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.

---

July 5th, 2026

Finding Myself 

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

~

Rilke gives me two ways to lose.

The panther paces behind bars until the bars are all there is. No world behind them anymore — just the groove his strength keeps wearing into itself. That's the kind of defeat with nothing behind it. A will turned inward, going nowhere on purpose. I know that pacing.

The man watching loses differently. His wrestler doesn't win the fight — he's kneaded by the Angel like clay, and walks away larger for it. Growth here isn't the fruit of victory. It's what's left after losing well, again, to something that keeps outgrowing me.

Same word. Opposite outcomes. Maybe that's the whole question of my life — which defeat I'm in.

~

I spend most of my energy avoiding both. Building bars, then resenting the view. Or bracing against every storm as if staying upright were the point — when staying upright might be exactly what keeps me small. What I fight is tiny. What fights with me is vast. Every small win just proves how small I am.

So finding myself was never assembly work. Not enough wins stacked up until a self stands there, finished. It's closer to what's left once the storm has had its way — when the thing holding me together loosens, and what remains is not less of me, but more.

~

Even the panther gets a moment of grace — not release, just an image slipping past the bars, down through the tensed muscles, into the heart, gone before it can be held. Something arrives anyway.

I don't choose which defeat I'm in on a given day. But even the wearing-down kind carries a flicker of the other — something getting through, unbidden, doing its quiet work.

~

I'm not found by winning bigger fights. I'm found in what the losing leaves behind. Even what I let go of keeps circling me, drawing its curve around a center I didn't ask to be. I'm rarely that center. More often, I'm just the one being shaped by what draws near.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. Not to survive them. To let them do what only something greater can — make me, finally, someone else.

July 4th, 2026

Sylvia Plath on Independent & Freedom 

Quote of the Day by Sylvia Plath: 

 'Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to use it..' - Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet of Ariel and The Colossus teaches thought-provoking life lessons on why freedom matters only when you know how to use it

Sylvia Plath's words highlight that freedom's true value lies not in its mere existence, but in our capacity to wield it wisely. She emphasized that purpose, understanding, and responsible action are crucial for freedom to be meaningful and lead to fulfillment.

Freedom is something many people strive for throughout their lives. Whether it's the freedom to choose a career, express opinions, or make independent decisions, it is often viewed as the foundation of a fulfilling life. But freedom by itself is not enough. Without the ability to make wise choices and use opportunities responsibly, even the greatest freedom can lose its value. American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath captured this idea in a quote that continues to inspire reflection. Her words suggest that freedom reaches its full potential only when it is guided by purpose, understanding, and action.

The hardest thing, think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly- managed past.

Sylvia Plath

 

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

Sylvia Plath

July 3rd, 2026

        

Anne Frank's Chestnut Tree

Etty Hillesum Jasmine 

 "Two Voices at the Window" 

I.

Gilbert says: risk delight.

Hillesum says nothing so bold —

she just keeps writing, in the barracks,

that the sky is still that blue,

the jasmine still smells the way it always did.

Not a philosophy. A report.

~

II.

I imagine them at the same window.

Gilbert points at the harbor, the one light burning.

Hillesum looks past him, at the wire,

and says: yes — and still, this.

Two ways of refusing

to let the dark have the only word.

~

III.

She does not ask to be spared.

She asks only that the world not be reduced —

that even here, a moment can stay whole,

not a symbol, not a lesson,

just true.

That is harder than delight.

Delight I can choose on a good morning.

What she is describing

is fidelity to what is beautiful

even while it is killing her.

~

IV.

I have called this grace before.

Now I wonder if it is closer to witness —

the refusal to let suffering

edit the whole of what's real.

~

V.

Burns waited for death to bring the recompense.

Gilbert found it at the oars.

Hillesum found it already here,

inside the very thing

that should have erased it.

Three answers.

Only one of them

was written by someone

who did not survive to revise it.

~

VI.

So — coffee, still hot.

His  voice, still his.

The sentence I wrote this morning

that did not need to be beautiful

to be true.

