Mirrors of the Soul by Joseph Sheban Joseph Sheban Kahlil Gibran Page B

wheat and a stack of hay. No one knows them but they know each other. They are like the summits, which can see and hear each other — not like caves, which cannot hear or see. They are the seed dropped by the hand of God in the field, breaking through its pod and waving its sapling leaves before the face of the sun. It shall grow into a mighty tree, its root in the heart of the earth and its branches high in the sky.
    1.   Fifty years before this translation.

9. SOLITUDE AND SECLUSION
    by Gibran
    Life is an island in an ocean of solitude and seclusion.
    Life is an island, rocks are its desires, trees its dreams, and flowers its loneliness, and it is in the middle of an ocean of solitude and seclusion.
    Your life, my friend, is an island separated from all other islands and continents. Regardless of how many boats you send to other shores or how many ships arrive upon your shores, you yourself are an island separated by its own pains, secluded in its happiness and far away in its compassion and hidden in its secrets and mysteries.
    I saw you, my friend, sitting upon a mound of gold, happy in your wealth and great in your riches and believing that a handful of gold is the secret chain that links the thoughts of the people with your own thoughts and links their feeling with your own.
    I saw you as a great conqueror leading a conquering army toward the fortress, then destroying and capturing it.
    On second glance I found beyond the wall of your treasures a heart trembling in its solitude and seclusion like the trembling of a thirsty man within a cage of gold and jewels, but without water.
    I saw you, my friend, sitting on a throne of glory, surrounded by people extolling your charity, enumerating your gifts, gazing upon you as if they were in the presence of a prophet lifting their souls up into the planets and stars. I saw you looking at them, contentment and strength upon your face, as if you were to them as the soul is to the body.
    On the second look I saw your secluded self standing beside your throne, suffering in its seclusion and quaking in its loneliness. I saw that self stretching its hands as if begging from unseen ghosts. I saw it looking above the shoulders of the people to a far horizon, empty of everything except its solitude and seclusion.
    I saw you, my friend, passionately in love with a beautiful woman, filling her palms with your kisses as she looked at you with sympathy and affection in her eyes and the sweetness of motherhood on her lips; I said, secretly, that love has erased his solitude and removed his seclusion and he is now within the eternal soul which draws toward itself, with love, those who were separated by solitude and seclusion.
    On the second look I saw behind your soul another lonely soul, like a fog, trying in vain to become a drop of tears in the palm of that woman.
    Your life, my friend, is a residence far away from any other residence and neighbors.
    Your inner soul is a home far away from other homes named after you. If this residence is dark, you cannot light it with your neighbor’s lamp; if it is empty you cannot fill it with the riches of your neighbor; were it in the middle of a desert, you could not move it to a garden planted by someone else.
    Your inner soul, my friend, is surrounded with solitude and seclusion. Were it not for this solitude and this seclusion you would not be you and I would not be I. If it were not for that solitude and seclusion, I would, if I heard your voice, think myself to be speaking; yet, if I saw your face, I would imagine that I were looking into a mirror.

10. THE SEA
    by Gibran
    In the still of the night
As man slumbers behind the folds,
the forest proclaims.
    â€œI am the power
    Brought by the sun from
    the heart of the earth.”
    The sea remains quiet, saying to itself,
    â€œI am the power.”
    The rock says,
    â€œThe ages erected me as a monument
    Until the Judgment Day”;
    The sea remains silent saying to