Still looking 

Still Looking

A poem for the people who have studied themselves and are still a little lost


I have been taking myself apart for years

and still I can’t explain the wreck

I know the diagrams, I’ve read the books

and still something’s caught in the neck

I’ve sat with therapists in quiet rooms

and walked out with the same old ache

the mirror offers nothing I don’t know

and still I can’t sleep when I wake

I know exactly how I pull away

I know the name of every wall

I built the taxonomy, laid it out flat

and then I went and did it all

There was a child who learned that love was leaving

who waited by a window every night

and when love finally stayed I found a reason

to stand up and turn off the light

The damage doesn’t stop when you discover it

it doesn’t care what you have named

it bleeds right through the bandage of your learning

and someone new gets stained

I’ve handed people maps of all my damage

said here’s the wound, here’s where it leads

and then I watched myself go right along

and plant the same old seeds

But something in the writing keeps me grounded

it pulls me back to what is real

not fixed, not freed, just willing to return

and say again what I still feel

There is a dignity in looking twice

in going back when nothing’s changed

the work is not the cure, the work is witness

a record of the strange

Fragility is not the proof of failure

the crack is where the light comes through

the fool who names his folly has more standing

than the one who never knew

I am not a villain for the wounds I carry

but I’m the one who gets to choose

I know the punchline now — it’s still worth laughing

at what I couldn’t bear to lose


About This Poem

I’ve been writing about myself for over fourteen years — the patterns, the contradictions, the gap between what I understand and what I actually do — and I still don’t have a tidy answer. That used to embarrass me. It doesn’t anymore, quite. What I’ve come to believe is that the examined life isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a practice to be kept. This poem is about the specific frustration of knowing yourself well and still finding yourself at the same old crossroads — and why I think that frustration, named honestly, is worth more than a false arrival. If you’ve ever read something about attachment or self-sabotage and thought yes, that’s exactly it and then watched yourself do the thing anyway, you already know what this poem is about. My blog and Substack, going on fourteen years now, are built for the people who are still in that gap — not defeated by it, just honest about it.


Who This Is For

For the people who feel things deeply but can’t always find the words — and for whom someone else’s words, when they land right, feel like being heard for the first time. For the people sitting in the middle distance between belief and doubt, between knowing and doing, between who they were and who they’re trying to become. For anyone who has ever understood their own damage completely and still had to live through it anyway. That’s who I write for. That’s you.


DCG

Screenshot

The four step structure of successful biblical prayers 

Grok AI’s Findings:

The 4-Step Structure of Successful Biblical Prayers


Researchers fed every recorded prayer in the Bible — from Genesis through Revelation — into Grok AI, instructing it to ignore symbolism, theology, and emotional content, and focus only on the sequential structure of speech acts. When it filtered for prayers the text itself described as answered (receiving a specific, observable outcome), a clear and consistent four-step protocol emerged. In 100% of “failed prayer” cases, at least one of the four steps was violated.


Step 1 — Recognition (Acknowledgment of God’s Nature)
The prayer begins not with the request, but with a deliberate recognition of who God is — His character, power, and past faithfulness. The AI found that prayers which opened with the petition itself showed a statistically lower rate of answered outcomes. The request always came second. Recognition came first, essentially establishing the “signal connection” before transmission.


Step 2 — Alignment (Reshaping the Request Around a Larger Purpose)
This is where the modern ego struggles most. The petitioner didn’t merely ask for what they personally wanted. Their desire was restructured — rewoven into God’s broader design — so that the personal need became an instrument of a larger purpose. Purely self-interested requests were consistently reformatted in answered prayers. The AI observed this as a form of “absolute alignment” — zero entropy in the request.


Step 3 — Surrender (The Paradox of Release)
The AI found a required “clause of release” — the person praying had to signal acceptance of any possible outcome, even one running against personal survival or their deepest desire. Prayers that insisted on a specific mechanism of rescue at any cost consistently failed or produced harmful outcomes. This step is described as the most unexpected finding: the willingness to release control was structurally required, not optional.


Step 4 — Persistence (Repetition Until Outcome)
Very few significant answered prayers in the Bible were single attempts. The pattern demanded repetition. Elijah prayed seven times for rain before a single cloud appeared. The AI labeled this “optimization of cognitive resources” — the structure was not about predicting what comes next, but preparing the person for whatever comes next through sustained engagement.

The AI’s conclusion was stark: the four-step sequence — Recognition, Alignment, Surrender, Persistence — behaved within the dataset not as a literary habit or stylistic guide, but as a constant, directly correlated with positive outcomes. The probability that such a correlation could appear across the entire biblical body of text by random coincidence was described as effectively beyond calculation.

The Statistical Case for Divine Authorship: 40 Authors, ~1,500 Years, 3 Languages


The Bible was written over approximately 1,500–1,600 years, by roughly 40 different authors, across 3 continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe), in 3 languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. These authors came from radically different backgrounds — kings, shepherds, fishermen, tax collectors, military generals, and prisoners — writing in wartime and peacetime, in prosperity and famine, in freedom and captivity.
Despite all of this, the 66 books form a single, unified narrative arc: creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and new creation — with consistent theology, interlocking prophecy, and thematic harmony from the first page to the last.


