Kahlil Gibran's Little Book of Love - Softcover

Gibran, Kahlil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571748334 ISBN 13: 9781571748331

Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

Kahlil Gibran's aphorisms, stories, and poetry on a theme remain among some of those best known to Western readers. His views, however, extend beyond the most-quoted "greeting card" sayings to a wide realm of human emotions and relationships--passion, desire, idealized love, justice, friendship, and the challenges of dealing with strangers, neighbors, and enemies. This little book captures love and life in all of their complexities and nuances.

This little volume includes over 90 selections from Gibran's writings and is divided into four sections:

1. Love's Initiation
2. The Veils of Love
3. All of Our Relationships
4. A Love Beyond

This book, ideal for all gift-giving occasions, is informative, illuminating, and inspirational.

Whom Do We Love?
When I stood, a clear mirror before you,
you gazed into me and saw your image.
Then you said, "I love you."
But in truth you loved yourself in me.
Love is the veil between lover and lover.

About this title

About the Author

Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883-April 10, 1931) was a Lebanese-American artist, and poet. He is chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book The Prophet, an early example of inspirational fiction that includes a series of philosophical essays written in poetic English prose.


Neil Douglas-Klotz, PhD, (Saadi Shakur Chishti) is a world-renowned scholar of religious studies, spirituality, and psychology. Living in Scotland, he directs the Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Learning and for many years was co-chair of the Mysticism Group of the American Academy of Religion. He is also the cofounder of the International Network of the Dances of Universal Peace.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Kahlil Gibran's Little Book of Love

By Neil Douglas-Klotz

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

Copyright © 2018 Neil Douglas-Klotz
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57174-833-1

Contents

Introduction, 
1. Love's Initiation, 
The Spring of Love, 
Beauty in the Heart, 
First Love, 
Wandering Desire, 
Singing the Heart, 
Beauty and Love, 
If You Have Desires ..., 
Describing First Love, 
Mistaken Identity, 
Love's Summer, 
O Love, 
Desire Is Half, 
Between Desire and Peace, 
God Moves in Passion, 
Voices in Rapture, 
Your Body Is the Harp of Your Soul, 
If Your Heart Is a Volcano, 
Love Across Age, 
A Desire Unfulfilled, 
A Passion Unspent, 
All the Stars of My Night Faded Away, 
2. The Veils of Love, 
Love's Gifts, 
The Caged Heart, 
Love v. Law, 
Three Persons Separated, 
What Lovers Embrace, 
Two Kinds of Love, 
Whom Do We Love?, 
Laughter and Tears, 
Love Cleansed by Tears, 
A Woman's Heart, 
Love Caresses and Threshes, 
Love's Autumn, 
Between Heart and Soul, 
Tears and Dewdrops, 
Depth, 
Where Are You Now, My Other Self?, 
Who Is Crucifying the Sun?, 
Seasons of Your Heart, 
Great Longing, 
Longing Beyond Words, 
Alone?, 
Unsealing the Heart, 
Speaking and Listening to the Heart, 
Freedom and Slavery, 
Weep for the Beloved...., 
Harvesting the Heart's Pain, 
3. All Our Relationships, 
Mother, 
The Song that Lies Silent, 
Sayings on Children, 
Lullabies, 
If Love Were in the Flesh ..., 
Hide and Seek, 
Love Song, 
Love and Hate, 
Two Sides, 
The Hermit, the Beasts, and Love, 
Working with Love, 
Wave a Bit Nearer ..., 
Sayings on Enemies, 
Friends and Strangers, 
Friendship — Hours to Live, 
Friendship's Sweet Responsibility, 
Loving the Neighbor, 
Your Neighbor Is Your Unknown Self, 
The Neighbor Unbefriended, 
Your Neighbor Is a Field, 
Love and Patriotism, 
Spaces in Your Togetherness, 
Flame to Flame, 
Loving the Lost Sheep, 
The Fingers of One Loving Hand, 
4. A Love Beyond, 
Love's Winter, 
A Rhythm for Lovers, 
Love Is the Only Freedom, 
Love Is Justice, 
Silence Whispers to the Heart, 
Love Song of the Wave, 
Seeds of Heart, 
Song of Love, 
Love's Light, 
Love Is Sufficient to Itself, 
When Love Becomes Vast, 
Out of My Deeper Heart, 
Longing for the Heart of the Beloved, 
Love and Time, 
Love Created in a Moment, 
The Gardens of Our Passion, 
Love's Wild Assault, 
My Soul Is My Friend, 
Staying and Going, 
My Longing Shall Gather, 
Sources of the Selections, 

CHAPTER 1

Love's Initiation

* * *

The spring of love introduces us to beauty, desire and passion. What part does the "smoke" of love play in relation to love's enduring fire?

