Dear _____
I don't really know your address, but I hope to learn it soon and get this letter to you. It deals with some of the biggest questions of life, and I want to share my thinking with you.
There was a question I wanted to ask you this past month, that I didn't get a chance to. I did get a chance to ask ____.
I think I know a great deal. Much of what I claim to know, I actually do.
Much of what I know is metaphor.
As cliched and pretentious as it can be, I spent a good amount of time studying the Kaballah, the mystical traditions of Judaism. I took much of what I learned as psychological, neurological, social, etc. metaphors. And then one day, I asked myself: how much of what I know is real? Is this stuff I really know and feel, or just concepts I play with to amuse myself?
The question I asked ____ is if she really felt and believed in The Most High. Whether she "knew" it. She answered...well, she answered want any mortal might.
So here I am in Tainan, ROC. The University I put so much effort into told me to come back tomorrow, and to find a Hotel. I wandered the streets for an hour, before I found an East Indian man outside a Presbyterian church, who found an old man who told me to go ask the Catholic Church. He gave me directions, I was surprised I followed them succesfully.
At the Church, I found a secretary who after hearing my story, decided that of course I had to stay in the Church. And she managed to talk the Priest into it.
So as I lay here on my bottom bunk, with the cute little Disney pattern of Dalmations, and enjoy the towel I use as a blanket, and the prospect of 12 hours of peaceful sleep in the sanctuary, I have answered my own questions as well as any mortal might.
MH
Dec 23rd, 2003
Tainan, ROC
This is a letter I scrawled in my little notebook after an exhausting transoceanic jet ride, followed by a bus ride in a strange country. Although there has been many travellers flung further than me, I had never left the country before and I was in a country where I knew not a single person, and I felt extremely lost. And when I found a place to sleep, I felt extremely found. This is the verbatim record of what I wrote, which never got sent, and was never read by its intended recipient, but maybe now it will be.