Travels on a Finno-Ugric drum journey

The scent of burning sage signals the opening of ritual space.

Small bells circle, gently breaking up energy.  As the drum stick swishes across the reindeer skin stretched over the frame, sussuring sounds spiral outward.  

Soon, the drum begins its song, and she is sent on her journey into a tunnel of darkness.

As the beat of the drum vibrates through her, different animals' faces appear one by one before her closed eyes. Squirrel. Blue Jay. Crow. Rabbit. Deer. Dog. Moose. Raccoon. Mole. Bee. Wasp. Butterfly. Mouse...no, it was too big. Was it Rat? No, it was Mouse. Mouse! she wondered incredulously, was Mouse to be her Spirit Animal?

No. Suddenly Ilves appeared.

Image source

His large yellow eyes loomed before her, staring into her soul.

Suddenly, she was on the back of Ilves, the  large huntress. The cat ran through the back woods. It was night, winter, snow covered the ground. Ilves ran powerfully through the dark woods, snaking through the trees, comfortable in its territory. Running, running. The dark night sky, a canopy of indigo overhead, was filled with glittering stars that glinted back from the snow fields. Running, running. Flying past snow covered trees. Flying over snow encrusted ground.

Suddenly, she was sucked into a small hole in the earth, pulled down a vortex, her arms and hands last, waving. The lovi had opened up, sending her deeper on her journey.

She found herself under the earth, swimming amongst the tangled roots of trees, of the birches, poplars, balsams and black spruce above. She pushed the roots aside, swimming through their tentacles. She was unimpeded. Her arms were strong, her hair long, weaving smoothly through the tendrils of roots. She swam and swam. 

She entered deep indigo blue water, dark blue like the sky above. She was swimming deep along the bottom of Lake Superior. The place where silence was born.

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A large sturgeon floated by.

A white door opened to the right, a ghostly portal beckoning her. Light emanates from it, pulsing soft rays of haunting enticement. She swam through the watery portal, passing through it.

She found herself on a cliff. But now she is Ilves. Her hands are large powerful paws and she is running in the forest, along the edge of a high cliff. She runs and runs. Her energy is boundless.

There is a large valley below. She stops to bask in the sunlight, curls up on the edge of the cliff. It is a sunny day, spring.  All seems calm and fresh. Then, she is told to fly off the cliff.

She jumps. She sails, soars through the sky. She lands on all fours on the earth in the forest. She is on a canyon floor. She starts to dig and dig. The earth is black, soft and rich with decay. The scent of decomposing earth fills the air.

She finds a bone, one bone. It is not big. She digs and digs. She finds some pages. They are loose; they flutter in the wind. Then, her digging done, she leaps and flies straight up into the sky.

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It is is night again, indigo blue, the sky covered in stars. She is a woman again. She is floating on her back, streaming through the night sky as if floating downstream in a river. She floats and floats, restful like a baby calmed by a warm bath until she lands by a big rock at the shore of a lake.

She climbs up on the rock and sits and looks across the water. It is Midsummer Day. The waves lap softly. The sun is warm. The air is calm.

She stands up. She is naked.

travel and tourism today

Will they be teaching this new travel opportunity in college Travel and Tourism courses?

While it is true that, for jaded travelers who have been everywhere, vacations can get boring at times, who would imagine that learning to shoot a military weapon and taking up anti-terrorist training would be a good way to kill some time? That you can kill time by learning to kill!

And as the training facility that offers these classes for tourists is in an illegal Jewish settlement in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, I wonder who the tourists get to imagine is the enemy they need to waste?

How much more mainstream can you get if anti-terrorist training is noted under "Leisure" on the Travelers Today website? Indeed, as Rachel Frogel, who gave her four children all under the age of 10 this chance to learn to target people with military weapons, says, "It's a fun experience for the whole family." 


In the news clip I embedded above, we see American tourists to Israel excited to learn to shoot not just any old gun but a military weapon. What better way to spend time on a vacation than this "exciting new program for tourists" that capitalizes on fears and taking up violence as fun and entertainment? The brainchild of an American Jew from Los Angeles, who, I assume, is also an Israeli citizen, this training facility of "security solutions" that "works in close cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)" uses former Israeli soldiers for the real "authentic" experience.

