Letter to K

CAVEAT: Warning! These letters have not been edited by Carla. Expect errors.

Dear K,

I am not even going to attempt to see if this is a good tape and if it is not, there is nothing I can do about it. We do have an air conditioner in here and I am talking louder than I normally talk to try to compensate for the din. It is as noisy as our furnace, but unfortunately it never goes off unless we turn it off. That is the only problem we have had with it, is that you have to live with the noise. Do you have any solutions, R? Help!

I was moved to answer you ahead of about twelve other people and it is not that the other people are not as important to me as you. It is simply that I think that sometimes for some reason, there comes a time when letters stand out at you that say, “This person for one reason or another has a special need at this time.” I really don’t know what gives a person that feeling, but I always go with it. So I would just like to share with you a feeling of peace, and joy and passion to be alive, even if you spill your entire glass of orange drink, which I just did on my Oriental carpet, and you can still laugh at life if you have a big enough sense of humor. Really. You need to have a large sense of humor because life is horrendously funny with the ultimate comedy being deaf.

Let me talk to you a bit, K, about what you said. The things that R and you are doing together sound very positive, and it sounds like you are almost discovering your child within as you play and I think that is wonderful. And that you scrubbed paint, etc. is wonderful too because that Jim does that with our outdoors and it just looks beautiful. As to your garage, just slap a price tag on everything and say it is a yard sale. That was a thought.

You had a visit from your sister, but the funny thing is you seem to be having trouble getting through to us. Bless your heart about the money. I am sorry we can’t pay for people to come. We just don’t have any money. We don’t ask any money, but it does cost something to get here. You can come any time you want. We have a meeting every Sunday night.

It doesn’t look like the intensive is going to happen. We have not gotten one response from anyone that is interested in the channeling because of the fact that Jim will not put it in the paper because he hasn’t felt good enough about it yet to offer it to people. People just simply don’t know it exists and so we haven’t had anybody asking that didn’t want to learn to channel specifically. I think that the chances of Jim’s and my teaching people who live far away enough in any small amount of time that they may go home and have a support from their own support group are very chancy, very long, and the odds are so close to impossible that we will deliver a student to a sympathetic teacher for further practice because bubble channeling requires endless practice.

We finally decided until we could figure out how to do it, to offer no more teaching intensives teaching the art of channeling, for that is too much in too short a time. We were in the middle of clearing lower energy blockages and everybody who has ever come has said, “I loved it,” but not one person has channeled that had said that he or she intended to channel. It is just not apparently possible without that support group.

I have just said, “If you want to learn how to channel from me, then see if you can get a nice job in Louisville.” Louisville is very hot, but it is cold with the air conditioner on. I absolutely don’t know what the temperature is any more outside. It is about 95 out there and I imagine the humidity is about 95.

That letter to those interested in the intensives was written by Jim. You must please understand that Jim and I do not think with one mind on this. I am a sociable person and he is a loner a lot. The feeling that I have is that there is something very special about us, about the place, about what we do, about how we live our lives. We live our lives very consciously as beings of the Creator as creations. We live our lives with that in mind, all of our lives, twenty-four hours a day. For us to have the opportunity to do that is more luck than anyone could ever imagine in one lifetime, but Jim and I can both live, if we are careful, on the trust that Don left us and that is exactly what he intended, I am sure. He wanted the great work to go forward and it will. We always have Sunday meetings.

I can’t figure out what you wanted to ask about. You said, “For your Sunday meditation topic, would you please add one,” and then you talked about lacking a conclusion to your papers. Let me address that. That is the center of it.

There is something going on here that is very important for you, and for you to stand on your own two feet and accept your goddess self is very, very difficult. It must come to one conclusion or another. Either you are hot or you are cold; either you are woman of faith or you are a woman of intellect; either you are a person of passion or a person without passion.

I do not mean in any way to denigrate the tremendous things that the mind and its native abilities can do. I am very intelligent and I use it constantly talking to people in various vocabularies, depending on how they write me. To you, I am talking my normal college English, but to a prisoner, perhaps, I would make things a little bit simpler and change the words around here and there. You can see what I am talking about. That the intelligence quotient comes in handy for that kind of thing.

But in order to choose with all your heart and soul to be a person of passion and intelligence of being imperishable, lasting forever, to realize that in yourself and to accept it, is to do a tremendous amount of inner work. It is the clearing of the lower energy centers, and you have a good partner in R because he is doing exactly the same thing. He has a lot of work to make up, just as you do, because of low self-esteem.