The Spring of Love

Come, my beloved,
let us walk amidst the knolls.
For the snow is water,
and life is alive from its slumber
and is roaming the hills and valleys.

Let us follow the footprints of spring
into the distant fields,
and mount the hilltops to draw inspiration
high above the cool, green plains.

Dawn of spring has unfolded her
winter-kept garment and placed it
on the peach and citrus trees.
And they appear as brides in the
ceremonial custom of the Night of Kedre.

The sprigs of grapevine
embrace each other like sweethearts,
and the brooks burst out in
dance between the rocks,
repeating the song of joy.
The flowers bud suddenly
from the heart of nature,
like foam from the rich heart of the sea.

Come, my beloved,
let us drink the last of winter's tears
from the cupped lilies
and soothe our spirits
with the shower of notes from the birds,
wandering in exhilaration
through the intoxicating breeze.

Let us sit by that rock where violets hide.
Let us pursue their exchange
of the sweetness of kisses.


Beauty in the Heart

There are only two elements here,
beauty and truth —
beauty in the hearts of lovers
and truth in the arms of
the tillers of the soil.

Great beauty captures me,
but a beauty still greater frees me,
even from itself.

Beauty shines brighter
in the heart of the one who longs for it
than in the eyes of the one who sees it.

First Love

I was eighteen years of age when love opened my eyes with its magic rays and touched my spirit for the first time with its fiery fingers. And Selma Karamy was the first woman who awakened my spirit with her beauty and led me into the garden of high affection, where days pass like dreams and nights like weddings.

Selma Karamy was the one who taught me to worship beauty by the example of her own beauty and revealed to me the secret of love by her affection. She was the one who first sang to me the poetry of real life.

Every young man remembers his first love and tries to recapture that strange hour, the memory of which changes his deepest feeling and makes him so happy in spite of all the bitterness of its mystery.

In every young man's life there is a "Selma," who appears to him suddenly while in the spring of life and transforms his solitude into happy moments and fills the silence of his nights with music.

I was deeply engrossed in thought and contemplation and seeking to understand the meaning of nature and the revelation of books and scriptures when I heard LOVE whispered into my ears through Selma's lips. My life was a coma, empty like that of Adam's in Paradise, when I saw Selma standing before me like a column of light. She was the Eve of my heart, who filled it with secrets and wonders and made me understand the meaning of life.

The first Eve led Adam out of Paradise by her own will, while Selma made me enter willingly into the paradise of pure love and virtue by her sweetness and love. But what happened to the first man also happened to me, and the fiery word that chased Adam out of Paradise was like the one that frightened me by its glittering edge and forced me away from the paradise of my love without having disobeyed any order or tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree.

Today, after many years have passed, I have nothing left out of that beautiful dream except painful memories flapping like invisible wings around me, filling the depths of my heart with sorrow and bringing tears to my eyes.

And my beloved, beautiful Selma is dead. And nothing is left to commemorate her except my broken heart and a tomb surrounded by cypress trees. That tomb and this heart are all that is left to bear witness of Selma.

The silence that guards the tomb does not reveal God's secret lying in the obscurity of the coffin. And the rustling of the branches, whose roots suck the body's elements, do not tell the mysteries of the grave. But the agonized sighs of my heart announce to the living the drama that love, beauty, and death have performed.

O friends of my youth who are scattered in the city of Beirut! When you pass by the cemetery near the pine forest, enter it silently and walk slowly so the tramping of your feet will not disturb the slumber of the dead. Stop humbly by Selma's tomb and greet the earth that encloses her corpse and mention my name with a deep sigh and say to yourself, "Here all the hopes of Gibran, who is living as a prisoner of love beyond the seas, were buried. On this spot he lost his happiness, drained his tears, and forgot his smile."

"By that tomb grows Gibran's sorrow together with the cypress trees. And above the tomb his spirit flickers every night commemorating Selma, joining the branches of the trees in sorrowful wailing, mourning and lamenting the going of Selma, who yesterday was a beautiful tune on the lips of life and today is a silent secret in the bosom of the earth."

O comrades of my youth! I appeal to you in the names of those virgins whom your hearts have loved to lay a wreath of flowers on the forsaken tomb of my beloved.

For the flowers you lay on Selma's tomb are like falling drops of dew from the eyes of dawn on the leaves of a withering rose.

Wandering Desire

When you were a wandering desire in the mist,
I too was there, a wandering desire.

Then we sought one another
and out of our eagerness
dreams were born.

And dreams were time limitless,
and dreams were space without measure.

And when you were a silent word
upon life's quivering lips,
I too was there, another silent word.

Then life uttered us and
we came down through the years,
throbbing with memories of yesterday
and with longing for tomorrow.