And, when you get back home from your travels, you can tack up on the wall at home or in your office a certificate that you have completed a basic shooting-course in Israel--or in the case of a young child, you might bring it to school for show-and-tell or maybe your mom will pin it onto the fridge with cute fridge magnets. 

young female American tourist learning anti-terrorist training. Maybe when this business grows, she could ask for a turquoise coloured gun to match her sunglasses? 


You do not have to be of age to learn how to shoot with a military weapon. It is an experience not to be missed even by the youngest child!

Taking that advice recently was Michel Brown, a Miami banker who brought his wife and children to Caliber 3 with the aim of "teaching them values."
"This is part of their education," he told YNet, as his 5-year-old daughter wielded a gun. "They should know where they come from and also feel some action."

The banker's daughter Take that back to Miami!

Seems there is no shortage of moms and dads who want their kids to learn how to shoot people...I mean, terrorists...I mean, Palestinians: 

"travelers and families take turns shooting at photos of men wearing the keffiyeh scarf worn by Palestinians."

Now, the "security" company's website does not say if it's any tourists who can take their learn-to-attack-terrorists-training. They do say that they have a lot of visitors from around the world come to take their "exciting" course. But I wonder if Palestinian or Arab tourists can take the training, too?

Or do they just get to be the target in this fun activity?

trees have rights, too

Olive tree within a traffic circle within an illegal Israeli settlement within the Occupied West Bank.

Regardless where you stand on the question of Palestine, watching the destruction of olive trees as shown in the video clip above calls into question the tactics Israeli settlers have taken up. Uprooting and burning olive trees? All to claim their rights to, what they call using the Old Testament names, Judea and Samaria, but since the creation of Israel in '48 became known as the West Bank; otherwise known as Palestine. Speaking to the further compartmentalizing of land for political and ecocide purposes yet masked in the rhetoric of claims to "my home," the West Bank has been divided further into Areas A, B, and C:

The Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into three geographic areas. In Area A, in which most Palestinian urban centres fall, the Palestinian Authority is responsible for security (although the Israelis routinely enter Area A at will) but in Areas B and C, which comprise over 80 per cent of the territory, it is the Israelis which are responsible for security. This means Palestinian police are not permitted to protect Palestinian civilians from Israeli settlers in most of the West Bank. The problem is, of course, that the Israelis are not doing this job either and so it should come as no surprise that 95 per cent of settler violence occurs in Areas B and C.

Whether the Palestinian land is categorized as A, B, or C, it seems there will be more uprooting of its trees and destruction of its natural environment to build more homes for Israeli settlers. The Israeli Housing Ministry announced last Sunday that it will build 1028 new homes in ...where? Well, here are more terms to obfuscate the question of where these homes are going to be built: 

According to a statement by the ministry, 500 homes will be built in Har Homa in south Jerusalem, on land occupied during the 1967 Six Day War; 348 in the West Bank settlement of Betar Illit; and 180 in Givat Ze'ev, which lies between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

According to official Israeli terms, lands south of Jerusalem are known as Judea, and lands north of Jerusalem, Samaria. In other words, the homes are for Israeli settlers and will be illegally built on Palestinian land that has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

I invite the uprooters of trees and their supporters to watch a short video from System Change. In this clip, Canadian Maude Barlow argues for the movement towards making laws to encode the rights of protecting the trees, forests, oceans, rivers, streams, wetlands, and ecosystems, those interconnected systems of life. She argues for a sacred relationship with Nature, a  reclaiming and honouring of these beings / systems of the Commons, protecting ecosystems from marketization, resource extraction, and privatization.  I wonder how --and hope that-- the question of Palestine can move forward when the rights of Olive trees are enacted. And let's not forget water as praise for the River Jordan is sung reverently over the holidays. 

