A recent post of poems by the Kashmiri Sufi Nuruddin Rishi included this verse:
He created man with the earthly nature
and shaped him in the frame of clay.
He created all natural things from clay.
Cooking is done in pots of clay.
When life leaves,
the body is reduced to dust.
Dust gets mixed with dust.

At first reading, we may think the poem is simply describing the transience of the body: God made your form from clay, and some day your body will again be dust mixed with dust, nothing more. Certainly, that is an important and fundamental lesson for the spiritual student. We must recognise the impermanence of the body if we want to rise to awareness of the spirit.  But there is something else here as well.

Nuruddin Rishi’s poems are brief, almost silent, and they convey something of the long, silent hours of meditation the poet spent in his cold, bare cave in the woods.  The words are not random chatter but arise out of a profound stillness; therefore they carry weight.  When he passes from the human frame shaped of clay to a clay cooking pot, he is not simply listing things made of clay (such as bricks, roof tiles, flower pots, crockery, etc) but he is reflecting on what happens in our brief occupation of an earthly form.  The clay cooking pot serves a purpose, but in itself is not the goal.  The pot is of value because of what is cooked in it. In fact, the poem itself is a little like a cooking pot, a form surrounding something unspoken.

In a recent post about evolution, Hazrat Inayat Khan makes the point that a newborn baby is beauty itself and is nothing else than love, and yet it does not know what love and beauty are.  It is only by living in the world of differences that we can begin to recognise and appreciate these qualities.  It is that transformation that could be called ‘cooking.’

But of course cooking requires heat, whether from a flame applied to the pot, or, as was done in neolithic times, from hot stones thrown into the contents of the pot.  In either case, the heat – or to be plain, the suffering – is what brings about the change.

And to complete this extended metaphor, when the contents of the pot are well cooked, then others can enjoy the results and be nourished.  That is why it says in the Vadan, Boulas:
The bringers of joy have always been the children of sorrow.