For yesterday was death conquered
and tomorrow was birth pursued.


Singing the Heart

Our mind is a sponge.
Our heart is a stream.

When Life does not find
a singer to sing her heart,
she produces a philosopher
to speak her mind.

Beauty and Love

Beauty has its own heavenly language, loftier than the voices of tongues and lips. It is a timeless language, common to all humanity, a calm lake that attracts the singing rivulets to its depths and makes them silent.

Only our spirits can understand beauty, or live and grow with it. It puzzles our minds. We are unable to describe it in words. It is a sensation that our eyes cannot see, derived from both the one who observes and the one who is looked upon.

Real beauty is a ray that emanates from the holy of holies of the spirit and illuminates the body, as life comes from the depths of the earth and gives color and scent to a flower.

Did my spirit and Selma's reach out to each other that day when we met, and did that yearning make me see her as the most beautiful woman under the sun? Or was I intoxicated with the wine of youth, which made me fancy that which never existed?

Did my youth blind my natural eyes and make me imagine the brightness of her eyes, the sweetness of her mouth, and the grace of her figure? Or was it that her brightness, sweetness, and grace opened my eyes and showed me the happiness and sorrow of love?

It is hard to answer these questions. But I say truly that in that hour I felt an emotion that I had never felt before, a new affection resting calmly in my heart, like the spirit hovering over the waters at the creation of the world. And from that affection was born my happiness and my sorrow.

Thus ended the hour of my first meeting with Selma. And thus the will of heaven freed me from the bondage of youth and solitude and let me walk in the procession of love.

If You Have Desires ...

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.

But if you love and must have desires,
let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook
that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own understanding of love
and to bleed willingly and joyfully.

To wake at dawn with a winged heart
and to give thanks for another day of loving.

To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy.

To return home at eventide with gratitude
and then to sleep with a prayer
for the beloved in your heart
and a song of praise upon your lips.

Describing First Love

A woman whom providence has provided with beauty of spirit and body is a truth, at the same time both open and secret. We can understand that truth only by love and touch it only by virtue. And when we attempt to describe such a woman, she disappears like vapor.

Selma Karamy had bodily and spiritual beauty, but how can I describe her to one who never knew her?

Can a dead man remember the singing of a nightingale, the fragrance of a rose and the sigh of a brook?

Can a prisoner who is heavily loaded with shackles follow the breeze of the dawn?

Is not silence more painful than death?

Does pride prevent me from describing Selma in plain words, since I cannot draw her truthfully with luminous colors?

A hungry man in a desert will not refuse to eat dry bread even if heaven does not shower him with manna and quails.

Mistaken Identity

Upon a day Beauty and Ugliness met on the shore of a sea. And they said to one another, "Let us bathe in the sea."

Then they disrobed and swam in the waters. And after awhile Ugliness came back to the shore and clothed himself with the garments of Beauty and walked away.

And Beauty too came out of the sea and found not her raiment. And she was too shy to be naked, so she dressed herself with the raiment of Ugliness. And Beauty walked her way.

And to this very day men and women mistake the one for the other.

Yet there are some who have beheld the face of Beauty, and they know her, notwithstanding her garments. And there are some who know the face of Ugliness, and the cloth conceals him not from their eyes.

Love's Summer

Let us go into the fields, my beloved.
For the time of harvest approaches,
and the sun's eyes are ripening the grain.

Let us tend the fruit of the earth,
as the spirit nourishes
the grains of joy
from the seeds of love
sowed deep in our hearts.

Let us fill our bins
with the products of nature,
as life fills so abundantly
the domain of our hearts
with her endless bounty.

Let us make the flowers our bed
and the sky our blanket
and rest our heads together
upon pillows of soft hay.

Let us relax after the day's toil
and listen to the provoking murmur
of the brook.


O Love

They say the jackal and the mole
drink from the same stream
where the lion comes to drink.

And they say the eagle and the vulture
dig their beaks into the same carcass
and are at peace, one with the other,
in the presence of the dead thing.

O Love, whose lordly hand
has bridled my desires,
and raised my hunger and my thirst
to dignity and pride,
let not the strong and constant in me
eat the bread or drink the wine
that tempt my weaker self.

Let me rather starve,
and let my heart parch with thirst.
And let me die and perish
before I stretch my hand
to a cup you did not fill
or a bowl you did not bless.


Desire Is Half

Desire is half of life.
Indifference is half of death.

Between Desire and Peace

They say to me, "You must choose between the pleasures of this world and the peace of the next world."

And I say to them, "I have chosen both the delights of this world and the peace of the next. For I know in my heart that the Supreme Poet wrote but one poem, and it scans perfectly, and it also rhymes perfectly."

Faith is an oasis in the heart
that will never be reached by
the caravan of thinking.