doors I saw in Toronto

Hello dear readers,

Sorry to have been away from posting and not leaving you an explanation; I had gone to Toronto for six days to visit my sister and her family and my brother and his family. Today, I am posting a few images of doors that are among the photos I took as I walked the streets of downtown Toronto, sometimes with my sister, sometimes with my brother.
My sister, Della, her daughter, Emma, and her son, Jake, and I went to eat lunch one afternoon at Tasty Corner in Kensington Market, a multicultural neighbourhood in Toronto with a long history of immigrant settlement. Today it is a mixed neighbourhood of students, young families, musicians, hippies, the elderly, and people from all walks of life and ethnic origins. If you visit Toronto, you will see everyday multiculturalism before your eyes when visiting Kensington Market. Della's two boys live in a house in the Kensington Market area with their other band members; their band Nightbox has just released their EP and they have been playing various gigs around Toronto. I took this photo looking out to the street intersection from inside the restaurant. I ordered a potato roti that turned out to be as big as a pillow. If you are hungry, I recommend Tasty Corner.
Kensington Market is full of small independently owned businesses, many of them ethnic shops, like the fish store above (I think Portuguese in origin), which have been in business for years and years. Outside this fish shop's front door, on the small tiles it looks like an image of a young woman striding by the sea with a bag of fish had been painted some time ago.
Global Cheese, as their sign says, speaks your language in cheese. We stopped off to pick up cheese -- their selection is HUGE -- and olives. This shop is another long time inhabitant of Kensington Market. I bought some Kashkaval cheese (yellow sheep milk cheese), goat cheese, and large green olives to bring back home. I wrapped the olive container in three plastic bags, cushioned it among the clothing in my suitcase, and prayed the olives wouldn't burst out en route! Thankfully, they did not. I enjoyed some this morning as I ate a very gooey and yummy melted Kashkaval grilled cheese on pita manaoush sandwich, sprinkled with the Jordanian zatar our friend Zaid brought back from his last trip home.
My sister and I also stopped into a Tibetan shop to browse. The man behind the counter smiled at us, but he did not speak English; this, of course, is not a problem as we all know the language of money. I bought a wool hat lined in fleece for $12; she bought a pale lime green sleeveless summer top. The front window reflects the second hand and vintage shops across the street.
Just up the street from the Tibetan shop, my sister stopped in at a Jamaican shop where she likes to buy shea body butter, which she swears by. I took a photo from inside the shop looking out. I can't remember the name of the shop or the shea butter brand, but I'll ask my sister. You can make your own shea body butter, too, if you have the time.
One day, after dropping her daughter/my niece at her high school, my sister and I walked down to Forest Hill Village. This door frame is made of broken china. It frames the front doors of a closed down restaurant, Hope Street Cafe, just up from Spadina in Forest Hill, an upscale neighbourhood in Toronto.
This is a hinge on one of the doors of Grace Church-on-the-hill, an Anglican church that we passed on our walk down Forest Hill Village where we stopped in at a bookstore and a bakery. There was a sign out front that the church was holding a concert.
This is not a door, but it is what is behind the door of the Cobs Bread bakery where we stopped in to buy some raspberry danishes, cinnamon buns, chocolate swirled croissants, and other tasty sweets to bring to our brother's house for tea time later. This bakery just opened at the beginning of this year, and I must say the raspberry danishes are dee-lish.
Beside the bakery is a bookstore and beside the bookstore is another door, a door that tells the visual story of who is walking around with a camera!
Another walk, another day, on our way to the Bata Shoe Museum on Bloor Street, I noticed that above the front doors of this University of Toronto building, the embossed script read Department of Household Science.

"It's what we used to call "Home Ec" or home economics," I told my sister. "The classes where we learned the science of being housewives." This building is evidence of the institutionalizing of "domestic science" as it was called in the day. I have no idea what home ec is called today, but I am sure the schools are teaching something similar to it, but for both genders.

