posted November 23, 2009 06:01 PM
[New York]
Sunday, (April 18, 1915)Beloved Mary,
...How infinitely better it would have been if I had had the courage to speak of pain. I suffered in silence -- and silence sometimes is apt to make suffering deeper -- because silence itself is deep. It is more comfortable for most people not to speak; as a rule they make a mess of things when they think aloud. But with us it is just the other way. Talking brings us nearer and nearer by brushing away the dusty corners of our beings. The only silence which we both love is that which understanding creates. Other silences are cruel.
May God bless you, beloved Mary, May God keep you and me.
Love from Kahlil
Miss Haskell's School
Boston
(Sunday, April 18, 1915)
Beloved Kahlil,
... Do you know how I've often told you that in the Sierras we are never out of the sound of rushing water? So I am never out of the feeling of you in me. Bless you.
And God bless you -- and bless us both. Love to you, my beloved Kahlil. -- Love and love from
Mary
[New York]
Sunday 5/23/15
... I have always thought, Mary, that a Revelation is simply the discovery of an element in us, in our larger self, the self that knows what we do not know, and feels that which it does not feel. And what we call growth is nothing but the knowledge of that larger self.
God bless you, beloved Mary,
Love from Kahlil
[California]
Wednesday -- July 7, 1915
Beloved Kahlil -- sweetest friend, Blessed One --
Morning began in the sky, all crowded and shining with storm. I looked out and saw you -- "Kahlil's day," I said -- and it was yours into black night...
Sometimes far across an endless earth I saw snowy mountain tops entering the tender skies as tenderly as a breath -- and then we mounted to the dark plateaus with their level horizons and the chasms carved unfathomably below them. Then heaven and earth were swept away, and a shadow was scooped beneath us, and we ran with the clouds like stars through a blue void; and when heaven and earth came back, they were deep and sparkling like God's eye -- the heavens were the hollow of His eye and the earth His eyeball.
Sometimes we saw just simple wilderness, cloud-banked -- sometimes it was fierce and pinnacled, and big eagles flew about the tops. Once a great plain, filmy like mist, spread round us to the mountain on the edge of the world -- and asleep upon it, like a dream-flower, lay a single purple hill. Sometimes the emptiness and silence was like a mighty grave and the grave of many pasts terribly ended -- and you felt that God had emptied these places and that the full ones He had filled.
The sun sowed light like seed, and the earth drank it like rain. Stem and seed, plume, and leaf-blade, and flower were myriads on a vessel of light. The whole surface of the glove flashed and roughened and smoothed again.
The air came into you like pure space...
...And I thought of earth, free out here to the sun -- and suddenly earth became living like flesh to me -- real -- divine -- beloved -- free in deserts only, where she is but with the sun and brings nothing forth; elsewhere, a mother, perforce, because that is the way things are; and we, her children, as horses and birds and weeds are her children, biting her breasts and marring her fairness, and wearying her -- and dear to her. But the terrible, glorious, ravishing reality was not her motherhood.. but her self -- and something else -- that she loves.
... God bless you -- Beloved -- great soul -- precious Kahlil, -- God bless you and keep you. -- Love from
Mary
[New York]
July 17, 1915
Beloved Mary,
You and I and all those who are born with a hunger for Life, are not trying to touch the outer edges of other worlds by deep thinking and deeper feeling -- our sole desire is to discover this world and to become one with its spirit. And the Spirit of this world, though ever changing and ever growing, is the Absolute.
The saints and sages of the past were seldom in the presence of the God of this world, because they never gave themselves to life but simply gazed at it. The great poets of the past were always one with Life. They did not seek a point in it nor did they wish to find its secrets. They simply allowed their souls to be governed, moved, played upon by it. The wise man and the good man are always seeking safety -- sometimes they find it -- but safety is an end and Life is endless...
Your last letter, Mary, is the most wonderful I have received. It is an expression of that sacred desire to find this world and to behold it naked; and that is the soul of the poetry of Life. Poets are not merely those who write poetry, but those whose hearts are full of the spirit of life...
Love from Kahlil
[mid- or late July 1915]
Wenatchee, Washington
Beloved Kahlil,
I have heard for the first time things you have been saying to me for nearly five years. Kahlil, I have done you all the wrong I could do. You took me to the tenderest centre of your heart and it was from there that I gave you every blow and every wound.
Never have I let you be yourself. I said I wanted you to be free with me. But if ever you were, I hit you. With you I was like one in a room in the dark, who knocks everything down. But this room was You, and the things were the most sensitive things of the soul...
... I did not know I was near you -- nor what it was to be near you -- nor You. What matters most to know, I did not know...
Mary
[New York]
August 2, 1915
All is well now, beloved Mary, all is well...
Indeed we have had five long years of great pain. But those years are extremely creative. We grew through them and though we came out covered with deep wounds, we came out with stronger and simpler souls. Yes, simpler souls, and that to me is a great thing. All the tragic processes in human life, and this war is one of them, are working towards the simplification of the human soul. I feel that God is the simplest of all powers.
...The past five years were a season in our friendship. Now we are at the beginning of a new season, a season less cloudy and perhaps more creative and more eager to simplify us.
And who can say, "This season is good and that season is bad?" All seasons are natural to life. Death itself is part of life. Though I have died many times during the past five years, the marks of death are not upon me and my heart is without bitterness.
Kahlil
Lindaland
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posted November 23, 2009 06:01 PM
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