I am not saying that you both should turn into raving ego-maniacs. Actually the desire for and the memorization of excessive amounts of information is quite boring to me, and I am not impressed by any who quote the Bible or anything. I am impressed with people who think, and think for themselves and I know that you think for yourself. I know that right now you are having a particularly rough time, whether it has to do with your mom, or R or just the general situation, I don’t know, but I want you to know that Jim and I keep you in our hearts as we do all of our friends.

The conclusion to life is life. The answer is, “Yes.” That is all you need to have faith in. That is all. You do not need to spout a great lot of theology to love the Creator. You do not have to know dogma or doctrine to be one who worships at the Creator’s feet. You do not have to be someone special for the mothering, nurturing part of the goddess/god to come forth and comfort you for no human hand could. So in spite of your intelligence, I am saying this both to you and to R, in spite of your intelligence, learn to have faith.

Learn from the trees. Think how very, very long it has taken that tree. First there was a pine cone; maybe for two or three years it skittered about drying out in the underbrush; and then one providential footprint stamped it slightly below the ground, stamped a little piece off, a little seed and it grew. Years later it is this huge tree.

That is what faith is like. Choose it. Come to a conclusion, K. I am not saying you should close your mind. That would be the last thing I would say. As a matter of fact, mine is so open it is probably gaping. There is always new to learn. There is always a challenge ahead, but to me the life that is lived consciously is so much more rewarding than the life I lived before I took up meditation. Really, the difference is enormous and I don’t think that I would have been able to get it from my Christian heritage. I needed the meditation too.

I wish there were some way I could incorporate meditations into the worship of the church and then invite all of my friends to come because I love church, but that is not to be. I believe it is a dying faith and that is okay as long as people make up another one.

The important thing about faith is, it doesn’t matter, for instance, whether Jesus was real or not historically. There is a great body of evidence, which can be trundled forth in a little red wagon to impress the heck out of students and show them that things in the Bible have historicity. They have evidence to prove that these things happened. It makes a good case for everything that happened to Jesus being so. This is irrelevant to the truth.

If you wish to follow the Christian path, I strongly suggest that you refrain from believing anything literally, but ponder the parable of Jesus’ life. Ask yourself, How do I learn the mind of Christ today? Take in the red print mystically, non-verbally. Read that aloud as if it were poetry, or read it silently, but slowly, or read it through all in a rush; it doesn’t make any difference. You will find your own way, but the conclusion must be reached, the decision must be made for service-to-others of a specific kind before you begin doing serious channeling.

This is asking a lot of people. It is asking an awful lot of people because what I am saying is that if you aren’t very stable, if you are moving about from job to job, or you are between marriages, or etc., and you are kind of skitzy, it is really not a good time to learn channeling.

I can’t help what the season is in people’s lives when I come upon them, but I do have a strong nurturing feeling for people whom I can help and not much feeling at all for people I can’t help. I love R dearly because with all of those various oddities, little quirks and extraneous information and games, etc, underneath all of that, he is one of the most decent gentlemen I have ever met. Gentle, being the word. He is a very gentle, gentleman and I am most fond of him and, of course, you too, but you seem, in my mind, to be the stronger one spiritually and psychically, although R did have a pronounced ability to do channeling.

The damage that was inherent in that attempt almost took his personality right apart. I didn’t see it coming because I didn’t know that he had been staying up all night talking with M. So R would probably be the first one to tell you that it doesn’t really, really work to learn channeling at the wrong time.

So I think what we are going to offer from now on, until we find a better way, is that people come and live, and have the daily morning offerings and free time, and then a good work shop in the afternoon about dreams. What you have dreamed and whatever you want to write, or whatever part of your life you want to re-script. Jim is pretty much in charge of that.

He has had a lot of that kind of training and I haven’t. It is fascinating. He has done it on me and I just think it is fascinating, and I think everybody will really enjoy Jim’s teaching. He is very succinct and economical in the way he teaches, and when he gets his feet under him on this one, he will be all right. He is just not used to the idea yet and I do not want to rush him.

You see, to be a member of the true, real imperishable universe, you must first realize that you are such a thing. You see yourself as this sort of blocky piece of flesh with bone, and marrow, and sinew with various bolts here and there, but we can also think of each other as energy—as a field of energy. I cannot see your field of energy and I don’t know if you can see mine or not. Some people can to a certain extent see auras, see the energy body, and see it working and see what is happening. I think that would be a very great gift to have. It is not one that I do have and I didn’t want to work any harder on it than I did. I just stuck to channeling when I found out I wasn’t a natural.