The Lillian Massey Department of Household Science has an interesting history; the building now houses U of T's Department of Classics and the Centre for Medieval Studies, as well, there is a Club Monaco clothing store in the section of the building fronting Bloor St.
Here's an old photo of the Department of Household Science (approximately 1920), taken before the city of Toronto widened Avenue Road, which is now a multi-lane busy downtown street full of traffic. For a history of the building read Nostalgia Tripping: The Lillian Massey Department of Household Science by Agatha Barc, which is where I found the black and white photo.
A love-ly door on a house along the way to hiking an icy trail in High Park with my brother, his wife and their two sons. Of course, we didn't know at the time that the trail was a glossy sheet of ice. However, we managed to emerge unscathed. Mercury points to the sky outside the door where I slept.

the magnificient Pigeon River Trail, Canadian side

Unlike the trail on the American side of Pigeon River, the Canadian trail is not wheelchair accessible. It is quite a climb and restricted to those who are sure-footed and have hearty lungs. I'm still trying to figure out my new camera so, unfortunately, the American forest on the other side of the river washes out.
If you are afraid of heights, some sections of it might spook you, but there are options so you don't have to go that route. Over many years gone by, glaciers, volcanoes, water, wind, and ice have carved out this amazing landscape.
Parts of the trail are less challenging than other sections. But you still need to be able-bodied and fit to hike this trail as the path is full of roots and is not asphalted and planked the whole way like the American side. Only sections of the Canadian trail have a boardwalk and that's over the swamp down river by the end of the trail when you loop back. Parts of the trail have stones placed in such a way to help you climb up or down the path, depending on which loop you take first. Whether these rocks are natural or placed strategically for hikers' benefit, I'm not sure. I would say not as the path is left to its natural inclination for the better part; indeed, this is what contrasts it most strongly with the American side. If you are able-bodied and fit, this short invigorating trail won't disappoint you. I recommend the half hour drive down Highway 61 to the American border to hike this trail. If it's raining, however, take a rain date as the rocks will be slippery when wet.
Why risk a fall?

High Falls, the American side

In North America we have a terrible problem with multi-tasking taken to ridiculous levels. People even drink coffee and drive. There are a lot of people who drink coffee, drive, and even talk or text on their phone at the same time -- even though using a cell or personal handheld device in your car is illegal for drivers in Canada. (Indeed, last week a driver of a truck almost smashed into our car as my husband and me drove down a busy street. The distracted guy had failed to stop at a stop sign because he was too busy talking on his cell phone!).

Personally, I rarely take a coffee on the go because to me, coffee is about the ritual of brewing a cup of freshly ground beans (fairtrade and organic), waiting for the coffee grinds to settle in my little blue pot (I don't use a coffee maker), pouring the coffee into a favorite mug, and sitting down to enjoy it. To savor it on its own. I admit there were a few times that I tried taking a thermal mug of coffee with me, but both times I ended up spilling the coffee all over myself, the front seat of the car, and the floor. I have never gone through a drive-through to pick up a coffee. I'm not sure how many other Canadians can say that. On my way down to Ryden's to pick up my new camera with my son, I did take a thermal coffee mug with me filled to the brim with my home-brew. My son was driving.
The American side of the trail starts at a viewing platform that overlooks the lower part of Pigeon River as it meanders its way down to Lake Superior. Canada lies at the far horizon. The heathery colours of the reeds and grasses evoke a sedate calming warmth. The colours remind me of the heathery heaths of Ireland, where I visited in the fall a number of years ago. As we got to the platform, an American man was packing up his tripod and camera. The tranquil river shallows at this spot show little sign of the High Falls just a very short walk up river, and if you didn't know that there are falls upstream, you might only stop and visit this marshy part of the river and miss the tumult. The trail leading to the falls is paved and easily accessible to travellers of varying physical abilities. This trail is in the northernmost part of Minnesota so a lot of US residents come upstate Minnesota as this is one of the most northerly parts of their mainland. It's their north, but our south. It's all relative, after all. The border, of course, is but a recent invention of nation state building. Both sides of this land artificially cut with a border are Anishnaabe/Ojibwe/Chippewa lands.
Outhouse for anyone on the path who may suddenly need to use the loo -- for having drunk too much coffee, for example. There is a shiny new just-opened visitor center at the start of the trail with gleaming restrooms. The brown outhouse, I think, is the old version of the toilets for tourists who come to visit the High Falls trail of Grand Portage State Park.
There are wooden boardwalks leading to the viewing platforms, which make getting closer to view the falls accessible, too. This shot was taken from the higher platform. You can see High Falls in the background, the Canadian forest on the right, and my middle son, the risk-taker, getting carried away with the serotonin that pumps through you as a result of the open sky, roaring waters, and fresh, clean air. He used to do other dangerous balancing acts ever since he could drag himself out of the crib, so I no longer get panicky.
The whole natural environment is like an open heart welcoming you. This is the gift you receive for going to the most northerly part of Minnesota if you are an American. For us, it is our welcome into their country--that is, after we have crossed the security of the US border patrol at customs at the border, which includes your entire car being photographed and digitally recorded as you drive through some huge yellow steel (scanning?) barrier (and if they allow you in). This time, we had to go inside and get questioned. The border patrol officers said it was a random thing. When we got back in the car, my son said to me, "It's you. You're a jinx. This never happens to me when I cross the border."