The Prophecy Probability Calculation
Mathematician and astronomer Peter Stoner — in his book Science Speaks, reviewed and validated by the American Scientific Affiliation — applied the modern science of probability to Messianic prophecy:


• For just 8 prophecies fulfilled in Christ: the probability of one man fulfilling them all by chance is 1 in 10¹⁷ (one in one hundred quadrillion). To visualize this, Stoner asked you to imagine covering the entire state of Texas two feet deep in silver dollars, marking one coin, stirring the entire mass, and blindfolding a man to pick the marked coin on his first reach.


• For 48 prophecies: the probability rises to 1 in 10¹⁵⁷ — a number with 157 zeros. Emile Borel, a leading authority on probability theory, stated that once a probability exceeds 1 in 10⁵⁰, it is considered a statistical impossibility in the observable universe. 10¹⁵⁷ is so far beyond that threshold it cannot be meaningfully compared.


• For over 300 Messianic prophecies fulfilled in Christ’s life — prophecies like the virgin birth (Isaiah 7:14), birth in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), betrayal for 30 pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12), and crucifixion described in Psalm 22:16 — centuries before crucifixion was even practiced — the mathematics become incomprehensible.


Why This Matters Statistically


As LifePoint Church explains it: if you took 40 random people from a library across 1,500 years, gave them no communication with each other, told them each to write independently on hundreds of controversial subjects — history, law, poetry, prophecy, science, ethics, biography — and then assembled all their writings, the probability of them forming one harmonious, non-contradictory, unified story is not merely improbable. It is a statistical impossibility by any mathematical standard.
The standard scientific threshold for impossibility is 1 in 10⁵⁰. The Bible exceeds that threshold thousands of times over in prophecy fulfillment alone — before even accounting for its structural, thematic, and linguistic unity across authors who never met each other.
The conclusion many scholars draw is the same one the Bible itself claims: there weren’t 40 authors. There were 40 writers — and one Author.

Let this be Understood

I had to tune out the news today

I keep seeing the perpetual propaganda

Need to keep my eye on the ball

Need to accept the Miranda

Focus on the moment

Forget the Past

Forgive and be positive

Do not become the iconoclast

We allow ourselves to get caught

The trappings of the hive mind

Just a little information

Seeds our vision and makes us blind

Don’t want an embittered heart

Take out the poison that’s in my blood

Control the thinking that

Will create this toxic flash flood

My meditation

My triumph over the negatives

Sends me on a trajectory over

My go-to expletives

Send me on my way

Let me do something good

Let kindness flow

Let this be understood

DCG

Meditation


Be still my heart

Your beat is keeping in time

The rhythm of the body

The direction of the mind

Waves of frequency

Spilling over my form

Relaxing me and soothing me

The drops in a rainstorm

Skin is smooth

Hair is glimmering

Quench my thirst

Eyes are shimmering

Fix my attention

Your presence Invigorates

When I’m with you

My heart accelerates

My mantra

My meditation

My muse

My fixation

Be still my mind

I hear the silent calling

Liberate me

Do you see that I’m falling?


DCG

A Zen like Moment

I’d like to reflect on an earlier memory of mine when I was just a kid.
A pleasant memory of a peaceful moment that happens to all of us from one time or another if we choose to enjoy it or even notice it. The memory brings me to an earlier time in my life, a time when I did not have to drive or even have concernment about such matters. When I was the passenger in the backseat of the family car, with no other responsibilities or duties to perform in the family presence. One night after a long day of events, my family endured a lengthy drive home from either a social function that took us to another part of town, or some other endeavor that encompassed everyone in the family to be present. Not much was said between our family, we were not a family that talked much, as everyone seemed to be in their own thoughts. The remembrance occurs to me about my overall sentiment as I started to drift into a quasi sleep state as my head leaned against the glass window and the engine motor acted as a white noise that allowed me to shift into a meditative realm.
I’m sure I was reflecting on whatever happened to enter my mind at the time, but one observation came to me as I noticed something very comforting. An observance that whilst you are aware of your surroundings, you can be far off in another realm altogether. Despite my closed eyes, my not too diminished comfort level being in a small Volkswagen bug, a tired body and relaxed mind tends to drift, yet my being in a quasi-awake state, quasi-present and aware of the events happening in my environment- I was also somewhere else; in two places at once.

I do not speak of ekcancar, or an out of body experience, but simply that I had a sense of fulfillment, that I felt a sense of being safe, that I was relaxed in mind and body and my spirit was relieved of any worry. I did not have to have my guard up, I did not have to protect myself, I did not have to be cautious, but only just be!
Imagine being worry free, being relaxed and having a stress-free moment. I seemed to be tuned into a meditative state enjoying only good thoughts. A dream like state that incorporates the present moment without it being a fictional dream.

Letting go of barriers, letting go of ideas, thoughts, and perceptions about the world that closes us off from this experience is harder to do as one grows older. With age one can acquire more scars, more experiences, and more encounters with those who may try to subject you to their ignorance which only builds a history of possible offenses that can convolute the mind. I do not know if I as a child experienced a Zen-like moment, but I do know it has happened at times in my life, but in rare instances. I do know that I was in the company of people who were close to me, and allowed me to project myself out from underneath my mortal flaws if only for a moment. If only for a moment we must cherish them as they are the ones that can lead us to a more sane world.

Letting go of the ego is what I believe happens during those quasi moments of bliss. Not having an encroaching personality conflict, and opening one up for a pure moment of silence and not letting the malfeasance of the mind break you of this opportunity. Having those around you often can help though it is not a requirement of the experience in my point of view.

more to come…..