In the lobby of the Minnesota Public Radio headquarters are three white egg-shaped chairs. Whenever I’m there I crawl into one of them, sit cross-legged, and close my eyes. Sitting in one is like wearing a warm sweatshirt with the hood pulled entirely over your head. My love for those chairs is inordinate. When I picture a safe place to comfort myself when sad or troubled, those egg-shaped chairs come to mind. 

When I was a little girl, the poems in The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, used to bring me the same kind of solace. A few days ago I stood in a museum in Mexico City admiring some beautiful paintings by an artist named Gibran Kahlil Gibran, the similarity of whose name to the poet made me happy. A display case was filled with handwritten letters by the artist and I read each one out loud to myself. The fact that the painter wondered about the same things I do, love and longing and sadness, was as inexpressibly comforting to me as the egg-shaped chairs. It turns out that the painter and my poet are the same man. His words from a hundred years ago, found in an unfamiliar museum in an unfamiliar city in a country not my own, go straight to my heart.

 

Found poem, by Gibran Kahlil Gibran (lines from his handwritten letters, arranged by Alison McGhee)

Are you unhappy, my beloved?
I, too, am unhappy sometimes.
There are days when
bitterness mingles itself with life—
days when my dreams are
dreams of hunger and
my songs are sighs, and the
things I try to create are
sad, so very sad.

And there are days when I
want to be nothing but a
shepherd somewhere on a
faraway mountain, or an
unthought-of brother in an
unknown convent, or an
outcast on a lonely,
undiscovered island.

I have journeyed twenty-five
times around the sun—and
do not know how
many times the moon has
sailed around me—and I have
not solved the
mystery of light yet.