But once past the stress of customs and the border agents, you feel welcome by the average American. Americans love us Canadians who live close to the border. Do you know how many cars cross the border each day with folks eager to go spend their money in the US? No one seems bothered in the least about the hassle of the security measures.

dinner at Manuella

One late afternoon on our way back from a day in Beirut, we stopped to eat in Jounieh at Manuella Restaurant, a large, popular seaside restaurant with both indoor and outdoor options for seating. We sat by the Mediterranean sea, under the thatch roof in the open air. For your famished eyes, they first treat you to some fresh brilliant hues. You don't know whether to stare at it or eat it. We did both.

Shortly after filling our eyes with colour and popping some pumpkin seeds and peanuts into our mouths as my brother and sister-in-law planned what we will eat, the mezze was laid out before us. Among other plates, this included grape leaves, a large artichoke, hummus (chick pea dip), tabbouleh, (parsley salad), baba ghannoush (aka moutabbal, coal charred eggplant pureed), purslane salad, and shangleesh (dried yogurt balls in spices and oil). We also had a dish of raw kibbeh (lamb meat with soaked wheat--although it really looks just like a plate of raw pounded ground meat), which my brother- and sister-in-law have to eat at every restaurant. I usually just have one scoop in my pita bread wedge. My husband doesn't eat it. I always say with a twinkle in my eye, "What kind of Lebanese are you who doesn't even eat raw kibbeh?"

 We also had a dish of fattoush, a salad which is my favorite and that I have to eat at every restaurant in Lebanon. If made correctly (and it usually is) it is very lemony, with an extra tart kick from a smattering of sumac. It is a perfect summertime dish. If I recall correctly, the plate at the fore of the photo is moo-zhaddra (that's a phonetic spelling); it's a brown lentil and cracked wheat dish with fried onions on top. There was also a plate of delicious stir fried greens which I can no longer remember the name of but it's something that is special to the Lebanese. This summer I ate all sorts of green plants in Lebanon that I have no idea what they are.

And that was just the starter.

After filling our bellies, the waiter cleared the table and laid out various seafood dishes from shrimps, squids, octopus and inky squid. The inky squid looked....very inky.

Looking over all the food, I exclaimed, "Goodness gracious! Who's going to eat all this food?"

My brother-in-law said with solemnity, "Don't forget, we still have the fish to eat. I ordered fried fish for us."


I munched and munched and the more I munched the more I felt my stomach push against the waistband of my jeans. 

 "Keep eating!" my sister-in-law laughed when I slowed down.

Time for a break.

road trip to see Gibran

When I was in Lebanon this summer, every few days I would nag my husband, “I’m not leaving Lebanon this time without going to the Gibran House and Museum.” So it happened that one day came the day that finally my husband, his brother, Sabah, his wife, Cheryl, and I took a road trip to Bcharre (also spelled Bsharri), a village in the northern mountains, to visit the house where Khalil Gibran was born and to see the Gibran Museum and Tomb, which is built into a cave in the side of a mountain.

