The Sema



For years I kept calling you,
And suddenly you came to me at dawn,
And whirled me to the Sema,
You left me with not a moment to spare,
Not even for my morning prayer.
~Rumi

  (watercolours and acrylic)

I painted this Dervish in a trance, in celebration of this verse by Rumi. Someone very special had read it to me and it has been part of me for a very long time.

The colours are a gentle intermingling of warm, cold and earth tones. It is difficult to explain 'Nirvana' or 'Moksha' or 'Najaat' using the visible spectrum of seven colours and the shades in between. 

This Dervish is a representation of myself. His feet are still planted on the ground while his head or mind is reaching for the heavens. I wanted to depict the non existence of time and space when in ecstasy.

The 'Simurgh' which represents the 'self' or the 'soul' in Sufism is depicted here above the head of the Dervish as reuniting with the Source, the celestial Almighty, which is why I painted it in the same colours of the skies.

Passion can never be satisfactorily put on paper or canvas. This is a glimpse of my fleeting imagination... a feeling I felt when I heard the verse above.

This work by Ambereena Razvi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.