A return to the face I had before the
world gave me another one.
2026
Acrylic on canvas
50 x 30 cm
. FullyRumi wrote of the soul as something that arrives whole and spends a lifetime being forgotten, not lost but forgotten, and the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described the same truth through his concept of the true self, that authentic core which does not disappear under the weight of adult life but retreats quietly into hiding, behind performance, behind responsibility, behind the accumulated pressure of being too much or not enough. Jung, who drew his understanding of psychological transformation substantially from Greek mythology, recognized in the myth of Persephone the same movement: the descent of the self into hiddenness, and its eventual return not as rescue but as readiness, when the inner conditions finally allow it.
This painting is about that moment of return. The figure's large hand reaches gently toward a small girl emerging from within the tree that grows inside her own face, and the gesture is not a reaching forward but a receiving, an openness, a readiness. The little girl, painted in the detailed language of Persian miniature, is not being pulled but is choosing to come out, trusting that the space being offered is safe. That trust is the leap, not an act of courage in the conventional sense, but an act of listening, of finally believing what has always been known.
Above, a bird rendered in the luminous color of Persian miniature tradition rests against a monochrome botanical flower, the two figures of the ancient Persian allegory of lover and beloved, here reframed as the meeting of the self with its own deepest nature, the bird vivid and fully itself, the flower holding its form quietly, and together they rest in a stillness that is not passivity but completion.
Growth begins here, not in the reaching forward, but in the turning inward.