Are you Skimming through Life?

Every year, come May, June, or July, the Master Key Experience (MKE) gives members the opportunity to sign-up for a week-long retreat in Kauai, HA. This year was no exception.

While attending the retreat, the founder of MKE, Mark J., offers participants the chance to join a small group mastermind to delve deeper into written course materials. This supplementary class begins upon return home from Kauai.

In 2021, I decided to do this. Led by Mark J, a portion of this class was focused on “The Prophet,” written by Khalil Gibran.

The Prophet

The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran.[1] It was originally published in 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf. It is Gibran’s best-known work. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history [2] as well as one of the best-selling books of all time. It has never been out of print.[3]

The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

One of my homework assignments was to do an interpretive analysis of one of the Chapters in this book entitled “Beauty.” For the sake of comparison, first, I present the original text, followed by my analysis.

KHALIL GIBRAN — THE PROPHET
BEAUTY

And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.

And he answered:

Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?

And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?

The aggrieved and the injured say, ‘Beauty is kind and gentle.

‘Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us.’

And the passionate say, ‘Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.

‘Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.’

The tired and the weary say, ‘Beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.

‘Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.’

But the restless say, ‘We have heard her shouting among the mountains,

‘And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.’

At night the watchmen of the city say, ‘Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east.’

And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, ‘We have seen her leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset.’

In winter say the snow-bound, ‘She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills.’

And in the summer heat the reapers say, ‘We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.’

All these things have you said of beauty,

Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,

And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.

It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,

But rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted.

It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,

But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.

It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,

But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels forever in flight.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.

But you are life and you are the veil.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

Now my homework

Note: I suffer from a rare condition known as “Rhyme Disease,” (vector unknown), you will see my analysis is a symptomatic expression of this disease.

The Prophet – Beauty

As MKE makes it clear,
To seek without means to seek within.
Whether it be the truth of love, or of God, or of beauty, the clarity does appear;
Because it is in this way only that we must begin.

No worry or fear or some such concern fills your head,
For when the truth of love, or of God, or of beauty speaks of what you found,
Only goodness and greatness and nary a sign of dread,
Are left to define the wonder so abundant within all there is around.

Still there is a tendency to say what is.
By saying what it is not.
When pain and discomfort happen to be his,
Then gentle kindness tends to be the beauty that he’s got.

Like a young mother shyly shimmering in her grace,
Beauty to him is like this saintly being,
With the smile of an angel upon her lovely face.
Though others may not see her, that’s what he is seeing.

Then there are those so passionately possessed,
In their minds beauty must be what even the most mighty tend to fear.
It is the tempestuous roar of the hurricane they have guessed,
For it’s mother nature unbridled that they alone can hear.

Then there are those who are tired and with exhaustion weary,
Who speak of soft tremulous whispers to lift their spirit.
First there must be silence as background for this theory,
Kept alive by the mere softest of sounds, only they can hear it.

With opposite tack are those who just can’t be still.
Who see beauty as the call of the wild.
The sound of stampeding hooves, startled wings and even the roar of lions echoing from hill to hill,
Befits their character forged quite early, when just the child.

Then there is employment that hones the beauty that they seek.
For the watchman whose night-time duty leaves them standing lonely at a gate,
It is dawn’s orange brilliance when over the horizon the sun begins to peek,
That lightens the daily burden of the duty they’ve come to hate.

And for workers of land and sea whose labor brings only sweat to cool the noonday heat.
For them, the wonders begin at sunset.
As earth pulls down its glorious, cooling shade to mark passage when day and night must meet,
And then it may be like a Van Gogh impression of the stars we cannot forget.

And then there are those who use the change in season,
To design the dress that beauty wears.
Deep in winter the snowbound use this as the reason
To envision spring’s colorful march of new greenery to replace their frozen cares.

And similarly, when summer’s heat begins to beat upon the heads of the reapers of the wheat,
Can envision the swirling blaze of autumn leaves when a breeze fills the air.
Can see them thrown skyward by her joyful feet,
With a classy drift of snow to adorn her flowing hair.

All these things we’ve often said of beauty,
Yet is it really she your words define?
Or is it more a longing that comes sparked by event or duty,
Into an ephemeral blaze of glory that makes her appear divine?

Yet beauty is not a want nor need or anything that remains unsatisfied.
These are visions born of desire, when desire is the seed.
You see true beauty brings an esthetic inner feeling for which were always gratified.
Everlasting is its immortality defined indeed.

It is not born of lips parched with thirst,
Or a beggar’s empty hand that appears to ask, “Spare change?”
It is the heart inflamed by the love we call our first.
It is the soul enchanted when God’s oneness is allowed our life to rearrange.

You see beauty is not a product of the senses —
An image you long to see nor a song you long to hear.
Such things are blocked by city walls and fences
No matter how far, no matter how near.

But rather an image born of beauty can be seen whether eyes are open or closed tight.
Likewise, a song worthy of the same can be heard even in the silence we call complete.
For visions that are beauty are not dependent upon the light.
Nor sounds dependent upon vibration no matter how sweet.

Beauty is not the sap underneath the bark, although it brings vitality to the tree.
Nor a wing attached to a claw that allows the bird so graceful in its flight,
It is rather the kind of garden where flowers bloom forever that we see.
Or rather the flight of angels everlasting that only with the mind’s eye can we see them right.

So, you see people of Orphales, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
And since you are the life we seek, it’s up to you to lift the veil to see it.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror to see its grace.
Yet you are both eternity and the mirror, waiting upon you to be it.

Your Turn

And so ends my poetic interpretation of what Khalil Gibran had to say about Beauty in his masterpiece, “The Prophet.” Perhaps, you have a different one, or something else you would like to say. If so, feel free to use the comment box down below.

Additionally, since this blog was inspired by the MKE, you might be interested in what an MKE master guide, Shirley Koritnik, says about it. This is the way she closed one of her recent blogs:

Want to have this experience, too?
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Stop Skimming!

I understand if up till now you’ve not had something like this and have been missing out. I skimmed life, too. So if you’re ready to stop skimming and to join a powerful Master Mind of like spirits, we can help. The MKE course and its scholarships happen only once a year, starting the last Sunday of September and you can get started today.

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