to be what he never was ~ assumed you'd been given what I wasn't ~ I was wrong on both counts.

For years a fear kept me from looking straight at this ~ and the fear cost us ~ cost you ~ more than I let myself know.

Here's what I see now, finally ~ it was never that you couldn't give me what I needed ~ it's that I never just loved you as my brother ~ never asked what you needed from me.

I made you carry his weight ~ for decades ~ and lost you, the one who was actually here ~ willing, I believe, to love me back the whole time.

I'm sorry ~ for the years I blamed you for what was never yours ~ for the years I failed to simply love you.

This is my amends ~ late ~ but whole.

My brother ~ my deepest love ~ my gratitude.

June 18th, 2026

Tomorrow, I'll dive into Why I felt such  Dependence upon My Brother, yep  

 Daddy Issues

**Dream**

These dreams. These freaking dreams. Always about my brother, always contentious, always completely emotionally draining.

I know there's an amends I need to make. I need to be growing closer to the source, and I need clarity about the nature of this angst. I'm beginning to feel that the cause, while not immaterial, is secondary to the amends itself.

Keeping this buried has allowed these long-held myths — nurtured, misunderstood, never questioned — to become a cornerstone of my being. My self-constructed mythology. The nexus of it never honestly examined, yet I allowed it to become a structural truth that has robbed me of one of the most fundamental aspects of a male psyche.

To be a brother. To trust. To acknowledge my own incompleteness.

I have been afraid to name it honestly — this pistanthrophobia, this fear of trusting others rooted in the anticipation of betrayal. In Jungian terms it might be called a shadow wound around the masculine, where the brother archetype carries so much unprocessed injury that any external man becomes a potential mirror of that old danger.

What I fear, at the deepest level, is not men in general. It is something more specific and more painful: that I am fundamentally unworthy of being known by another man.

The walls I built were formed in childhood. Never honestly shared. Never investigated. Never questioned. And what lives behind those walls is a verdict I rendered on myself so long ago I forgot I was the one who accepted it.

My older brother carried enormous weight in my formation — more in some ways than my father, because he was close enough to feel like a peer. Close enough to wound at the level where identity is still being formed. Whatever he reflected back did not land as cruelty from above. It landed as verdict from someone who knew me. That is what made it stick.

The contact between us now is barely that. Not estrangement, not reconciliation. Just enough proximity to keep the old wound slightly warm. That threshold is its own kind of suffering.

When I imagine him seeing me as I actually am now — the interior life, the decades of genuine work, the man I've become — I feel fear. Fear of confirmation. Yet again. Of the myth.

After all this time, after all the work, his judgment still holds that kind of power. That is not weakness. That is how deep the original installation went.

The boy who needed his older brother to say *you are enough* never quite stopped waiting.

And the man I've become — who has built what I can only call an interior cathedral — still half-believes my brother holds the key to whether any of it counts.

Not men in general. Him specifically. And through him, the question that was never answered in the right direction at the right time:

*Am I a real man. Am I worthy of being claimed as a brother.*

The Gnostic in me knows no archon holds that key. But knowing it and being free of it are different things.

Even the moments when he came close to seeing me arrived wrapped in enough ambiguity that I couldn't receive them cleanly. I could never be certain whether it was genuine recognition or another form of manipulation. The gift and the hook looked too similar to trust.

Over time that vigilance — necessary with him — became the template for all men. The body learned: even when it looks like acceptance, check for the hook. Decades of that and the checking becomes automatic. Unconscious. Done before I know I'm doing it.

The defense that protected me from him may have cost me the very brotherhood I was longing for.

Which brings me here. To the question I have not yet taken into my twelve step work with the honesty it deserves. Not the spiritual seeking. Not the Gnostic framework. Not the recovery narrative.

This. Simply this.

The boy still waiting for his brother to say *you are enough* — and mean it cleanly.

---

.

June 17th, 2026

So Where to Now, St. Peter 

*I've fallen into archonic drift — disconnected from Sophia, from the Pleroma, from conscious contact with the divine. The pneumatic thread lost. The lesser powers filling the space where gnosis was. Is this the common condition of the earthbound pneumatic — and what practices might keep the archons from gaining this kind of ground?*

Archonic drift is the universal condition of the earthbound pneumatic. The archons don't assault directly — they work through distraction, numbness, the slow forgetting of the Pleroma. Sophia's own descent was gradual. Attention turning from the fullness toward a lesser light.