What you can’t see about yourself, what you can only realize by saying, “I Am,” is not only you, but All That There Is. And All That There Is was created by one Thought, thought of by the Creator, and that Thought was love. I know you want to polarize service-to-others so I strongly, strongly advise you to settle on when you have found it, a way of daily meditation and offering. In other words, be reading something and be meditating daily. Not that it is a long time that you have to spend doing that, but rather that it is daily.

The difficult thing about becoming an imperishable entity while still in a physical body is that it is almost impossible to take oneself seriously as a metaphysical entity when one sees one’s various body parts sitting around. It just doesn’t look like God at all. Of course, flesh and bone has nothing to do with the Creator.

The consciousness that binds one person together binds all together. We see through a glass darkly. We distort the things that we see. We do not perceive things as they are meant to be perceived by the person that offers. We think that things are difficult that someone else might not. Or we think that something is very easy whereas someone else might be thinking, I can’t understand this at all. We all have our blind spots. You know I have a lot of trouble making Jello. That is one of them.

It doesn’t have to be Christ. Jim doesn’t go any further than Christ consciousness, but to my mind, that is his way of saying that he is unchurched. He is not denying his Christianity, but he refuses to get involved in the church bit. He challenges in the name of Christ consciousness and service-to-others and that pretty well covers the field, but he has a passionate feeling about that which he came to authentically over a period of time. He took a leap of faith, and then he took another step, and then another step and he keeps on taking steps. Jim is, as far as I am concerned, he is incredible. Well, R could tell you. He is just an amazing person. I sort of have a big heart and write letters to people that sometimes may seem to be helpful, but insofar as discipline, and cheerfulness, and alacrity and all of the other excellent virtues in the world, Jim is pretty much a model for most of them. I am grateful because I don’t come up to snuff in a lot of categories. Physically, I can’t do some things for myself and he really doesn’t mind doing them, which is great.

There was a parable about Jesus that he was walking on the water one night and he startled his disciples who were sleeping in the boat and Peter said, “Master, can I come walk too?” Jesus said, “Sure,” and held out his hand. Peter walked on the water, but as soon as he let go of Jesus’ hand, of course, he sank like a stone.

Dailyness is the most important quality you need because dailiness is evidence of a deeply felt desire of an authentically willed change of consciousness. You want to find the answers, but what you will find is yourself and more questions. Yourself is the answer. That is a neat little puzzle and it will take us an eternity to work it out.

I haven’t finished telling you about what we are going to do. Then I was just going to have channeling each night, but I was going to get people to work on the questions at a morning session; each day to work on the question for that evening and really have some quality questions to ask. I think what might come out of that would be a better-than-average run of channeling for the simple reason that the energy of people coming together from quite a ways, etc. sets up a higher spiritual energy because the people had to work harder to get here so there is more energy to the channel. I can lock on to a better contact, or lock onto one in a deeper way and get more out of it or whatever. This is basically what we will offer in the future. Like I said, I feel very good about it.

Jim who is a loner is going, “How many people are we going to have in the house?” The thing is, he makes his own difficulty, you see. He is so good; he is so hosty, if you know what I mean. He can’t stop himself from doing everything for everybody. He doesn’t walk in and say, “All right. Who is cooking dinner tonight?” when we have a bunch. Gosh, we had mostly women last summer and people sort of tried to take turns cooking, but Jim did far more than his share. I guess he always will.

He is very, very aware of other people and very respectful of other people. There is a real Christ quality in that awareness, which I treasure.

It is too bad about the money, as I said before. But it will come when it is time. When there is a good time. I just urge you at this time to realize that you are a serious, heavy-duty, industrial-strength, imperishable, metaphysical entity who has lived for a long, long time. Forever, as a matter of fact, since the beginning of this octave at least. And you are going to live imperishably after this.

This is what Joel Goldsmith called “a parenthesis in eternity,” this little life that we weave. As you weave it, be aware of the beauty of the cloth. Find ways to make beauty out of the spoils, the fallen down, the ramshackle in oneself. Take yourself seriously. Really, really seriously, but keep your sense of humor because nothing is as funny as serious spiritual talk. The reason for this is that the essence of spiritual seeking is paradox. “The last shall be first.” That sort of thing. You find paradox every way that you turn when you try to learn spiritually and you must, in order (I think) to move on, move further and flow better than you are now; know yourself to be not better or worse, but just exactly the God-self, which I call the Goddess-self. I think in women, it shows forth in sexual passion first and in nurturing and other ways, of course.

