darkness as well as light.
And if nectar is mine, whose is poison?
Nectar and poison – both are mine.
Whoever experiences this I call religious,
for only the anguish of such experience
can revolutionize life on earth.
56. Love.
I have received your letter.
I was very glad indeed to get it,
more so since you have sent a blank sheet.
But I have read in it all that you have not written
but wanted to write.
Besides, what can words say?
Even after writing,
what you had meant to write remains unwritten.
So your silent letter is very lovely.
As it is, whenever you come to see me you are mostly silent,
but your eyes tell all, and your silence too.
Some deep thirst has touched you,
some unknown shore has called you.
Whenever God calls he calls this way –
but how long will you go on standing on the shore?
Look! The sun is out
and the winds can’t wait to fill the boat’s sails!
57. Love.
I have received your letters –
but they are not just letters really, they are poems born out of love,
out of love and prayer, for where there is love there is prayer.
So it is possible to get glimpses of God through another
whom one loves –
love providing the eyes that can see God.
Love is the door through which he appears.
So when one loves all he can be seen in all things.
Part and whole in fact are not in opposition:
deep love for even one other finally spreads to all
because love dissolves the self, leaving the no-self.
Love is like the sun, the individual like frozen ice.
Love’s sun melts the icebergs, leaving a limitless ocean.
So the search for love is really the search for God,
because love melts, and also destroys;
because love only melts and only destroys.
It is both birth and death.
In it the self dies and the all is born.
So there is certainly pain –
in the birth as well as in the death.
Love is the deep anguish of birth as well as death.
But the poetry flowering in you shows that you
have begun to experience the joy that lies in love’s anguish.
58. Love.
Your letter has filled my heart with joy.