When you reach your height,
you shall desire only for desire.
And you shall hunger only for hunger.
And you shall thirst only for greater thirst.

God Moves in Passion

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.

If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.

For reason ruling alone is a force confining. And passion unattended is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion that it may sing.

And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house.

Surely you would not honor one guest above the other. For the one who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows, then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason."

And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion."

And since you are a breath in God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

Voices in Rapture

[The ancient Earth Gods, weary and depressed, converse among themselves about life's purpose, or the lack of it, until one of them notices....]

A youth in yonder vale
is singing his heart to the night.
His lyre is gold and ebony.
His voice is silver and gold.

Down in the myrtle grove
a girl is dancing to the moon,
a thousand dew-stars are in her hair,
about her feet a thousand wings.

The girl has found the singer!
She sees his raptured face.
Panther-like she slips with subtle steps
through rustling vine and fern.

And now amid his ardent cries
he gazes full on her.

O my brothers, my heedless brothers!
Is it some other god in passion
who has woven this web of scarlet and white?
What unbridled star has gone astray?
Whose secret keeps night from morning
and whose hand is upon our world?

They meet,
two star-bound spirits
in the sky encountering.

In silence they gaze
one upon the other.
He sings no more,
and yet his sunburnt throat
throbs with the song.
And in her limbs
the happy dance is stayed
but not asleep.

Brothers, my strange brothers!
The night waxes deep,
and brighter is the moon,
and between the meadow and the sea
a voice in rapture calls you and me.

Your Body Is The Harp of Your Soul

But tell me, who is the one that can offend the spirit?

Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars?

And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind?

Do you think the spirit is a still pool that you can trouble with a staff?

Oftentimes, in denying yourself pleasure, you only store the desire in the recesses of your being.

Who knows whether that which seems omitted today waits for tomorrow?

Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived.

And your body is the harp of your soul.

It is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.

And now you ask in your heart, "How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?"

Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower.

But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.

For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life, and to the flower a bee is a messenger of love.

And to both bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.

If Your Heart Is a Volcano

If your heart is a volcano
how shall you expect flowers
to bloom in your hands?

I am the flame
and I am the dry bush.
And one part of me
consumes the other part.

Love Across Age

The poet youth said to the princess, "I love you."

And the princess answered, "And I love you too, my child."

"But I am not your child. I am a man and I love you."

And she said, "I am the mother of sons and daughters, and they are fathers and mothers of sons and daughters. And one of the sons of my sons is older than you."

And the poet youth said, "But I love you."

It was not long after that the princess died. But before her last breath was received again by the greater breath of earth, she said within her soul,

"My beloved, mine only son, my youth-poet, it may yet be that someday we shall meet again, and I shall not be seventy."

A Desire Unfulfilled

Salome speaks about Jesus to a woman friend:

He was like poplars
shimmering in the sun.

And like a lake among the lonely hills,
shining in the sun.
And like snow upon the mountain heights —
white, white in the sun.

Yea, he was like all these,
and I loved him.

Yet I feared his presence,
and my feet would not carry
my burden of love
that I might girdle his feet
with my arms.

I would have said to him,
"I have slain your friend in an hour of passion.
Will you forgive me my sin?
And will you not in mercy release my youth
from its blind deed
that it may walk in your light?"

I know he would have
forgiven my dancing
for the saintly head of his friend.
I know he would have seen in me
an object of his own teaching.

For there was no valley of hunger
he could not bridge,
and no desert of thirst
he could not cross.

Yes, he was even as the poplars
and as the lakes among the hills
and like snow upon Lebanon.

And I would have cooled my lips
in the folds of his garment.

But he was far from me,
and I was ashamed.
And my mother held me back
when the desire to seek him was upon me.

Whenever he passed by,
my heart ached for his loveliness,
but my mother frowned at him in contempt
and would hasten me from the window
to my bedchamber.

And she would cry aloud saying,
"Who is he but another locust-eater from the desert?
What is he but a scoffer and a renegade,
a seditious riot-monger,
who would rob us of sceptre and crown,
and bid the foxes and the jackals of his accursed land to
howl in our halls and sit upon our throne?
Go hide your face from this day,
And await the day when his head shall fall down,
but not upon your platter."

These things my mother said.
But my heart would not keep her words.

I loved him in secret,
and my sleep was
girdled with flames.

He is gone now.
And something
that was in me
is gone also.

Perhaps it was my youth
that would not tarry here,
since the god of youth was slain.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Kahlil Gibran's Little Book of Love by Neil Douglas-Klotz. Copyright © 2018 Neil Douglas-Klotz. Excerpted by permission of Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571748334
• ISBN 13: 9781571748331
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Douglas-Klotz Neil