Love Letter: Margaret Mead to Ruth Benedict.

Ruth, dear heart,
The mail which I got just before leaving Honolulu  could not have been better chosen.
Five letters from you and, I hope you may often feel me near you as you did — resting so softly and sweetly in your arms.
Whenever I am weary and sick with longing for you I can always go back and recapture that afternoon
out at Bedford Hills this spring, when your kisses were rained down on my face, and that memory ends always in peace, beloved.
I was never more earthborn in my life — and yet never more conscious of the strength your love gives me.
You have convinced me of the one thing in life which made living worthwhile.
You have no greater gift, darling. And every memory of your face, every cadence of your voice is joy
whereon I shall feed hungrily in these coming months.
All this love which you have poured out to me is very bread and wine to my direct need.
Your lips bring blessings — my beloved..

In one way this solitary existence is particularly revealing —
in the way I can twist and change in my attitudes towards people with absolutely
no stimulus at all except such as springs from within me.
I’ll awaken some morning just loving you frightfully much in some quite new way and I may not have sufficiently
rubbed the sleep from my eyes to have even looked at your picture.
I feel very peaceful and it is such joy to go to sleep loving you, and waken so.
And it is true that we have had this loveliness “near” together for I never feel you too far away to whisper to,
and your dear hair is always just slipping through my fingers. I kiss your hair, sweetheart.
I am coming back to you.

Will the birds forget to come north in the spring to the land of their desire?
When I do good work it is always always for you — that’s my wishing.
I’ve a hundred details I should be writing about, but if I were there I’d kick them under the table
and bury my face in your breast — and the thought of you now makes me a little unbearably happy.

I feel immensely freed and sustained, the dark months of doubt washed away,
and that I can look you gladly in the eyes as you take me in your arms.
My beloved! My beautiful one. I thank God you do not try to fence me off,
but trust me to take life as it comes and make something of it. With that trust of yours I can do anything — and come out with something precious saved. I kiss your hands.

I feel at peace with the whole world. You may think it is tempting the gods to say so,
but I take all this as high guarantee of what I’ve always temperamentally doubted — the permanence of passion
and the mere turn of your head, a chance inflection of your voice have just as much power to make the day
over now as they did four years ago, so also you give me a faith I never thought to win in the lastingness of passion.
I love you, Ruth.

Oh, sweetheart I’m lonely for your arms. I wonder if you’ll feel as mentally amputated as I do.
 I have just one definite urge and that is to write to you. You will never know what a priceless and so undeserved gift you
have given me in giving me a perfect love no least inch of which I need ever repudiate.
Beside the strength and permanence and all enduring feeling which I have for you, everything else is shifting sand.
Do you mind terribly when I say these things? It is so good to really be all myself to love you again.
The moon is full and the lake lies still and lovely — this place is like Heaven — and I am in love with life.
My sweetheart, my beautiful, my lovely one.

Always I love you and realise what a desert life might have been without you.