Postage: One heartbeat to another, across an ocean. 🕊 💌 🌊 🇫🇷 ➕

I am still here with you, even alone. It is that longing that brought me here, that drives me on, that leads me, that keeps my breath as yours. You fill my new, very old home, these walls that were here for Templar knights in quest of the relics for which they gave their lives to bring home, to breathe it in their own lives and to let it be known that it is real, not just some hereafter, but the eternal stepping in, the love and illumination of form, as Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin passionately wrote, “Throughout my whole life, during every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelop me in one mass of luminosity, glowing from within . . . The purple flush of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of spirit, to be lost finally in the incandescence of a personal universe.”

Can you imagine they sat before my fireplace with that burning desire before leaving on their chainmail-clad horses with blinders on to everything else, but with the whole world in view, and warming their bodies from this fire before taking on the cold to Jerusalem? The desire for you fills these walls now, fills my moments, and pushes me on to all the discoveries to understand what has transpired into these, our lives, our moments of precious breath.

It is nothing less than pulling back the veil on the supranatural into the natural, this Garden of Eden of Earth on which we are gifted life. My love, I prove you and you prove me.

And what of it, of Jesus’ wisdom, “Assuredly, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own country”?

I like the story of how a prophecy came before Jeanne d’Arc, “Jeanne at Domremy was acquainted with a prophecy foretelling that France would be ruined by a woman and saved by a maiden [ . . . ] it was current among ecclesiastics. [ . . . ] it specified that the Maiden Redemptress should come from the borders of Lorraine,” as “Jean Barbin, a witness at Joan of Arc’s 1456 retrial, testified that in 1429, shortly after Joan had met with the Dauphin, a master of theology named Jean Erault had raised the possibility that Joan's arrival had been foretold.” 

I will retrace her steps as well, as the cardinal to condemn her to death came from Beauvais where Hubert Givenchy would be born and where he would leave for Paris to robe Audrey, a divine affinity coming together and headed for America where there was a cosmic job Audrey had to do, dressed heavenly.

In all purest consciousness how could one go on living life as ‘normal’ when a great right--what Audrey came from France to do, and through the path of Willa Cather, who recognized it, too, in the South of France,

--and a great wrong has been done? 

It is a wrong that sits at the very foundation of the matter. It is at the heart of the Hebrew Bible, at Shiloh in ancient Canaan and David, to the shores of France (why it had to leave Jerusalem and go to France), and at the heart of the wrongs of greed and abuse. It is the very wrong that has been handed down generation after generation with a cold and brutal fist, in the name of love, but actually identifiable by its never-changing patterns. It repeats and tries to own and control life itself.

Could there be one breath taken past a Judas Kiss, not a dénouement, but a calculated denouncement, and in that moment the sole cause for my Being was pulled to its definition, a culmination of all that came before, all the beauty and knowledge that I could muster to be sacrificed, and its path as if I were the only one who saw the crime committed and it was laid at my feet, its only witness, but when really millions saw it happen without seeing, without caring, without heart or empathy—those weak things of heroes—and that itself the very evidence that the control mechanism in America worked in controlling from its seemingly off-hand public censure and had completed its hateful task, and done so easily with consent: with everyone having ‘free will’ to crucify. And in that it boastingly claims of itself these many years later to have “given voice to millions.”

--And to find that Audrey had seen it, too.

If you could go back in time and by Jesus’s side you saw the crime, would you not write the gospel? Would you not speak it? Would you not “take up thy cross and follow?” Would you not wake up breathing it and go to sleep mourning it? If you were the witness at the death and the resurrection, would you not risk everything to tell what happened? Would you not go where you needed to go for it to be told—not America where they cannot hear because they cannot feel it, but to where the mind is alive to the depths of the literature itself—the vast, deep, aged richness of culture that knows very well what it is looking at. They know it with their own blood, invasions, slaughters, they know what matters. 

It goes back to Willa’s Santa Fe, full circle, where she took it, too, the Place where one can touch the miracles, I have found. I arrived there in 2008 for the first time because of movies, but found myself hiding away in that first Mission, San Miguel, the oldest church on the continent, unaware I was standing by the bell, and unaware it was the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo painting my name inside the Sistine. The 700th anniversary of Beatrice. I walked into Willa’s photograph in front of the cathedral, unaware I had just stepped onto the very street, into the path of her Breakfast at Tiffany’s, her Coming, Aphrodite! where we came to know we loved each other just two years later.

How will you shine, you ask, with Little Sidonie dancing on the constant stage ‘on the first floor of a building on the Rue Montpensier, at a cafe chantant,” where there are many people to give her the attention she is still so hungry for after being so well fed? And there beside her the ones who think not they! will be betrayed because they are somehow special, that that betrayal has not always been in exchange for that very attention and when it was done to the most beautiful, the most brilliant, the best, the most priceless?

Ahhh! Here in France they knew it in 1874 and can save you the trouble in finding out as if it were a new fangled trick, come as a dramatic shock, those patterns of Little Sidonie! Her stage, wherever she can find it, be it dinner table or cabaret, spares no one, not even refraining to leak to the press in her patterns of ‘powerful denouncements’ that “son père est complètement déconnecté de la réalité” or that “Son amant est extraordinairement poilu et c'est pourquoi elle porte une selle.” She, through that very public paradoxical “permission” (harming everyone by a system of control, and by what has not been said of the value of what is lost), out trumpets even the political circus trumpet acts and thinks herself slyer than they. Ils sont deux d'une même espèce, une paire assortie. 

I do not mind at all all the little calculated stage lights and faux pap walks so far removed from the providence, age and grace and glamour of Hollywood on the Tiber, this Roman Holiday, for this is the chance to go to the very crux, the heart of the matter, right to the heart of every wrong.

I got lost in the aisles of the Bibliothèque today in Avignon in the ancient documents department where you have to put in a special request to view a rare treasure of antiquities, wait respectfully and patiently for the approval of the dedicated guardians of this sacrosanct, the one of a kind, and then be carefully conducted into a private room with majestic wooden carved tables as if you are entering the history itself to open the words, and then are asked, no told, to wear white gloves before you even begin to peruse the old pages, the old voices coming from the deep spaces as if to answer with the utmost delicacy the feeling in my bones. It is quite a privilege to be so close to the scribe-written accounts, but here they are. I guess the writer of this long-ago ink stains never imagined me sitting here reading their handwritten words come true. I am moved as if we are speaking to each other. I have new friends.

But all in all, I do not have much room to talk from my very free life. I will go to my old home this evening by myself (a ride back on my Vespa) to its very old furnishings (I’m not sure what the French have against bathtubs yet, generally speaking) and I will tell the sheep about the extraordinary findings—about the books—not the scarcity of bathtubs, as there is a tin tub on the grounds from which they drink that I’m sure they think is all one needs, but they will blithely listen, sometimes even have a remark or a blank stare, and I will enjoy this audience because so far the French do not care what I am doing but I have prophet-like importance to this wooly herd. Should I tell them of the prophecy? And they can say, ‘I was there’ in the South of France.

The chickens, well, les poulets commencent à adhérer à mon point de vue, for which I think I shall soon convince them of my passion and my mission. I think the rooster may take up my cause with me, come daylight. You take what emotional support you can get. I have arrived at crusade heaven.

So here is the document I got to touch today and copied down, through white gloves. I may or may not have pretended they were doves flying down to pick up the pages. Or maybe there were doves.

Yours,

Shiloh