Men have those same traits too. There are men with a lot of yen energy that I can think of. R is one of them. Jim is one of them, but basically the way of thinking is different from men to women in most cases, and you just really need to seek your own personal authenticity, your own genuineness.

And do please ask that question that you were going to ask.

Here I am answering your second letter now and you said, “It is amazing to me the number of interferences encountered when I think about writing.” I just knocked my whole orange drink off at the beginning of this tape so I kind of know what you mean. I don’t know. I don’t feel like the grim reaper or anything, but you see, all I feel like is a person writing to friends. I accept that a lot of people consider me a teach/learner. I’m comfortable with that. I have been comfortable with being a teacher all of my life. I enjoy teaching. I really enjoy sharing anything I’ve got; anything of mine is yours; and that is true for any part of my life, whether it is emotional, or intellectual, or some facets of knowledge that I might have from somewhere.

You just have to go in the space that what you are doing is the best you can do, and the path is manifest right before your eyes with love abounding, no matter where you are. And this space takes one into a space that can only be described as chaotic. In that dark space, that abyss of space, one expects to sink forever, but one does not. One has a rough and gritty ride sometimes, a smooth, and gentle and beautiful ride at other times, and an ever increasing ability to decide between those two choices of living.

That is what the spiritual path offers. It offers you constant challenge, constant change; therefore constant harassment, and hassle, and constant joy and laughter.

So jump, K. Just take a big leap into that abyss and then gaze steadfastly on the star of hope because as you hope, so shall it be. Hope the highest and best that you can think of, and I do both for you and M, who hasn’t written me in a while. I guess I will have to write him and congratulate him on his nuptials. It isn’t really surprising to me that he caved in and decided to marry because he is a decent person. He felt that when she said, “I’ve given you seven years of my life,” I don’t think it occurred to him that he had given her seven years of his. I think he accepted her reality and felt that he was doing her a disservice by being unmarried after so long a time of courtship, would you call it?

Anyway I have watched more than one friend whom I have advised to stay more on the spiritual path until he found somebody he could really seek with go down that aisle and I don’t know, I guess there is a place for everything. Like you said, there must be tremendous lessons for M to learn in this lifetime because, I mean, the thought of getting married when one is absolutely sure it is the right thing to do is frightening. The thought of getting married when one is being merely hassled by one’s girlfriend, and while one is wondering whether or not one still has a job, he’s a brave man. I mean, this man wants to wade into it, so I wish him all the luck in the world. He’s a sweetie and I am sure that he will be very fond of the little rug rats he produces and have a good time raising them. It is just, you remember the poem, “two roads to burst in the wood, and I took the one less traveled and that has made all the difference,” I think M took the one more traveled. It is harder to work a spiritual journey from that point, but it is not impossible.

As a matter of fact, when one gets the hang of it, one is a more stable, magical personality with a husband and family to ground you than just being out there in the ethers all by oneself without responsibilities and duties to tug you and balance you in this incarnational experience. We can’t let the incarnation go by, not a moment of it, without realizing how precious it is and what an opportunity it is. Every single moment you have the opportunity to do whatever you are doing for the love of the creator. May you make always the choice of service-to-others and may you come to a conclusion soon, my dear one.

Well sister, it looks like I have a little bit of time to tell you what is going on here.

The Box Society rehearsal starts in August so I am only singing at church right now for my sins, I believe. God in the person of MR, the Episcopal Church’s women’s group President (she is from North Carolina) has made me Chairman of the Dioceses and Arrangements Committee for the Easy W convention next October, a job I go to simply because I believe that MR is a woman of faith and God told her to pick me some way or another, but it probably will be fun. I like to arrange things and have them all come out right—like getting dinner on the table all at the same time. I enjoyed doing my wedding even though it took four solid months of work. When it came off, it was worth every ounce of it so I am sure I will enjoy this.

But I will be doing some church work as opposed to getting all of my tapes out for the next three or four months and it is simply because until the last weekend in October, I’ll just have this on me, that I am chairman.

Guess what, when you are the local arrangements chairman one year, the next year you are program chairman for the whole diocese for the convention, but MR got me into two years of fiddling around with the Episcopal Church and I guess it is as good a way as any to learn service-to-others. Just as good as changing diapers or typing out dictation or, I don’t know, any little thing one can think of. It is all worth the same if it is all done with love. I certainly hope that anyway because I really enjoy writing letters to people on tape and hearing.

