its eyes cut deeper than the blade

today i read for the first time the radiance that is The Prophet, by Kalil Gibran. 

I want to weep with the beauty of these simple words, the spring water of wisdom distilled in every line.

its eyes of gentle rejoicing cut deeper than the blade. 

i want to weep deeper because books have always been my grandparents, allies, friends when i had no others to fill in these spaces. 

one day in high school i asked a literature teacher, who herself was an oak of noble Being - Why did we study only French books? She raised an eyebrow, and said that with what little time we had in a school year, we could only carve out a tiny slice from our nation’s supply. The rest of the world was simply too vast to even peek at. 

but the books i had to read were printed in one shade of gray, like a slowly rotting corpse. endless obsessions of murder and despair, the grim gray monotony of life that must end and brittle joys scavenged for a moment from the teeth of time. 

like that was all there was. 

there were no examples of anything else going on.

to think of all these bright hours of green childhood, force-fed adult disillusions wrapped in exquisite, poisonous beauty…

when right there were the glorious writings of hafiz, rumi, that never fail to make my blood sing and my spirits soar and all the colors become brighter. 

words that fly through time and space like wondrous birds, their songs speaking of spring and autumn and above all, the unspeakable majesty of now, that i can smell like i smell the sharp taste of the sea on the wind…

and i dwell on the phrase that what we cannot imagine, we do not reach for.

and i dwell on the fact that for many westerners, “ecstasy” is a word, a vague abstraction they have no reference for. 

not a bone-deep music that rocks our days and hours.

may we never forget that we are what we eat.

—

photo of Mandy by @Jeff