Incandescence is happiness. All expression is happiness. Happiness is creative. To work, to express, that is to radiate. The object is as important as the thing that aches to go forth. Choose the form that sets you free. To each his form.
A tireless woman asked how she might serve. Her lover was lost in Flanders. We told her to write to the soldiers—to write her heart out in letters to soldiers—that she would save lives and start great dreams and bring the gold back to many grey mists—to be Mary the Mother, the saint, the dream of the film-eyed fighting men—to love them through the heart of her beloved. That is what focalisation leads to—to draw forth the great energies from our souls, to set us free, first to one, then to the world.
We learn to love the one—in order to give this love to the world. We learn to love in matter for the moment, in order to become consummate artists and players in the soul stuff that cannot die. Again and again, through possessions and personalities—missing, destroyed or moved away—we learn to take the force of our outpouring from the mutative to the changeless—making a divine bestowal at last of a clinging human need—lifting from the idolatry of the flesh, which encloses all pain, to the love of souls which sets us free.
7
THE NEW DANCING
I have found true North Americans. A woman of twenty-seven, a mother (with a mysterious man somewhere) and a girl-child with the calm and power of Joan come again.... I needed a change, was tired of my house and my voice—close to the end of all human interest that morning as I set out for a walk up the edge of the Lake. On and on walking, until I came to the little girl on the shore. She was making a frowning man in clay. She asked me if I were the Crusader, but answered herself while I was hoping to fit the dimension of that fascinating title. She had decided that I wasn't.
North Americans—I think of them so again and again—something great and calm and deep and beautiful, something arrived, at last, from all the fusion—en rapport with nature, children of the light, living and abiding constantly in the essences of sunlight—with the humour and certainty of Mother Earth about their ways—the cleanliness of earth and the sweetness of golden light in their house and mind....
Mind you, I had walked forth as one would wade out to sea in the path of the moon—actually yearning for a better land than this.... There on the shore, after hours, was the child—her eyes turned to mine, putting me into the enchantment of the wise—stilling hate and ennui. We had words together, the great awe of life stealing over me again after many days. Her hand stretched forth to take me to her mother (this day called the Lonely Queen, for they live in an enchanted story-book). A climb to the top of the bluff and into the most fragrant and godly lane, a low house in the distance in the shelter of beeches—solitary and isolate beeches sheltering a human house, built for sunshine long ago. Many pages would not tell of the lane and the house, the lawn and the hives.... I want to touch the core of this inimitable pair that took me in—poor but dining upon the perfect foods, so poor that they make and dye the lovely things they wear—a kind of holy handiwork everywhere—perfume of summer in the house and in the heart of it a deepdelved peace where broods a sort of lustrous dream.