By the way, I don’t enjoy getting tapes back from people. If you possibly can, I would appreciate your writing me back. The reason is simple. I read quickly and can underline the parts of the letter that I want to refer to whereas on a tape, you have to listen in real time. That is you are listening to me talking at the same rapidity at which I am talking. You can’t speed me up and still understand me, but I can speed up this by reading it because I will be able to read it much faster than I can speak it.

With that in mind, if you would like to write back, I would be most grateful and happy. Just for the companionship of souls, I am very glad to be a wise one for you, if a wise one is what you need, but rest assured and always remember that this wise one is just a bozo and has very clay feet up to about the neck. You have already met me so you won’t fall into that trap that some people do of thinking I am tremendously worldly-wise etc. Actually a lot of things come through me and have during this last forty minutes or so, but I am just an instrument and actually my personality is very light. You wouldn’t put me down for an intellectual heavy weight at all, nothing like that. But people do, you see. I don’t understand that exactly because I am always clowning around, and giggling and making fun, but I find that people do listen and do take me seriously enough that they think I am better than they are or wiser.

I don’t mind teaching, as I said. The only thing that I mind is somebody thinking that I am better than they are just because I have something to share on one point or another. I have had an incarnation, which is very unusual, and I have had an awful lot of experience in this one area of spiritual seeking that I can help people with because I have talked to so many hundreds of people over the years about the same subjects. It isn’t as though everything that I said is right. That is just simply not true so always remember that. If you can remember that and like me anyway, then that will be our bond together and we will be heart sisters along the path.

I think the most informational, interesting and substantive way to communicate actually is the round robin letter writing method that they phased out, of course, really when typewriters came in and ditto machines, etc. People began publishing lots of books, but in the Middle Ages, someone would write a letter and it would be sent to another great thinker and perhaps it would take four months to get there. Then that thinker would think about it and send that letter on with his letter, back and forth or around in a larger circle of people, and basically I feel that our true situation is that we are all companions along a path. It is merely a matter of accepting the fact that we are all truly one and that we do not threaten each other and so allowing that to be so.

I don’t think I have too much else to say. I seem to have run down here. We are sort of in vacation mode at this time. Not that we are taking a vacation, but in the summer time Jim really blossoms and this spring especially he found Avalon, our ninety acres of great wilderness upriver from here. It is wonderful. It is magic. It is incredible. Jim has even built an outhouse and there is an old house. I guess it was used in the forties probably and abandoned, mid forties or 1950 because there is wall paper on top of paper that says 1945 or something and that was probably put on about 1950. Everything is pretty well shot, but the floor is dry in that house. There doesn’t seem to be any leaks in the ceiling so that is really a gift from heaven for a place to stay in. All Jim has to do is scrub out about six inches of mud, and who knows what else, and scrub everything off of the walls and slap some paint on there so we can consider it clean. We are talking shack here.

But he loves that place and he goes down there by himself, for the most part, because he has a tremendous amount of work to do before really he can usher me into the living room and say, “Here, sit down, Carla. Enjoy yourself.” And that is what he wants to do. He doesn’t want me fooling around down there too much. He has made it safe for the gimp. So he has been working down there about once every two or three weeks. I urge him to do it more often and just stay over and do it two days in a row, but he is very protective about me. It is difficult for him not to worry and feel that he should be here, I guess, if he is gone too long.

I expect he will learn to trust me more as time goes on and realizes that is really okay. That I really do need for him to take advantage of being able to be on his own from time-to-time.

Before Jim was in my life, my primary relationship was with a man who was with me less than half of the time, and I did not seek companionship for the other half. As a matter of fact, the four years before the year I began dating M, I dated no one. I saw no one so my social life was zip. My sex life was zip. I really couldn’t feature anybody who asked me and I really am not an aggressive person. I am not the kind of person who would ask anybody. People pretty much have to find me out. I am sort of like a shy doe in the woods or something until you get to know me, in which case you find me hard to shut up. Right?

I am hoping that when KH comes to stay (she is going to come in September to Louisville), that even though she won’t be living with us she will be able to come over overnight sometimes and let Jim be gone for more than one night. I think it would really do him good. He truly is a loner and I can’t give him solitude. I am sitting here non-solitude as I speak. There is no way I can give him solitude except by finding someone else so he won’t worry about me to do the little dibs and dabs that need doing. K is all easy and handy with all of that. No problem.

