August 5th, 2026

Nürnbergby Anselm Kiefer

The Ground I Was Standing On

For years I was the architect of my own life. I believed joy was a delicate crop, needing exactly the right conditions before it would grow. So I cleared ground—shifted relationships, fixed broken systems, packed bags for distant cities, arranged the world piece by piece, waiting for the climate to be right before I let myself receive anything. I was building a greenhouse for something already growing wild at my feet.

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I treated today like a waiting room. Somewhere ahead was the real life, the one that would begin once conditions were finally right. I crossed state lines, untangled old family histories, chased distant horizons—searching everywhere for the very thing I kept trampling underfoot in my haste to find it.

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Eckhart called it detachment. I mistook it for effort—one more discipline to master before the ground could be trusted. Gelassenheit—not effort but release—is the letting-go of the very seeking that keeps the present moment at arm's length.

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In the Gospel of Thomas, the kingdom is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it. I read that line for years as a puzzle. Now I read it as a diagnosis: the kingdom was never hidden. My attention was. This is what the alchemists meant by prima materia—the base, unglamorous substance already at hand, already sufficient. I kept looking for a purer material elsewhere. The work was to be done on what I already held.

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The Third Step asks for a decision, not an achievement. I turned my will and my life over and expected transformation as a reward for the turning. I did not understand that the turning itself was the joy—tawakkul, the Sufi surrender to what is given, is not a strategy for producing peace. It is the abandonment of strategy.

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So here is the confession underneath the architecture: I was not building toward joy. I was building a case for why I could not yet receive it. The permission I was waiting for was never withheld. It was only unclaimed.

The fertile soil was never something to engineer. It was here, in the unpolished texture of the ordinary hours, the whole time. Today is not preparation for the ground. Today is the ground.

I am only now learning to stand on it without checking underneath.

silly goose