One of the communities that continues to nourish me in the virtual world that accompanies the coronavirus epidemic is the Community Congregational Church (CCC) at the top of Rock Hill Road in Tiburon, California. In this instance, I am thinking of a weekly meeting called Stone Soup that normally meets in the church's Seminar Room but has adapted to meet during these times through the medium of Zoom. Imagine 25 to 30 of us, focusing our discussion on the readings that accompany the previous and prospective Sunday services (also Zoom facilitated).
Typically, one of the two readings is a biblical passage, the other often a story or poem from a more contemporary writer. In the most recent Stone Soup of which I am thinking, the second reading is a poem by the 20th-century Lebanese-American artist Kahlil Gibran.
Born in 1883 of a poor Maronite Christian family in the village of Bsharri in what was then the Ottoman Empire and is now Lebanon, Gibran had very little formal schooling before being taken by his mother to the United States in 1895. The family settled in Boston's South End. Although attracted to the Western aesthetic culture of the day, his mother and elder half-brother wanted Gibran to absorb more of his own heritage, so at the age of 15 he returned to his homeland to study for three years at the Collège de la Sagesse, a Maronite-run institute in Beirut.
Quiet and sensitive as a young boy, Gibran "displayed an early artistic aptitude and a love for nature that became evident in later works." The writing for which he became best known was the book he called The Prophet, published in 1923.
Fear
by Kahlil Gibran
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
*She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
"Fear" is a poem of changing consciousness. The reader contemplates a river flowing into the ocean. "It is said," earlier in its life, "before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear." She can look back at her journey, but cannot go back. The source of the fear is clear:
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
That is the fear: to disappear forever, only postponed in a tidal marsh whose life is barely ours. I wish I had known that earlier, that there is no other way, that I can not go back. Poet, you speak with such clarity and certitude, brook no argument, no wiggle room. You ironically call it risk, but then say in truth:
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
However much we wish to go back, to relive our earlier existence (selectively, differently, to be sure) we can only go forward. That is my word, not yours. But it changes all, as you do, finally, in your very last lines. I see it is not risk you ask, but trust. All that looking back and all that trembling fear is apprenticeship. Learning what is not, in order to know what is.
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
* The river's gender intrigues me in this poem. Conventional usage suggests male. The river is female. I think the choice is inspired. The learning it conveys, the river's flow and her coming to know, are more yin than yang.
My dear friend Al Braidwood, after reading an earlier version of this post, sent me an excerpt from the Chandogya Upanishad, translated from the original Sanskrit by Al's former meditation teacher Eknath Easwaran.