Kahlil Gibran stated:
If these be vague words, then seek not to clear them.
Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end…
All personal knowledge and experience starts with a handful of unfamiliarities, or “vague words” and ends in clarity, understanding, and expanded vision with a path of learning in between. The unknown in life provides the experiences and knowledge of life.
Jul 30
The importance of loving what you do in life is often muted when the time comes to make career choices. It is downplayed as a nice thought, a hope or dream only and not a requirement or necessity. We don’t always become a professional baseball player but we should love what we do just the same:
Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and voices of the night.
- Kahlil Gibran on Work, “The Prophet”
Jul 25
Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
- Kahlil Gibran, “The Prophet”, 76
Well, in watching old episodes of “the Office” with Steve Carell, you can’t help ‘appreciate’ the wisdom and reason of Michael:
There must be a God because, if there isn’t, what are all these churches for?
Objectivists, eat your heart out!
On a deeper note, Kahlil Gibran on Religion:
AND an old priest said, Speak to us of Religion.
And he said:
Have I spoken this day of aught else?
Is not religion all deeds and all reflection,
And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stopne or tend the loom?
Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations?
Who can spread his hours before him, saying, “This for God and this for myself: This for my soul, and this other for my body?”
All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.
he who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.
The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.
And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.
The freest song comes not through bars and wires.
And he to whom worshipping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.
Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
When ever you enter into it take with you your all.
Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute,
The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.
For in every you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures.
And take with you all men:
For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair.
And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.
Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.
And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.
