Lately, I've been reading (and re-reading) the work of Lebanese philosopher Kahlil Gibran - primarily The Prophet. There is one passage in particular that is sticking with me. It's so beautiful...it makes my heart hurt. So, I decided to share it with you:
"For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance" (81).
Thoughts?
I know what you maen when you say that it is so beautiful it makes you hurt. It kind of makes death out to be something different entirely from the way our culture has long perceived it. We preach that the journey to heaven is a joyous one, yet still give death a certain negative stigma. This is probably so because we fear the unknown. We fear what we do not understand, cannot comprehend. Those things that are beyond human experience, beyond our faculties of understanding scare us, regardless of what their true natures might be. To embrace death the way Gibran writes is a true proclaimaton of one's enourmous faith.
ReplyDeleteWhen reading Gibran's The Prophet for the first time, I was initially suprised at how applicaple his subject matter was to the modern day. I shouldn't have been. The human condition doesn't change. People thousands of years agao and today continue to share the human experience. That's why Shakespere continues to be culturally relevent, right?
I can't quote it, but I remember liking Gibran's thoughts of child rearing, as described in The Prophet. He talks of parents being the bow and their children being arrows. The bow can shoot the arrow as straight as it pleases, but they must eventually release the string, and in the end, the arrow will choose its own path.
And in all this time, nothing has changed...