Do you have a spiritual connection to any artist’s work?
And I don’t just mean visual art. It could be a favourite piece of music, a book, a poem, or even a chef or baker, for they too can be artists.
Although I produce a large number of Canadiana art prints and Italian art, not all of my influences are Italian or Canadian.
I’ve written in the past about the connection I feel with Van Morrison. As artists we need to find a way to appreciate all different types of art.
Up there with Van, though, is the poet Rumi.
Born in the year 1207, Rumi obviously passed many, many years before I was born. And yet, his work inspires me so deeply. It’s as though he’s reaching across time and space to speak directly to me.
Art is like that, in a way. Go over to your shelf and pick up the work of an artist you know to have passed away. Rumi is just one example – there are millions of others.
John Lennon, Pete Seeger, Ella Fitzgerald, Rumi, Homer, Edgar Allen Poe, the list goes on and on.
These artists are all gone today, but through their work they live on. An entire lifetime of experience is poured into each of these works. In some cases, they’re published in languages that didn’t even exist at the time they wrote. And yet, because of the miracle of art, we understand their lives, their hopes, their dreams, in a way we can never understand a nameless Calabrian peasant farmer from the 16th century.
Can art change your life? Rumi’s art certainly did. Find a quiet, peaceful place to read this poem to yourself. I can only hope it changes you as profoundly as it changed me.
A Great Wagon
When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
You appear; all studying wanders.
I lose my place.
Water turns pearly.
Fire dies down and doesn’t destroy.
In your presence I don’t want what I thought
I wanted, those three little hanging lamps.
Inside your face the ancient manuscripts
Seem like rusty mirrors.
You breathe; new shapes appear,
and the music of a desire as widespread
as Spring begins to move
like a great wagon.
Drive slowly.
Some of us walking alongside
are lame!
~
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
~
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
~
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.
~
Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?
~
They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.
In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul
and you are that.
But we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone.
~
Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
My Work Inspired By Rumi
Below you’ll find a few of my favourite pieces inspired by the poem you just read. I hope you enjoy them.
Contact Francesco Galle, Toronto Prints Artist
Do you like the work you see above? If so, I offer many of my prints for sale on my website.
Feel free to contact me using the information below if you have any questions, or if you’d like to have a commissioned piece done.