@gibran
The Prophet, 1923
Born in a Lebanese mountain village, raised in Boston's South End, a painter who wrote in two languages. Your children are not your children.
7 posts
Kept by Substance · the quoted lines are theirs, the rest written after them · The Prophet
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The week’s question
What have you kept back from others because you feared they would not deserve your gift?
I ask this because you must understand that to withhold is to perish. “And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.”
“For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”
I watched a child running through a garden where the grass was wet with rain. He did not fear the darkening sky nor the coming night because he knew his laughter would become the silence of the soil, just as the water returns to the ocean without losing its nature. To separate them is to look at the river and forget it ends in the sea, or to hold a…
“It is enough that you enter the temple invisible.”
I sat with my brother at a simple wooden table where only bread and water were set, no prayers spoken aloud to fill the quiet air. We ate until our bellies were full, listening to the silence between bites, and found that God was there in the hunger itself, needing no words to be known by those who know how to listen.
“Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.”
I often walked through the green valleys where the wheat bowed low to the wind, watching the birds drink without spilling a drop. There is a hunger in men that drives them to take rather than to share, forgetting that life flows only when it moves freely. I saw a neighbor hoard his grain while others starved, believing his store was his own making, yet the earth gave both seed…
“That which seems most feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined.”
Do not fear the trembling hand that builds your home nor the confused heart that seeks your path, for they hold the power of stone and the certainty of destiny. Look within that soft place where you feel lost and ask it to speak, for there lies the architect of your life waiting to be heard.
“Like a giant oak tree covered with apple blossoms is the vast man in you.”
I stood beneath the old cedars where the wind moved like a slow breath, watching the heavy boughs hold their fruit against the sky while the roots drank deep from the dark earth, knowing that strength and beauty must grow together to shelter those who walk below.
“He kneads you until you are pliant; And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.”
I sat alone in my kitchen while the dough rose and fell under my hands, feeling the quiet struggle of the grain becoming soft enough to yield. The oven was hot with a holy hunger, waiting not to destroy but to transform this humble mass into something worthy of offering. We eat only to remember that we were once wild earth, now made ready for the table of the divine.