Not despite what still hurts.

Not after.

In the same room as it,

unedited,

still blue.

~

VII.

This one sits beside the amends letter,

beside Sophia walking into the dark

and calling it by name.

Same window. Different hour.

The costume comes off again.

What's underneath

is still enough.

July 2nd, 2026

Oh the Foolishness of My Intellect

Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened.

— John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

§

Wanting to sit with suffering ~ as if this will increase the quality of the amends.

An honest amends carries not only acknowledgment of harm done. Within the harm lies the next step on the journey toward a living amends.

Not some mystical event that rights the past and ensures the future. Just an honest desire ~ tirelessly, daily, within the moment ~ to bring active force to the gift of the amends.

So what does this gift entail? How do I know what the next step is?

I start by acknowledging, consciously, daily, the need to cultivate ~ thought by thought, action by action ~ the internal and external source of Love beyond conception.

Turn to the spark embedded by Sophia. That spark of the Pleroma. The ground beneath the ground of my being.

July 1st 2026

A Lifetime to Own It

*A change is taking place, some painful growth, as in a snake during shedding its skin — dull, irritable, without appetite, dragging about the stale shreds of a former life, near blinded by the dead scale on the new eye. It is 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

The snake sheds because it has no choice. Its body outgrows the old skin and the old skin simply fails. There is no version of the snake that stays inside it a while longer, adjusting the fit, deciding if it's ready.

I have had that choice, with the people I love. And I think, if I'm honest, I've spent long stretches wanting to look shed rather than doing the shedding — for us both to see.

~

Rather than a courageous love, it became a sort of accounting. Debits, credits, a tally sheet I consulted before I'd risk anything out loud. When the numbers looked bad, when I felt someone might be pulling away or might be angry or might see me clearly, I withdrew — not to survive the loss, but to author it myself before it could be done to me.

That much I've named before, to myself. It felt like finding something. It was something. But I have to be truthful about what I did next with the finding.

~

I took the naming of the fear and turned it into a performance of healing. The insight became the offering.

Look — I understand what I did now.

Look — I can trace it to its root.

Look — I am doing the work.

Please see me.

But understanding the ledger is not the same as tearing it up. I used the desire to make amends as a way to seem repaired, without being repaired. It was faster. It felt like movement. It let me skip the part where change occurs, where I might still be cold or unfair or afraid in exactly the old way, except now I have language for it, instead of the change itself.

~

I don't think the fear was ever only fear of losing love. Under it was something plainer and harder to look at: fear of the actual labor of becoming someone worthy of it. Fear that what I owe the people I love doesn't happen in a letter, an insight, one true sentence delivered at the right moment to move them. It happens slowly, unglamorously, mostly unwitnessed, with long stretches where nothing I can point to has changed at all.

A moment can produce the appearance of a truth. Only a lifetime can own one. I don't want to hand anyone the appearance again.

~

So here is what I want to be honest about, since honesty is the only thing left I haven't already spent cheaply.

I am not doing this so I'll be forgiven. I am not doing this so someone will see the change and soften toward me. If that happens, I will receive it as a grace I did not earn by trying to earn it. But it cannot be the reason, because a metamorphosis undertaken for another's verdict is still the old ledger — just with someone else's name at the top of the column instead of mine.

I want to become the man who doesn't keep the ledger, for my own sake, not anyone else's. Because I am tired of loving from inside an accounting. Because I would like, before I die, to know what it is to love without first checking whether it's safe to. Not to be witnessed doing it. Not even for it to be known that it's happening. For it to simply be true, whether or not anyone is watching, the way the snake's new skin is true either way.

~

I don't know yet who is doing the adjusting 

—

the man shedding, or the one still dressed in the old skin, describing the shedding beautifully to whoever will watch. I'd rather live inside that not-knowing, honestly, for as long as it takes, than resolve it today in a piece of writing and call the writing proof.

That's the only kind of love I trust myself to offer now. The kind that's too slow to perform, and too quiet to need applause — even mine.

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.