Gibran on Beauty
This blog is a place of love, of inspiration, and of beauty. I am sitting today in my brother’s lovely home in Washington DC, a place of unusual beauty, much of it honoring America. But it is also such an international city with its many embassies and international headquarters. So other cultures of the world are honored here in the form of art, architecture, music…. all unique forms of beauty.
A quiet heart is a place of beauty. 
A kind word, when harshness was the easy path, is a thing of beauty.
A moment of compassion, when life seems so unfair, is an act of beauty.
One of my early heroes, Khalil Gibran, famously known for his breathtakingly beautiful book, The Prophet, remains so to this day.
Here he speaks on Beauty:
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?
“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 enflamed and a soul enchanted.
Kahlil Gibran
