Epiphany and Gibran

*Written while listening to this jam on repeat and eating a mash-up of banana slices, grapefruit slices, peanut butter, raw honey, and dried cranberries

It's Wednesday, and that's column day in the Rochester Post-Bulletin. Here's a link to this week's writing. It's about a special bonus feature of today, January 6. Today is EPIPHANY! 

Today is also the birthday of Kahlil Gibran who lived from January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931. Have you ever heard of him? Here's some general info.  Are you ready for a super amazing fact about him? Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Laozi?! What the what?!

Some of Gibran's terrific poems and a bit from his novel, The Prophet:

"I would not exchange the sorrows of my heart
For the joys of the multitude.
And I would not have the tears that sadness makes
To flow from my every part turn into laughter.
I would that my life remain a tear and a smile."
-from A Tear and A Smile

"It is a perfect world, a world of consummate excellence, a world of supreme wonders, the ripest fruit in God’s garden, the master-thought of the universe.
But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a bewildered fragment from a burnt planet?
Why am I here, O God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods?"
-from "The Perfect World"

"My path is not thy path, yet together we walk, hand
in hand."
-from My Friend

"Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea.
We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together
is deep and strong and strange."
-from The Great Longing

"The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;

And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.

But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;

And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.

For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."

Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have found the soul walking upon my path."

For the soul walks upon all paths.

The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals."

-from his book, The Prophet