The Gift: 40 Days

Sometime ago, I received a gift from a friend, a book of poems by Hafiz called The Gift. It arrived as a timely answer to my helpless wandering at the time. It was a joyful reminder that everything in life is a “gift” which I must accept and enjoy in reverence.

As Hafiz predicts, my underarms were soon tingling with newly budding wings. He taught me a new dance of celebration. I drew the body’s movement as dancers, as the flow of the spirit, as angels. I drew desires as shadows.

Every poem of Hafiz is a song and a painting. His abstract concept of total love, divine or otherwise, transforms itself into Eros once it’s drawn. We understand and experience all forms of love with bodily intelligence as long as we live in this vessel called the body.

The number 40 is the number of perseverance. In his spirit, I made 40 paintings that his poems conjured in my mind: “True art evolves us—opens our arms and weakens our prejudices so that the ever-present seeds of healing take root in our soul and sinew, cause Joy.”