A New Cornucopia– At West End Gallery
By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. A want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it’s no good — there’s only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun.
—Katherine Mansfield, October 14, 1922, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield
I was thinking about yesterday’s post that was concerned with creeds and it reminded me of this passage from the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. It was one of the final entries in her personal journal not long before she died in January of 1923 at the age of 34 from tuberculosis.
She had contracted her tuberculosis in 1917 and had seen its effects worsen in the few years that followed. Nearly two years before writing her final journal entries, she had written this in her journal in December of 1920:
The leaves move in the garden, the sky is pale, and I catch myself weeping. It is hard — it is hard to make a good death.
I find it interesting that in her final journal entries, knowing that death was near at hand and could come at any moment, she maintained hopes and desires for the future. Though she wasn’t able to fulfill those hopes and desires here, her words stand as a fine template to follow for those of us remaining here.
To understand ourselves so that we might understand others. To be all we are capable of becoming.
To be a child of the sun.
I am glad to think of such things, to maintain hopes and desires for the future, on a morning like this. There are so many other darker things that could be dwelling in my mind.
Let there be light and sun instead.
Here’s a song from quite a few years in the past, from the late 1970’s. I can’t imagine a lot of people remembering this song but it did get a fair amount of airplay at the time. I had it on a live album from Carnegie Hall with this group, Renaissance. The song is Carpet of the Sun. One of its lines echoes the sentiment of Mansfield:
Part of the world that you live inYou are the part that you’re giving
Makes you wonder what part you’re giving to this world.
Redtree Times 