🌷🧚♀️ I’m reading this book now: THE BOOK OF MIRDAD

Believing that he was hungry I said to him very gently and very sincerely,
'We will share this frugal meal. There is enough bread for both of us - and for the bellwether:
To my almost paralysing astonishment he threw the first loaf to the goats, then the second and third, and so until the seventh, taking a bite of each for himself. I was thunderstruck, and anger began to tear my chest.

Yet realizing my helplessness, I quieted my anger in a measure, and turning a puzzled eye upon the goatherd said half-begging, half-reproaching,
'Now, that you have fed a hungry man's bread to your goats, would you not feed him some of their milk?'

'My goats' milk is poison to fools; and I would not have any of my goats guilty of taking even a fool's life?
'But wherein am I a fool?'
"In that you take seven loaves of bread for a seven lives' journey.
"Should I have taken seven thousand, then?'
'Not even one?’
‘To go provisionless on such a long journey - is that what you advise?'
'The way that provides not for the wayfarer is no way to fare upon?’
‘Would you have me eat flint for bread and drink my sweat for water?'
‘Your flesh is food sufficient, and your blood is drink sufficient.
There is the way besides?'
The strange story of a monastery which was once called The Ark
by Mikhail Naimy