If you are queasy with heights, I recommend you take the northern highway that speeds directly straight to Ehden rather than the old scenic road that snakes its way up along the southern ridge of the Kadisha Valley, the long and winding road that cuts through numerous villages, including Hasroun, the ancestral village of Walter Assef, former mayor of Thunder Bay, whose father was born there.

Hasroun. image source from Landscapes of Lebanon: Illustrating Twenty Poems for One Love by Nadia Tueni(1935-1983), an outstanding award-winning Lebanese poet and writer.

Hasroun is forever immortalized in all of our minds (my brother-in-law and his wife once lived in Thunder Bay and our young children played together); as we drive through this picturesque village we all chant: “here’s where Walter Assef is from!”

There is no denying that you are in conservative Maronite Christian Patriarch territory. Cemeteries, shrines, churches, posters large and small and other signs of a patriarchal Maronite history and presence abound. Sabah pointed out the cemetery on the edge of the gorge that him and his friends slept in one night to escape getting beaten up by angry villagers chasing them because of a teenage prank they pulled.

"Dear god!" I said. "Sleeping in a graveyard? And this one, perched so precariously on the edge of the gorge? What if a fierce supernatural being swooped down from the sky and tossed you down the ridge? Or a ghost emerged from a crypt?"

No, he laughed. We knew we would be safe in there at night. No one would look for us in there.

He also pointed out the old cinema in the center of the village where he first saw Romeo and Juliet, the 1968 Franco Zeferelli film that inspired and shaped the minds of so many young people, here, there, and everywhere popular culture descended like a new religion. As my brother-in-law skilfully and speedily manoeuvred the car along the edge of the cliff, I told my sister-in-law that after seeing Romeo and Juliet, I sewed a brown velveteen Juliet-sleeved, high collared-lace trimmed, empire waisted velvet ribboned dress for the Gr. 8 Christmas dance at Algonquin Public School. Such were the dreams of budding young romantics in whose minds flower power and Shakespeare blossomed side by side.

The old road was made long before cars were invented; its many hairpin turns, many without guardrails, may make you uncomfortable. I know you will never find my mother on that road. Then again, you may find the rapid ascent into the mountains exhilarating and refreshing, especially in contrast to the heat, humidity, and congestion of Tripoli and Beirut. The beauty of Lebanon is that it is a country of contradictions that live side by side with the unexpected always presenting itself around the next corner.

Bscharre. The etymology of its name is Phonecian/Canaanite, meaning "The House of Ishtar."

It's not easy to describe Bscharre; it's a small village of awesome magnificence. Gibran, of course, spent an entire lifetime immortalizing this House of Ishtar in his writings, paintings, sketches and poetry, and he is the best source.

Other writers have given a glimpse; from "In Gibran's City" by Maroun Abboud, c. 1954 :

"Bsharri sleeps in the lap of the mountain, the brooks sing for her and the breeze lulls her; the Qadisha river passes under her feet, and she is, thus, always in a cold bath. In her stand erect the poplars like giants amongst the dwarf fruit trees. Were it not for the houses, you would think her a fertile oasis; and were it not for the bells constantly tolling for prayer, especially the Carmelite priests bell, you would deem yourself in seclusion. No shouting or screaming in Bsharri; you pass by her coffee shops as if passing through a reading room, even though you might not see a book nor a newspaper.

The mountains surround her from four sides, and wherever you turn you see peaks erect like statues and domes; from the East dangles the waterfall, a silver chain in the neck of the beautiful "Jubbah"; and you see the electricity pipes of Qadisha like the snake that deceived our mother Eve -- that is if it were black, since every theologian dresses it with a color of his own imagination -- but the water is always snow-cold, and is a delicious seasickness to what the kitchens build."

The house where Gibran was born is a simple peasant-style one-room stone house at the top of the village square. Like other old-style homes, it does not need AC to stay cool as do the new villas and buildings that are rapidly mushrooming across the Lebanese landscape. Its simple charm is a step back in time with old cooking pots, a small fireplace, a rocking chair, two wooden chests, one long one with a padded wool batting top that appears to also have been a bed, a white wrought iron single bed, and striped sofa cushions, woolen and worn, that sit on the earthen ground, edging the walls and wrapping around a large copper tray table.

