“Powell Gardens, Kansas City’s botanical garden, is the only Kansas City-area venue to host Frida Kahlo’s Garden, an in-depth exhibition focusing on the influences and inspirations behind Frida Kahlo’s (1907–1954) body of work.” Here’s a sampling of that exhibit which is both biographical and educational.
Rumi was a masterful storyteller. Even by the lofty standard of Muslim mystics, he had a lovely way of talking about the most sublime of realities through everyday metaphors. Some of his favorite metaphors have to do with that most alchemical daily activity: cooking.
In many cultures, people obtain their protein not from meat, but from beans and legumes. So cooking hardened nuts till they are soft — for there is a grace in softness — was a matter of daily sustenance for many people worldwide.
Which brings us to the chickpea story, and Rumi’s retelling of the story.
A woman was standing over a fire, having poured a handful of dry, hardened chickpeas into water. As the water warmed up to the point of boiling, her mind began to wander. Then she heard a voice:
“I am burning!”
Startled out of her daydream, she looked to the right, to the left.
She didn’t see anyone, so she drifted back into the daydream.
Again, she heard:
“I am burning!”
This time she looked a bit more closely, and saw that the sound was coming from….inside the pot of boiling water. A chickpea within the boiling water, to be more precise. The little chickpea, twirling around the boiling water, began talking to the woman:
“I am burning….
Get me out of here!”
The woman glanced at the chickpea with compassion. Up it went, down it went in the boiling water. The fire was so hot it made water hot. What kind of fire is this, that makes water boil?
The chickpea pleaded with the woman again:
“Get me out of here!”
She reached over, and grabbed a ladle. She reached into the water.
And pushed the chickpea back into boiling water. The chickpea swam around the ladle, and rose to the surface again.
“Did you not hear me?
It’s boiling in here.
Get. Me. Out!”
The woman looked lovingly at the chickpea. She said: “My darling chickpea, I push you back in, because you’re not done cooking yet. You’re still hard. You need to be cooked before you’re worthy of being taken inside.”
As Rumi puts it:
If you should leave this place for one perfected
You’ll be a morsel and then resurrected.
All of us are like this, hardened hearts, in the process of becoming soft, getting cooked. The whole of life is like this: cooking in the fire of love, going from a state of hardness to softness, from rawness to being spiritually “cooked.” There is a transformation that each of us must undergo before we are “done.”
Rumi himself summarized his own life as this:
The whole of my life
is summed up in these three phrases:
I used to be raw
Then I was cooked
Now,
I am on fire.
Most of us would be content to simply go from being raw to cooked. For a select few, those who want not just salvation but sanctification, the goal is to actually be on fire. That way, anyone who comes into their orbit can move from being raw to being cooked.
I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death. ~ Lin Yutang
THE AWAKENING
Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
In the early dawn of happiness
you gave me three kisses
so that I would wake up
to this moment of love
I tried to remember in my heart
what I’d dreamt about
during the night
before I became aware
of this moving
of life
I found my dreams
but the moon took me away
It lifted me up to the firmament
and suspended me there
I saw how my heart had fallen
on your path
singing a song
Between my love and my heart
things were happening which
slowly slowly
made me recall everything
You amuse me with your touch
although I can’t see your hands.
You have kissed me with tenderness
although I haven’t seen your lips
You are hidden from me.
But it is you who keeps me alive
Perhaps the time will come
when you will tire of kisses
I shall be happy
even for insults from you
I only ask that you
keep some attention on me.
Sunset
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.
leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs-
leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
“An awake heart is like a sky that pours light.” -- Hafiz
“As a photographer you have a deep love for light, life and yourself. You know that the eyes of love aren’t blind, they are wide open. Only when your eye, heart and soul shine brighter than the sun, you realize how ordinary it is to love the beautiful, and how beautiful it is to love the ordinary.” ― Marius Vieth
“The Earth would die
If the sun stopped kissing her.”
Khwāja Šams ud-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī
“Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow
Try to remember, and if you remember
Then follow”
"Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium.
There is no life without water." — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Maverick Mist 