Prophets

In Freya’s mailbox as the first week of the New Year draws to a close…

... distracted by distraction from distraction. – T. S. Eliot

Art helps us unify. . .It gives us a chance to make visible our angels and our demons, and in doing that, it helps to heal us. It opens us. It frees us. Just the act of sitting down and looking at the human story and trying to show something of the choices that people make and how their lives are shaped by those choices is on the very edge of a spiritual practice. . . .Using a phrase from Franz Kafka, it cracks the frozen stream inside us so that what is best in us can flow again and not be fixed. – Ben Okri

Today is the 140th anniversary of the birth of poet Khalil Gibran. The author of The Prophet was born in the mountain village in Bsharri, Lebanon (1883). According to Garrison Keillor, Gibran is now the third-best-selling poet in history, after William Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.

. . .perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding — which is also the understanding of the novelist — to take this in. – Susan Sontag