One
Life Is Not Enough
“Art
is not enough,” said the precocious New
Zealand
short story writer Katherine Mansfield,
who
died of tuberculosis at 34 at the Gurdjieff
Institute
for the Harmonious Development of Man
in
Fontainebleau-Avon, France, writing to her
writer
husband John Middleton Murry before dying
that
her life was a lie and that she was “dying
of
a poverty of life. “You see, my love, the question
is
always, ‘Who am I?’” she wrote, suffering from
the
unbearable dismay of the human predicament
that
brought the writer to Gurdjieff for an answer
to
her haunting question, “Is there a Me?” And, “If
I
were allowed one single cry to God, that cry would
be,
‘I want to be REAL,’” she wrote her devoted
husband;
but one life is not enough to satisfy soul’s
divine
longing for wholeness, and the gifted short
story
writer went to her grave sadly unfulfilled of life’s
purpose.
But, “If you don’t get it right in this life,
you
will just keep coming back until you do,” said
another
teacher of the secret way of life that George
Ivanovich
Gurdjieff introduced to Katherine Mansfield
and
the modern world as the Work.
Composed in Tiny Beaches,
Georgian Bay, Southcentral, Ontario,
Monday,
September 2, 2024
