Both Ennoble and Complete




My own apologies for a lateness in replying are due, caused in part by quite lovely times on the last warm Sunny days of last week, walking along and climbing up sea-side cliffs, and strolling in breezeful loneliness the nearby sandy and pebble-strewn beaches; and, in part, by being again for a few days a part of another adventurous and dangerous world.

Now, here at the Farm (sanctuary) the wind has turned colder and stronger, clouds obscure the warmth of the Sun, and flecks of rain impinge upon my window as I sit at my desk listening to the Fourth Symphony of Brahms, whose beautiful First and Second Movements always seems to me to capture that sublime joy, that hope, and that poignant sorrow, that so often describes our personal relationships. Thus, are so many memories returned: and amid the mixed rememberings there is such a numinous intimation of how good it is to be healthy and alive so that the drying tears of only moments ago are only the drying tears of a past that has brought us this briefest wisdom of our knowing. Thus is there - and yet again perhaps foolishly - such a straining almost painful yearning for that personal love which we so earnestly believe can both ennoble and complete...


I'm still too much in love with life, with desire, with abandon and childlike needs, of Nature and adventure and the Quest.

Perhaps it always should be thus: that the dichotomy we feel - between actively being and seeking, and between resting, seeking solitude and often replete with some new sorrow and hope of inner peace - will be always with us. For how else do we inspire ourselves to create? How else do we - perhaps only in some small way - inspire others? How else do we - knowing, feeling - keep alive that adventurous, reckless, childful, part of ourselves which, secretly, in our darkest moments of sorrow, we perhaps never desire to completely cease to live?

For myself, this dichotomy has never, despite my many words and hopes, been completely resolved, and even when I begin in vanity, arrogance and pride to delude myself it has (as recently), my inner impish self returns to somehow in some way break the fetters of peace and solitude so carefully, painfully, constructed: as happened, again, only last week. Perhaps it is that we who know, feel, such a division, within - who have lived it for almost all our adult lives - cannot ever and should not try to escape this our true nature which is both of joyful passion and of a sorrowing pain. Or perhaps it is (and more likely) that for such as us it only ever and truely ends when we perchance find that special person who so completely and with honour completes us.

Now, I shall take myself out into the meadow fields again, the feel the wind, the cold, remembering the joy and the sorrow of so many pasts.



DW Myatt
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