July 6th, 2026

The Metanoia of My Past

Helen Frankenthaler, soak-stain works  

Mountains and Sea, 1952

That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves. That which you do not have within you will kill you if you do not have it within you.

Translated by Thomas O. Lambdin

The Gospel of Thomas (70)

From Nag Hammadi Scriptures 

---

There is no saving that comes from outside me, because there is no outside. What saves me was never separate from me to begin with — it is not a reward I earn or a rescue that arrives. It is the recognition of what I already am, brought into the light of my own awareness. When I bring it forth, I do not create it. I simply stop hiding it from myself.

What I withhold does not vanish for being withheld. It does not wait patiently in some safe, unconscious storeroom. Unlived, it does not become neutral — it becomes corrosive. I am not killed by some external judgment for failing to produce it. I am killed slowly, from within, by the split itself — by the ongoing labor of keeping something apart from the whole that I am.

My life, lived by self-will and self-will alone, will, in time and with a turning, provide the very fodder I need to divine truth from chaos. This is my alchemical transition: not from self *to* Other-Than-Self, as though one were discarded for the other, but self *transmuted into* Other-Than-Self, the way base matter becomes gold without ceasing to be matter. The truth is already present in me. It was never absent. It is only wrapped in emotional camouflage — not hidden by something outside me, but obscured by the very charge I have placed around it, the wrapping that once made it bearable enough for me to survive.

There is no "it" separate from "me" that I either express or repress. There is only one movement: either I am continuous with myself, or I am not. Salvation and destruction are not two outcomes handed down from outside. They are the same self, either integrated or fractured, either flowing or dammed.

So I do not go looking for what will save me. I stop refusing what is already here. I let the turning do what only turning can do — not escape myself, but ripen me into what I was always becoming.

---