On the subject of kitchens and cooking from my recent post, here’s a poem by Rumi:
Look at the chickpeas in the pot,
how they leap up when they feel the fire.
While boiliing, one of them rises to the top
and cries, “Why are you setting this fire under me?
Did you buy me for this tumbling and tourture?”
The housewife keeps hitting it with the ladle.
“No!” she says, “boil nicely now,
and don’t leap away from the one who makes the fire.
It’s not because you are hateful to me that I boil you,
but so that you might gain flavor,
and become nutritous and mingle with
essential spirit.
This affliction is not because you are despised.
When you were green and fresh,
you were watered in the garde:
that watering was fo the sake of this fire.”-Mathnawi III, 4159-65
translation by Kabir Helminski
Referred to in a TimesLife article called Dharma in the Kitchen?, an interview with businesswoman Swati Piramal. Another nice poem she quotes, by a woman from medieval India and translated by Tagore:
I salute the life that is revealed and that is hidden and the life of surging sea of fire
the life that is tender like a lotus and hard like a thunderbolt
the life full of joy and life weary with its pains
the life eternally moving, rocking the world into stillness
the life deep and silent breaking out into roaring waves of happiness…
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