It all started with this story. The very last story that Rumi told in his poetry before his passing. I knew it had to be great significance. I knew that Rumi wouldn’t just tell us a story about family drama. And yet I didn’t understand it. Or rather didn’t understand it’s significance. At first. The meaning of it went over my head. What stumped me defined me. The reason I struggled with understanding it was precisely because it contained the life lesson I needed to incorporate into my life. In fact, it was a struggle I had in many aspects of my life. A certain pattern of behavior I kept repeating.   

What this story? 

I encourage you to read the full story on your own. But in essence it is about a person who successful navigating the balance of being touched by a glimmer of the divine and yet having two feet firmly planted in physical reality. 

In my own life I had a tendency to immerse myself into a task. Become obsessed with it. Approach it in a puritanical way. Keep setting the bar higher for myself until the task turns into a form of torture. 

Allow me to give you an example of this pattern in my life as an author. 

To inspire myself while writing the novel Spoonful Chronicles I found myself delving into a bunch of activities. 

Since Thaniya, the main character of the novel, aspires to become a poet, I decided I would become a poet on her behalf. I spent four years writing poetry. My hope was that I would write bad poetry at the beginning of the novel, mediocre poetry in the middle and great poetry towards the end. I published all my output on this blog. I even tried to come up with my own unique brand of poetry that I called “doodle poems”. Imagine the tenacity that allows somebody to say I will invent my own kind of poetry. I translated the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish into English. Then I set into a flamenco performance. I immersed myself into the world of poetry reading a wide variety of it as possible. In the process I fell in love with the work of Garcia Lorca. I was already in love with Rumi. In the end writing bad and mediocre poetry was easy, the brilliant kind alluded me. There are two poems that I feel proud of. First is a strange poem about motherhood and bad cooking. Second a poem about bread and creating a sense of belonging. They are the best of the mediocre poems. Sorry Thaniya, I so wanted you to have a victory at the end. However, I did gain a heightened appreciation of poets. I also believe the process made me a better writer somehow. It did not turn me into a poet. 

I always felt great admiration for the “To be or not be” soliloquy in Hamlet. So I rewrote to fit the narrative of the novel. 

I adore the novel Forty Rules of Love. Inspired by it, I decided to create Ten Rules of Eating and sprinkle it in the novel. Like spice. These rules give the reader insights into the life philosophy of Thaniya. 

The name Thaniya itself which means “second” as in second in order. Is inspired by the name of the Sufi mystic poet Rabia Al Adawiya. Rabia means “fourth”. She was named such because she was the fourth child in her family. The is a delightful interplay in the novel concerning the numbers two and four that I will let you discover on your own. 

And then came the foodie adventure side of the novel. I always think of the chair painting by Van Gogh. How that chair was probably a completely ordinary chair that thousands of people had. And yet, Van Gogh was able to look at it. Look at it. And then look at it some more until a magical world of chairs was revealed to him. That chair trusted Van Gogh and allowed him to see something that was denied the rest of the world. 

To inspired myself to write Spoonful Chronicles. I grabbed a bag of spinach and placed it under my pillow at night. That is how I wrote the spinach chapter in the novel. 

Later I held a cauliflower in my lap and stared at it for hours. I tried to look at it the way Van Gogh looked at his chair. A magical unfolding happened. Something I can’t describe with words. Yes, I was in communion with a cauliflower. I ended up rewriting Metamorphosis by Kafka as a story of woman who turns to a cauliflower. It resulted in something ethereal and magical that I feel proud of. 

And then came the cooking frenzy. I made recipe after recipe of food art. There was the Andy Warhol Chairman Mao in Russian salad. Lasagna that looks like a giant strawberry and many others. What a dizzying adventure it all was. I feel like I delved into the world of food and emerged a different person. 

Needless to say I read every foodie novel I encountered.

I also devised these doodle type drawings which I incorporated into the novel in an interesting way. 

I hope you are starting to see why each novel takes several years to write.

To write a novel is to live in a dream like state. A place where all becomes possible. In there the physical and divine interact. Things get transmuted. A truer essence emerges. It is a magical world that I built for myself to allow the imagination to flow. Later I cracked a window into this to allow the rest of the world a peak. 

Reflecting on all this fills me with such gratitude. I had the courage to write something with all my heart, with absolute sincerity and devotion. And later share it with the world. That is no small thing. 

There was just one problem. 

When I wrote “The End”, I fell in the abyss of the depression for months. In fact I fell apart after finishing writing every single book.  I don’t fully understand why this happened and kept on happening. I did have a couple of theories. 

One, is the weight of expectations. In that creative space a novel is a beautiful perfect thing. When it’s printed words on paper, it somehow always seems less than what I had imagined. The end result always seems like a disappointment when compared to it highest potential.

Second is the loss of connection with the magical imaginary world that I just lived in for years. Yes, it only existed in my head, but that place was heaven. And now I was expelled from it with no guarantee of finding a way back. I had to find a way to exist in plain jane everyday reality. 

This above is just one example of extremes I go to. I came list several more, but then you would have to sit here reading this blogpost for 10 hours.

It was four years ago, that I decided that my well being was more important than writing novels. I wasn’t willing to go through the torment anymore. I told higher powers in the sky: ”If you want to inspire me to write, then find a way to do so that doesn’t require me to fall apart and later gather myself back. “ And so I decided to quit writing. To distract myself from thinking about creative writing, I knew I had to occupy myself with something else. Something so consuming it would stop me from thinking about the novel that was forming in my imagination. I decided to would go back to working hi-tech, after a 12 year break. I knew that would be a task requiring so much of my energy as to keep me distracted from writing. And so it was, I applied myself to job in software development until loosing my job late 2024. I saw losing the job as a sign that perhaps I was ready to write again.  

And then something happened that gave me some insight. Two years ago, I received an invitation from a professor to attend an online lecture he was giving. The topic of the lecture included a discussion of my novel Spoonful Chronicles. I accepted. This person talked about my novel like it was a work of genius. He talked about me like I was Dostoyevsky, a literary grand master. I kept it together. Answered all questions directed to me, nonchalantly. When the lecture was over and I turned off my computer. I felt physically uncomfortable. Feverish like. My whole body started to shake, I had to go lie down to calm down for a whole hour before I could function again. It was one of those clarifying moments. I realized that I didn’t believe it. Whatever that professor saw in my writing, I didn’t believe it myself. I wanted it. I really really wanted it. But I didn’t believe that I am capable of achieving my own desire.  

“I need to work on believing that I can have that which is my heart’s desire.” became my new mission. I needed to believe that I am worthy of the gift of inspiration.

I am happy to report that I did finish writing a novel and didn’t fall apart at the end of it. This is my proudest accomplishment of 2025. Not that I finished writing a novel. But that I finished writing it and I didn’t shred myself to pieces in the process of it. As I put the finishing touches on it, I look forwards to sharing it with you. I so hope that reading it brings you joy.

I think the lesson of Rumi’s story has finally been integrated.