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.