The Garden Between Worlds
- Lyra Knox
- Nov 2
- 5 min read
When I was about twelve years old, a book found me. Or perhaps, more truthfully, I found myself through it. It was The Garden of the Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I remember holding it in my small hands and feeling as though I had touched something ancient, something that remembered me long before I could remember it.
I didn’t yet know that Gibran was one of the most luminous voices to ever translate the language of the soul into human words. I only knew that when I read his work, something in me stirred awake. His words spoke in paradoxes, in that strange rhythm where sorrow holds hands with joy, and loss walks beside love. I could feel that I lived in the same realm from which he wrote; the liminal space between opposites, where truth is neither this nor that but something tenderly breathing in between.
Gibran once wrote, “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” I did not yet have words for my own pain, but when I read those lines, they opened like light through a crack.
They told me that breaking wasn’t a sign of failure but of expansion. That pain was not an intruder but a teacher who spoke in a language I was just beginning to learn. It has taking me almost 45 yrs to finally grasp what his words were trying to say all along. And now, a few weeks later, when I wrote my song Where Love Pours In, I realized I had been answering him all along.
Pain is the chalice, the sacred design, Breaking the vessel so light can align. Through every wound, the cosmos spins. Love finds its way, love pours in.
Gibran’s “shell” had become my “chalice.” His silent wisdom had become my melody. Both metaphors hold the same truth: that what shatters us also shapes us. That pain is not punishment but passage. I see now that Where Love Pours In is not just a song, but a continuation of the conversation he began a century ago.
As a child, I often felt like an observer standing at the edge of two worlds. I was both within life and somehow watching it from afar, living in what I now call “the space between choice.” Gibran gave me permission to exist there. He showed me that this liminal space is not indecision but sacred witnessing. It is the pause before the breath, the stillness before creation unfolds.
In The Garden of the Prophet, Gibran wrote, “Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.” That line shaped how I listen to people, how I write, and how I've tried to live. It made me sensitive to the unsaid, to the way meaning hums in silence, to the way truth often hides between words rather than inside them. His voice taught me that the space between is not empty at all; it is full of potential, of trembling, of divine invitation.
That realization has guided my life and my art. My poems, my lyrics, my healing work, even the way I move through grief, are all rooted in that sacred pause between what was and what will be. When I write, I am translating the in-between. When I sing (in the shower that is), I am giving breath to the silence he once described.
Gibran also wrote, “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.” That sentence changed the architecture of how I understood the human experience. It taught me that joy and sorrow are not opposites but reflections of one another. They rise from the same deep well, and to deny one is to shallow the other.
Every time I step into the creative process, I feel that truth in my bones. Where Love Pours In was born from pain, but what poured out was beauty. The well that once held my tears became the same place from which the song rose. In that way, creation is not about escaping suffering but allowing it to bloom into something transcendent.
Gibran’s paradoxical language has always felt like a map of my inner world. When he said, “Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you,” I understood it intuitively. Meaning, after all, is not absolute; it’s relational. It exists in the current between speaker and listener, between artist and soul. The words that fall away are as sacred as those that stay.
That sense of duality also pulses through this line that currently, I am trying to birth into lyrics for a new song, “I am the fold inside the spiral, where creation and ending meet.” It is a mirror to his philosophy, that life is circular, not linear, and that endings are simply another way the universe exhales into beginnings.
Both his writing and my music emerge from the same consciousness: the knowing that destruction is not separate from creation, that chaos and love are not enemies, and that divinity reveals itself most clearly in the spaces where opposites kiss.
When I revisited Gibran’s work this past week while on vacation, I realize he wasn’t teaching from above; he was teaching from the threshold. He stood in that same in-between where the poet, the healer, and the mystic reside, that place where one can see both light and shadow clearly enough to understand they are made of the same source. I feel deeply connected to that. It’s how I strive to live, create, and perceive the world.
Gibran was a bridge between East and West, between mysticism and modernity, between prose and prayer. In my own way, I like to think that I am also trying to be a bridge, between science and spirit, between the seen and unseen, between the body and the cosmos. He painted with words; I sculpt with sound and frequency. But at the core, we are both trying to reveal the same thing: that love is the force that unites all dualities.
Perhaps that is why his work found me at twelve. My mind was learning logic, but my soul already spoke in paradox. I didn’t need to understand him to feel him. His words didn’t explain life; they awakened it. And maybe every piece I’ve written since then; from Constellations Don’t Obey Lines to Where Love Pours In, has been another way of tending to the same garden he once described, the garden of the Beloved, where love, sorrow, and beauty are all simply different fragrances of the same divine bloom.
Gibran taught me that the role of the poet is not to offer answers, but to keep the dialogue between heaven and earth alive. That is the work I continue, consciously or not, every time I write, every time I speak, every time I witness pain transmute into light in another human being.
Maybe that is the real garden, not a place but a vibration, where love never ceases to pour in, and where the observer and the observed are one.
☥
Carry a piece of the garden with you, the melody is waiting.
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