You don’t know K, so I had better tell you about K, because if you continue and want to come here, etc., she will be one of L/L Research. She is one of our members now. She will have to work. There is no way that we can squeeze any more out of Trust Fund. If it was just food and shelter, we could do it. The problem is when you get into cars and insuring the cars, then insuring the people, we barely make it for just Jim and me. For three people, we would have to give up the insurance and then somebody would be sure to get sick. We were unable to offer for her to come live with us and work with us. That just wasn’t going to work, but K says she wants her own four walls around her anyway. She’d like to rent a small house if possible, somewhere out this way and I feel really excited about it.

You know what I look like. K is about my size, as far as height. Her hair is a duplicate of mine except there is about four times as much of it and it is a dark blond, a real pretty color, not real bright, and quite obviously natural. She has the same kind of pleasant unassuming face that I do, a face that almost defies you to put make-up on. And she has a Playboy figure as opposed to my non-Playboy figure, and for that reason she wears a size 8 to my size 4 or 6 because I am lighter than she is. She is more voluptuous, but actually she is quite slender and lovely.

Her biological clock is ticking loudly and my enthusiasm for K being here is tempered only by my knowing that she is not a woman who is going to live long without a mate, if she can help it.

My hope is that she will fall for a fellow that I happen to be very fond of whose wife died and who is a continuing member of the meditation group. Probably the most faithful member we have. She is prettier than he is, but he is an awfully, awfully nice guy so we shall see how that works out. Otherwise at some point I expect I will lose K to whomever she chooses as a mate.

The chances of her choosing someone spiritual are the same as M’s chances of choosing someone dedicated to the spiritual life. Sometimes people just don’t make that choice. They want to make it hard on themselves and they do. M is going to have a heck of a time and you know, with her biological clock ticking, I watched K narrowly miss making a very bad decision to marry a person eleven years younger than she. It just would have been disastrous. The guy was living at home and seeing K and they were going to get married. Right.

She has finally, after three years, worked it out that she wants to be here definitely and she is coming in September and it will be really exciting for me to have a girlfriend who is local. I’ve got wonderful deep friends from every place I have lived, but they have all moved away. People in this culture are just so mobile that you invest your love in a friendship and then the person isn’t there any more. So what happens? You correspond. I actually do correspond. Most people don’t, but I find it to be, and I don’t think I have any friends who aren’t spiritual friends because people who interest me area always spiritually-oriented. It is just the way my mind works, the way my feeling is.

Again I thank you for sharing your notes from the road. I really honestly believe that each of us is muddling along, and writing down the way we are feeling, and thinking at that particular moment and sending that news back and forth enables everyone to share love with everyone. Each and every letter that I send out carries at least that, and that is very, very satisfying for me because in the conventional sense, I am really pretty useless. I need for my own sense of self-esteem to be doing a kindly work, a work that I consider worth doing, a work that is a labor of love. I feel really, really tickled to be in the position I am in, although it is too bad about the limitations and all that.

I don’t think I have any more news for you. Please extend my heartfelt love to R.

And tell him to quit second-guessing himself as usual and just be. There is a tremendous amount of tension in that man and it has to do with pleasing people. He is wonderful at pleasing people. The problem is there are certain differences between behavior and authenticity, and when you are starting to work on the level of consciousness work, you need to have found your authentic personality and have stabilized it.

R has always been too nice, trying to please everybody. By saying that, I don’t encourage him to be un-nice, but simply to be honest. Just tell the truth. Play it straight from the heart and let the chips fall where they may because one thing that nobody can take from you is that you are telling the truth. The one thing is that you are saying exactly what you mean and what you feel. That no one can take from you. That is your uniqueness, and his, and I hope you both enjoy it in each other during this lovely summer.

We are having a very wet one here and humid and hazy, hot, etc.. R is right, but it is cool in here.

K, just think of it this way. You are welcome any time that you can figure out how to get here for a Sunday, or for a weekend, or if you want to do an intensive, I would be willing to do it just with you. All we need is three in the group in order to do the work and maybe I am a little hard on myself here, but actually I would like to get as much use out of myself as possible before I die in this incarnation. I have attempted poetry, and attempted fiction and have attempted critical nonfiction, and I have succeeded in all of those areas, but I found that I had no interest in becoming excellent in any of those areas. The only thing that has ever brooked me and held me is the desire to be excellent interiorly. I suppose it is kind of a desire for virtue, the love of virtue.

I was born with it. I am not normal, but it simply means that here I am and I will be thinking of you with lots of love through the summer and please feel free to write, and keep in touch and come when you can, and the same for R.

I think on that note we shall bid adieu because there is an end to the news. God bless. Bye bye, K.

Carla