real love.

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Some excerpts from the letters of Kahlil Gibran to Mary Haskell
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My boyfriend and I recently went to see an exhibition of Kahlil Gibran's work at the State Library, and I was completely blown away by his ability to express universal truths about love, life, joy and suffering in such an eloquent, timeless way. You could see it in the paintings and sketches, as well as in the words that circled the walls.

I don't know much about Gibran's relationship with Haskell, but I do know that reading these excerpts made me realise how real love is always generous and expansive, not limiting and possessive like the supposedly 'romantic' ideas we are bombarded with in movies and magazines.

Something that really appealed to me about these quotes is the way that Gibran seems to fully grasp the idea that in order to truly love someone in that compassionate, inclusive, accepting way, whether it's your partner or your brother or the stranger sitting next you on a train, you have to acknowledge that this person is real. That is, just like you, they are complex, often contradictory beings who ultimately want to receive and (hopefully) give love. Or at least that's how I understand it, and try (with difficulty) to constantly remember.

I think, in the end, it's easy to 'love' (read: worship, idolise) someone that you have shaped in your head as a perfect, faultless being; the instant human band-aid that will heal every insecurity you ever had about yourself. The problem is, that is a fiction. It is much harder (but arguably much more rewarding and true) to love in a way that acknowledges reality rather than distorts it, acknowledges sameness over difference, and acknowledges both the joy and sadness of living.

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No human relation gives one possession in another - every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach alone.
(Kahlil Gibran from Mary Haskell’s Journal June 8, 1924.)



If I can open a new corner in a man’s own heart to him I have not lived in vain. Life itself is the thing, not joy or pain or happiness or unhappiness. Live for yourself - live your life. Then you are most truly the friend of man. - I am different every day - and when I am eighty, I shall still be experimenting and changing. Work that I have done no longer concerns me - it is past. I have too much on hand in life itself.
(Kahlil Gibran from Mary Haskell’s Journal. December 25, 1912.)

I realised that all the trouble I ever had about you came from some smallness or fear in myself.
(From Mary Haskell’s Journal. June 12, 1912.)



You listen to so much more than I can say. You hear consciousness.
You go with me where the words I say can’t carry you.
(Kahlil Gibran from Mary Haskell’s Journal June 5, 1924.)



If I accept the sunshine and warmth I must also accept the thunder and lightning.
(Kahlil Gibran from Mary Haskell’s Journal. March 12, 1922.)

The resting place of my soul is a beautiful grove where my knowledge of you lives.
(Kahlil Gibran’s letter November 8, 1908.)


I want to be alive To all the life that is in me now, to know each moment to the uttermost.
(Kahlil Gibran from Mary Haskell’s Journal June 7, 1912.)

[first two images from garrettlockhart, third unknown, fourth jonathan delafield cook]