Rumi

"Through love the bitter shall be transformed into the sweetest, Through love copper shall be reborn into the purest gold." At the very edge of the water, on a golden mat, sits a grey-bearded elder in a tall turban — Jalaladdin Rumi. Prayer beads slip through his fingers, his gaze turned into the distance, beyond the garden, to where words are no longer needed. Before him, open on a carved stand, lies a book — 'Masnavi', his own ocean of verse — and beside it rest a writing set and a case for scrolls. But he neither reads nor writes: he abides. This is not a garden where one has come to learn — it is the garden of one who has already arrived. Above him rises a pomegranate tree, heavy with ripe fruit. Here the pomegranate is neither a promise nor the abundance of the table, but a ripened heart: that which no longer reaches for the fruit, for it has itself become the fruit, filled to the brim. On the branches three hoopoes sit motionless. They are not disciples — they are friends of God, fellow seekers, whose very coming is itself a testimony: where the friends of God have gathered, His presence too is near. Their silence beside the sheikh is the conversation of equals. To the left, by the bushes, stands a gazelle — and it does not flee. For one still on the road, the gazelle is the elusive Truth, forever beyond the next hill. But before Rumi she has grown still, tame and near: the Truth that has ceased to slip away, that has stayed with the one who has nowhere left to go. She is near not as prey, but as a friend. And right at the water's edge lie stones — red, green, blue, white. Whoever has read the tale of Mushkil Gusha, the resolver of difficulties, will recognise them at once: that scattering of gems revealed to the one who has climbed the stairway. Each colour here is a light of its own, its own prophetic road, sent to people in its appointed hour; green bears the light of Muhammad ﷺ, and beside it lie stones of other colours — the other paths of the great messengers. Different in colour, they lie together by the one water, for they lead to the One. Here is the quiet cipher of this garden: the roads are many — the Source is one. This work took the master 100 days, with a brush of a single hair. About the work The leaf belongs to the tradition of Bukhara book miniature, heir to the mastery of Maverannahr of the 16th–17th centuries: a gilded ground, the fine working of foliage and flowering grasses, cloud-bands in the Far Eastern taste, the calligraphic lightness of line. The composition is built around the figure of a Sufi poet in a garden — an enduring motif of Persian and Central Asian painting, where nature becomes a mirror of the inner state. The images of the birds, the beast and the fruit-bearing tree are here no everyday backdrop, but the language in which Sufi poetry speaks. The scene unites the portrait of a sage with the parable-like depth characteristic of illustrations to Sufi texts. Details Base: Natural handmade Bukhara silk paper (90% silk, 10% cotton) Technique: Tempera, watercolour, natural plant and mineral pigments, gold leaf (23 carat) Unique piece