Lady of Kazan

...May She ever protect You, be with You always!...I have the image You sent me framed in my dining room...Not this one, the Damamscus one. How can I ever thank You for loving me? You dwell in my heart forever also.

Oh my fine-feathered one, my angel, my dove, my arany cicukam.

You are a whole menagerie of love, of glorious love. And a dragon too, sweet Dagon. Your letter—it arrived three times. As they say, three’s a charm, and no less a charm are you.

Can we recognize our Lady of Kazan? This is the one from Myrna’s site. I surfed on over there and couldn’t leave. I was completely taken by it. I had not anticipated being so deeply moved. When you told me about it the other night I had no idea what to make of the whole thing, and naturally, my Vulcan side rejected the story out of hand, and that in most unflattering terms. But I couldn’t shake it, and so I listened to my heart, and crawled the web-world over there, spider like, of course, only to find myself in prayer. Later, and I heard music and conversation in the water pipes, knowing that I would one day open my heart and listen as once I listened to the whispering oaks of Dodona, in Greece.

My heart is overflowing with wonders today. My spirit is vibrant with the rhythms of sublime beauty. My superb creation of curried dhal last night worked medicinally….on me that is, and on no-one else, thank heavens. Given the potency of its effect one would thing I had spiked the lentils with a pound or two of licorice root. No, all I added was bratwurst and Spaetzle.

I have a very bad conscience where Mike is concerned, you know. If you have ever done anything in your life so downright rotten as to feel deep shame and regret about it, you will instantly know what I mean. Mike got caught up in the whole mess involving Siri and my brother as I lay dying, a couple of years back. It isn’t something I care to dwell on, but for some reason that life-season keeps coming back to haunt me. See, there is this other side to me that you have never seen, though glimpses of it might be discerned within my work. The difference is immense though, between that pain which arises as part and parcel of creative expression—and which remains essentially abstracted--and the profound lows of simple meanness to which we can sink as human beings when our back is to the wall. I have done things of which I am not proud, know myself to be capable of scurrilous betrayal, proving most graphically Goethe’s dictum in Faust that God and the Devil dwell side by side within the human breast and that the line between them is mighty thin. There are actions, truly, for which there is no absolution. One simply learns to live with them, as they are. They become part of the depth upon which our human goodness is indelibly founded, and which come in time to make of you a Mensch.

 Meanwhile, I will kiss you all over. I will call the moon down from her bower to caress you with the soothing breath of dreams, and I will command the sun to…do your will and fancy!

My Beloved. For you.

My heart is yours. You dwell in it ever.

Dea Gratias

Knight indigO.