i dont know how i got here... i tried to retrace my steps to find the place or link that landed me here but i cant remember. is anyone out there? -11:33pm 2/13/25 i am starting to realize that maybe the simple life is what i crave. does that mean i am dashing my dreams? fantasies of high achieving and money making, high falutin affairs of arts and letters. can i live on bread and God and poetry? maybe sunshine on a nice day. by the ocean if i am lucky. it all boils down to small ephemeral moments of unity, appreciation, awe, and beauty that can be trimmed into poetry and a feeling of contentness. a whiff of evocative scent that captures the mood in a bottle. my imagination can spin up all sorts of daydreams for me to project onto the blank wall. artistic renderings of my stylized memory. i can synthesize it all into a pretty thread, weave it into a pretty garment. i love being swept away into stirred up nostalgia and mood music, susceptible to my own warm feelings and remembered dream worlds. i believe in my art, my poetry, and all the creative perspective i have to offer. i take my poetry seriously and i hone my creative eye. -1:57pm 2/14/25 "For the procession of the creatures and the return of the same are so intimately associated in the reason which considers them that they appear to be inseparable the one from the other, and it is impossible for anyone to give any worthy and valid account of either by itself without introducing the other, that is to say, of the procession without the return and collection and vice versa." Eriugena, Johannes Scotus. "P. II, 529A". Periphyseon -2:02pm "O Lord Jesus, I ask of Thee no other reward, no other blessedness, no other joy than this: to understand in all purity, and without being led astray by faulty contemplation, Thy Words which are inspired by the Holy Spirit. For this is the crown of my happiness, this the consummation of perfect contemplation: the rational and purified mind shall find nothing beyond this, For beyond it there is nothing. For as there is no place in which it is more proper to seek Thee than in Thy words, so is there no place where Thou art more clearly discovered than in Thy words. For therein Thou abidest, and thither Thou leadest all who seek and love Thee. Therein Thou preparest for Thine elect the spiritual banquet of true knowledge, and passing you minister to them. And what is the path along which Thou leadest them O Lord, but an ascent through the innumerable steps of Thy contemplation? And ever dost Thou open that way in the understandings of those who seek and find Thee..." ("Periphyseon", book V, 1010C) A prayer to God, Eriugena is overcome with his passion. Does Rilke not proclaim that he desires to picture God without worldly interruptions, he tells God that he would "think you up to where thinking ends." Rilke hangs onto every Word, "live", "be", "die", "light", "man." By contemplating God's Word and the nature of reality around him, Rilke does indeed follow where God leads, ascending through the innumerable steps of His contemplation. "All things are from God, and God is in all things, and nothing was made except from Him, for all things were made through Him and in Him." This is precisely the view which is expressed by Cardinal Bona in his Via compendiad Deum, where it is said that "God is the ocean of all essence and existence, the very being itself which contains all being. From him all things depend; they flow out from him and to him they return; they are, in the degree to which they participate in his being." p.249 "To put the point vulgarly, 'What I can think inside me must have some sense outside me.' What man's reason can discover is, indeed, an appearance of the truth, but it is not a phantasy; it, like the created world, is a manifestation of the absolute and underived, a theophany, not a mere picture or that which does not exist in itself." p.249 "The nature of God is therefore most clearly revealed in the nature of man: a preparation for the doctrine of the Incarnation. And this means that in the human love which is man's highest level (in 'this-wordly' regard) there is a reflection-even a reproduction-of the divine charity which is the heart of God. Indeed, 'Insofar as human understanding ascends through charity, in that measure divine wisdom descends through mercy.'" p.249-250 "But, in such a scheme, what is to be said of evil? We have already indicated Eriugena's Platonic position here, but a few observations may be permitted. John would insist that if God be the absolutely good, and the ultimately real, evil (which denies the former) cannot possess the nature of being, in any final sense." p.253 Cold does not exist, it does not have physical properties, there is only the absence of heat, which does have physical properties and is real. In that same sense, God is love, sheer positivity, like Eriugena affirms. So this is where evil stems from, it is not of Him, it is the lack of heat/God's love/mercy/compassion/humbleness. Does 'sin' not mean 'without', also? Sin is without God, sin is without love. Eriugena touches physics and metaphysics, without maybe, realizing. "[Man] possessed of this twofold being (interior and exterior), reflecting on the one hand the divine qualities and on the other gathering up creation into himself, he is potentially the instrument for the self-revelation of the Creative Word in a supreme degree of fullness. He has it in him, as it were, to be the final link or connection between Creator and creation, through the Word, by whom all things were made." p.254 Pittenger, W. N. (1944). The Christian Philosophy of John Scotus Erigena. The Journal of Religion, 24(4), 246–257. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1199126 With Rilke on the brain, I am sure he must have read this early Middle Ages Christian philosopher because it echoes his sentiments too perfectly. Rilke, too, believes in his potential as a vessel for God, professing that his words only seek to carve out a space for him. He sees God everywhere, just like Eriugena and he references the one "sent out beyond your recall." He talks about his returning, his motivation to be the "instrument for self-revelation of the Creative Word in a supreme degree of fullness" that Eriugena describes too. Rilke tells God that he simply wants to say the name of things, see nature as it is. Rilke sees God in the soil, in the apple bark, in the image of a dark net, all that is not illuminated by the small circle of a candle flame. Rilke, like Eriugena, tells us to be humble in his poems. Eriugena says that our inflated ego is where our sin or desire to go against our nature to be close to God, comes from. It is selfishness. We are of the Earth and of God and we honor God through loving and understanding because God is love. We sin or go against our nature when we are with love or without compassion or without understanding. "And it is when man turns to God, in love and purity, and seeks to know him in reason and contemplation, that God is more adequately revealed through him. This is not a double movement, although it appears so to us; it is really one movement-God to creation, and creation returning to God-seen by man in two ways." p. 254 Rilke understands this oneness intimately, he is the instrument, the vehicle, he takes on his duty to finish the mosaic, to listen and fetch God a glass of water if ever he was thirsty. He inherently knows that every move and every word is a striving to return to God from whence he came. His poems detail this, he expresses his desire to return to that dark bosom, he begs the dark soil that is God, to give him more time to appreciate and love things as they have never been loved before, before it all returns to Him, the soil. He knows his origin and future, this tension pulling in both directions like Eriugena describes. "Muir later came to see that there is another sacred text, the universe. The winds, the waters, the springs, he says, are all 'words of God.' The earth, Muir realized, is like a 'divine manuscript.' And, echoing Eriugena in the ninth century, he said that there are 'two books' through which God is speaking, the little book, namely, the holy book of scripture, and the big book, the cosmos. The great sacred text of the universe, he said, is a living unfolding text, and God is still 'writing passages' for us to learn from." John Philip Newell, "Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul" (2021) -6:54 pm 2/20/25 Digital footprints. Altar on my screen, I can leave whispers in binary. Trace the shape of my ones and zeroes.