Cyber Sofreh: Day 14

There is a certain kind of happiness I sometimes experience that I privately can only describe as "lemon happy." Like tasting lemon curd, it is piercing while holding a sweetness that is beyond my taste bud's comprehension. And it is due to the influence of outside forces: lemon and sugar, or the existence of a fellow human being. Things that are gloriously outside of my control.

When it was first explained to me that flowers turn their faces towards the sun and move their bodies to dance with sunlight all day long, I didn't know how to believe it. It was a fact that perched uncomfortably between my childlike classification of flowers as Things That Just Sit There and Do Not Dance and my sense of what it was like to be a living being that moved.



A poetic someone pointed out that the flowers were in love with the sun, and their movement was a kind of love-based devotion. A prayer.




Sumac flowers. It reaches for the sun each day and somehow by a miracle of photosynthesis and genetics manages to capture the scarlet taste of sunlight in it's fruit. We dry it and crush it and eat it, and the whole cycle of how it goes from sunlight into our bodies and is then consciously remembered as the taste and color of the sun reminds me of the physicality of dervishes during sema, with one hand up and one hand down:

"As you act as a conduit in the turn, the light comes through the right hand, and the left hand brings it into this world." - Mevlevi Sheikh Süleyman Hayati Dede

Day 14- Sumac.


Images: http://www.klyoga.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/sun-salutation.jpg
http://www.theworldwidegourmet.com/products/spices/sumac/