New poem: "One Life Is Not Enough"

 

 

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