Category Archives: Blog

By some miracle, I woke up on time today for my 9 am Chinese class in Beirut. Afterwards, I studied some Islamic philosophical texts from China–like the passage below–to help me really wake up…

Moreover, the generality of creatures, because of their intense conjunction with this corporeal form and their perfect preoccupation with this material figure, have become such that they do not know themselves apart from it, and cannot make the distinction. Rumi writes in the Mathnawi:

You are this very thought, brother,
the rest of you is bones and fiber.
If your thought is a rose, you’re a rosegarden,
but if it’s a thorn, you’re firewood.

I want some day simply to live what I would say, and talk to people. I want to be a teacher.
Because I have been so lonely, I want to talk to those who are lonely…

— Khalil Gibran

Here is a quote by Peter Matthiessen, novelist and co-founder of the Paris Review, who died yesterday at age 86.

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions – such as merit, such as past, present, and future – our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment…

— Peter Matthiessen

And among all vanities of life, there is only one thing that the spirit loves and craves. One thing dazzling and alone…It is an awakening in the spirit; it is an awakening in the inner depths of the heart; it is an overwhelming and magnificent power that descends suddenly upon man’s conscience and opens his eyes, whereupon he sees Life amid a dizzying shower of brilliant music, surrounded by a circle of great light, with man standing as a pillar of beauty between the earth and the firmament. It is a flame that suddenly rages within the spirit and sears and purifies the heart,
ascending above the earth and hovering in the spacious sky. It is a kindness that envelops the individual’s heart whereby he would bewilder and disapprove all who opposed it, and revolt against those who refuse to understand its great meaning…

— Khalil Gibran

I sometimes imagine myself, my bodily part, after death, lying in the earth and returning to the elements of earth: the great loosening, the change everywhere, the opening into simpler things, the widening out into those things from which anything may be built up again, the great Return, such deep quietness and a passing into the substance of things…

— Khalil Gibran

I passed by this graffiti today on my walk home from volunteering at the Children’s Cancer Center of Lebanon/St. Jude in Beirut. In my neighborhood, each crumbling old home–damaged and abandoned during the civil war–serves as a visible reminder of the devastating wounds of war…

[L]ook at me and I will show you the holy torch which Heaven has lighted in the ashes of my heart—you know that I love you as a mother loves her only child, and Love only taught me to protect you even from myself. It is Love, purified with fire, that stops me from following you to the farthest land. Love kills my desires so that you may live freely and virtuously. Limited love asks for possession of the beloved, but the unlimited asks only for itself. Love that comes between the naivete and awakening of youth satisfies itself with possessing, and grows with embraces. But Love which is born in the firmament’s lap and has descended with the night’s secrets is not contended with anything but Eternity and immortality; it does not stand reverently before anything except deity…

— Khalil Gibran

Verily the ocean laughs always with the innocent. But what of those to whom life is not an ocean,
and man-made laws are not sand-castles, but to whom life is a rock,
and the law a chisel with which they would carve it in their own likeness?

— Khalil Gibran

I hopped on a boat in Beirut today to explore the beautiful rocks of Raouché…

Your thought holds that the glory of the nations is in their heroes. It sings the praises of Rameses, Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, and Napoleon. But mine claims that the real heroes are Confucius, Lao-Tse, Socrates, Plato, Abi Taleb, al-Ghazali, Jalal ed-din-el Rumi, Copernicus, and Pasteur. Your thought sees power in armies, cannons, battleships, submarines, aeroplanes, and poison gas. But mine asserts that power lies in reason, resolution, and truth. No matter how long the tyrant endures, he will be the loser at the end. Your thought differentiates between pragmatist and idealist, between the part and the whole, between the mystic and materialist. Mine realizes that life is one and its weights, measures and tables do not coincide with your weights, measures and tables. He whom you suppose an idealist may be a practical man…

— Khalil Gibran

And I remember, too, the beautiful spot in North Lebanon. Every time I close my eyes I see those valleys full of magic and dignity and those mountains covered with glory and greatness trying to reach the sky…

— Khalil Gibran

My new Huffington Post piece on the Khalil Gibran Museum in Lebanon was just posted. Please click here to view some of the paintings of the poet that are on display in the monastery where he’s buried in the mountains.

He saw the Father’s face reflected in the quiet pools,
and the faint print of His feet upon the sand;
and He often closed His eyes to gaze into the Holy Eyes.

— Khalil Gibran

Nesma’s Birds
Tribeca Film Festival
April 19th-27th

Awkward 11-year-old, Nesma, is at odds with the world around her since she began caring for her father’s pigeons after his death. Already facing pressure from her mother to get rid of the birds and continuing a bitter rivalry with the boy across the street, today Nesma will face an even bigger challenge as she enters womanhood.

For more information, please click here.