What the tradition holds:

**Seeing is already liberation.** The archons lose their purchase the moment they're named.

**The pneuma signals early.** Archonic encroachment registers in the body first — flatness, unreality, a false self at the wheel.

**Steps Ten and Eleven as pneumatic hygiene.** Daily inventory and conscious contact — not crisis remedies but ongoing maintenance of the pleromatic connection.

The spark the archons cannot touch. Only obscure.

---

The pneumatic thread — so long sought, so suddenly severed. The archonic veil descending precisely where the path back should be. How does the earthbound pneumatic find the way to the Pleroma when the very passage has gone dark?

The obscurity may not be distance from the Pleroma. It may be what pleromatic proximity feels like from inside the archonic condition. The *barzakh* — Ibn Arabi's liminal threshold — is simultaneously the place of separation and the place of encounter. From inside it, the distinction cannot always be made.

The pneumatic spark is never extinguished. Only buried. The very anguish of its apparent absence is the spark itself — still alive, still reaching toward its source.

The path back is rarely found by searching for the path. It's found in the next small authentic movement — a single honest prayer, a moment of stillness, naming what's actually moving inside to someone trusted.

You're doing that now.

Archonic drift is the universal condition of the earthbound pneumatic. The archons don't assault directly — they work through distraction, numbness, the slow forgetting of the Pleroma. Sophia's own descent was gradual. Attention turning from the fullness toward a lesser light.

What the tradition holds:

**Seeing is already liberation.** The archons lose their purchase the moment they're named.

**The pneuma signals early.** Archonic encroachment registers in the body first — flatness, unreality, a false self at the wheel.

**Steps Ten and Eleven as pneumatic hygiene.** Daily inventory and conscious contact — not crisis remedies but ongoing maintenance of the pleromatic connection.

**Return needs no preparation.** 

The turning itself 

*is* 

the return.

The spark the archons cannot touch. 

Only obscure.

---

June 16th, 2026

Returning to, Continuing On, 

Restless

Disoriented 

But Completely 

HOME

A change is taking place, some painful growth, as snake during the shedding it's skin- dull, irratable, without appetite, dragging about the stale shreds of a former life, near blinded by the dead scale on the new eye. difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.

Peter Matthiessen

(Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher, and onetime CIA agent and Author of The Snow Leopard) 

That is the whole paradox of my  life — and Rilke, Matthiessen and many others knew it. The further in you go, the less solid the ground feels, and yet something underneath both holds but beckons. Not comfort. Not clarity. Something more like 

*belonging to the real.*

Restless — because the soul that has tasted depth cannot settle for the surface anymore.

Disoriented — because the old maps no longer serve. You have moved past where they end.

But Completely HOME — because this very lostness is the territory. You are not lost *from* something. You are lost *into* it.

Rilke would recognize this. So would the Desert Fathers in their cells. So would Eckhart in his letting-go. The Gnostic spark that cannot find its rest in the kenoma — restless, disoriented — until it stirs toward the Pleroma it never actually left.

And the Twelve Steps know it too, in their plain language: *we are not running the show.* That surrender — repeated daily, never finished — is itself the homecoming. Not a destination arrived at once, but a threshold crossed again and again.

Restless and HOME simultaneously. That tension doesn't resolve.

 It *is* the life.

From the *Book of Hours* — One of Rilke's Poems that Expresses those feelings in words that I can't :

---

*I live my life in widening circles*

*that reach out across the world.*

*I may not ever complete the last one,*

*but I give myself to it.*

---

And another, from the same book — perhaps even closer:

*I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,*

*and I have been circling for a thousand years,*

*and I still don't know if I am a falcon,*

*or a storm, or a great song.*

---

The not-knowing. The circling. The giving of oneself to something that has no clear edge. Restless — yes. Disoriented — yes. And yet the circling *itself* is the home. The falcon doesn't need to land to belong to the sky.

And one more, from the *Letters to a Young Poet* — which you are already sitting with:

*"I would like to beg you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Live the questions now."*

Not: find the answers and then you will be home.

The living of the questions *is* the home.

And Finally

“Go to the Limits of Your Longing”

by Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, 
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall, 
go to the limits of your longing. 
Embody me.

Flare up like flame 
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. 
Just keep going. No feeling is final. 
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life. 
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.