I realized later as I tried to scrub clay coloured stains off my white cropped jeans that wearing white that day wasn’t a smart choice, after all. Dropping my bag to the earthen floor to take photos it seems I had inadvertently brushed the dusty earth of Bscharre all over the legs of my pants.

On the way out, Charlotte, the well-informed tour guide who brought us through the house, pointed to a window and told me to take a photo looking out onto the memorial statue of Gibran. As we were leaving the Gibran House, a group of tourists in a van pulled up and spilled out onto the steps, with Charlotte leading the way to the house.

I didn’t realize until later that it was the same window that caught my eye on the way in to the house.

Before we had gone into the Gibran House, we had stopped in the town square just below it to eat breakfast, freshly baked zaatar pies (made with local savory herb and sesame seeds) and cheese pies (local cheese) at a small shop along the long stairs that run up the slope. Enjoying my pie and beer, I watched two young boys walking up the stairs; one had a toy submachine gun in his hands. Awhile later, I noticed two other young boys walk up the stairs; one had a PSP in his hands.

Returning my empty beer bottle back to the zaatar shop after we left the Gibran House, I looked up and noticed a tangled mass of electrical wires surging overhead.

"Those would not have been there when Gibran lived here" I said to my sister-in-law as we walked down the stairs to the large stone spring-fed water fountain in front of the main church at the bottom of the square. After sipping ice cold water, we climbed back in the car and headed for the Gibran Museum and Tomb.

The Gibran Museum and Tomb are in Mar Sarkis, a former Christian Carmelite monastery that Gibran had wished to buy. The Museum and Tomb are a short car ride up the road from the center square of the village, but in the old days would have been a pilgrimage up the mountain towards solitude. It is sometimes a challenge to remove one's car culture eyes and imagine life before the paved roads we zip along on. Perhaps in days gone by, the trip from Bishmezzine to Bscharre was a week long affair of numerous stops along the way, rather than scheduled into a day where one had to get back before 2:30 to have dinner with mother-in-law.

I guess someone thought Gibran needed a drink.

The museum has a room that replicates Gibran's living space, and it holds some of his personal items that would have been in his studio (which was in New York; he called it the Hermitage). The museum holds a large selection of Gibran’s paintings and drawings (his visual art numbers about 400, but some are in museums in the US and others in private collections). The paintings and drawings in the museum are quite remarkable viewed as a collection in the silence inside the mountain. The paintings are exhibited in groupings in cave-like rooms, the later rooms going deeper into the mountain and higher, so that one needs to climb a steep set of stairs. It is not wheelchair accessible. No photos are allowed.

May Ziadeh

To reach Gibran’s tomb, after going up the stairs to the last gallery, you then go down a narrow flight of stairs into a cave where the walls are covered in a deep emerald green moss. The air is heavy and damp, but pleasant. It is quiet. You could hear a church mouse enter. His coffin is in a deep recess in the cave wall with a twisted old cedar trunk placed before the opening, so his grave is screened by a natural cedar sculpture.

After we left, we stopped to browse through the books that were for sale, but like many tourist sites, they were over-priced. I picked up a copy of Gibran Love Letters later, at Antoine’s on Hamra Street in Beirut, where it was 12 US dollars cheaper. In this edited and translated collection of Gibran’s letters to May Ziadah, a renowned Palestinian writer who had lived in Lebanon and had a literary salon in Egypt in the 1920s, Gibran tells her in a letter dated Dec. 3rd 1923:

“What can I say in response to your remarks about The Prophet? What should I say to you? This book is only a small part of what I have seen and of what I see every day, a small part only of the many things yearning for expression in the silent hearts of men and in their souls. There has never been anyone on the face of this earth with the ability to achieve anything by himself, as an individual completely cut off from all other human company. Nor is there anyone among us today who is able to do more than record what people say inadvertently. The Prophet, May, is only the first letter of a single word.”