I want to tell you about Saffron Rose and how children pick up light.
I grew up Bahá'í in Kenya. The Faith began in Iran, and while the community is as diverse as the world itself, my mother brought her Iranian heritage into everything we celebrated.
For the commemoration of the passing of Bahá'u'lláh, we would get up in the middle of the night. And there would always be sholehzard, a Persian saffron rice pudding, warm and fragrant and golden, served as a commemorative food. It wasn't just warm and cozy, it was a holy day. It was reverent and rooted. There we were in our little corner of Nairobi, in the middle of the night, Kenyans, Indians, Iranians, English, Malaysians, Ethiopians, Americans, and on and on (and their bleary eyed children), gathered around something that tasted like home to my mother. She shared it with everyone.
Saffron, rose and cardamom are a combination that is home to so many of us. You find this spice lineage in Moroccan bastilla, in Kashmiri tea, in Persian bastani sonnati, in Gulf balaleet, in Indian zarda. This flavor has traveled further than any of us. In my case, all the way to Kenya, where it became my taste of home, even though I have never set foot in my mother's homeland.
And I know people who grew up with us who aren't Iranian who feel the same way about it too. African American friends who grew up in Eritrean neighborhoods, Persians who grew up around Ecuadorians — they tell me the same thing. The smells. The colors. That warmth of whatever culture they grew up connected to became a piece of home for them too. Most especially when shared inside of homes, with families — remember that?
I know this because I lived it from the other side. There was an Ethiopian Bahá'í family in our community in Nairobi. I grew up eating their offerings of doro wat and injera at holy day gatherings. Years later, living in Seattle in Eritrean neighborhoods, those Habesha flavors were already a piece of home to me. I understood exactly what my mother had done.
And it wasn't only the holy days. In high school, one of my closest friends was Somali. I ate at her house almost every week. Banana and pasta (suugo baasto) — a dish I had no name for at the time. I just knew it as her mother's kitchen, as safety and the smell of somewhere I belonged. I still think about that table.
I'm not talking about an adult who loves tacos and spends their weekends standing in lines for the "best ones" in town. What I'm really getting at is that magical feeling that children carry with them through life. The love they pick up along the way, that reminds them of wholeness. And how it's not only found in their own homes, but in the homes of others, across cultures. Those experiences become part of them.
How does a piece of my mother's homeland become the feeling of safety for someone else? How does a flavor cross every line we use to separate ourselves — nation, language, blood — and just keep meaning the same thing?
I think it might be the most natural thing in the world. If we allow it.
Home isn't a place you're from. It's a feeling you recognize. And feelings, it turns out, are contagious — they pass from person to person, table to table, generation to generation, long after the original story has been forgotten. A Persian grandmother makes sholehzard for a holy night in Iran. Decades later, an English-Iranian child from Nairobi feels that exact warmth in an Eritrean neighborhood in Seattle, and calls it home.
This is the whole of what I believe about us. Not that we are different people who happen to share a planet, but that we are one family who has simply forgotten the relation. Every border, every language, every old grievance — real as they are — sits on top of something underneath that doesn't move.
If a smell can do that — if a spice blend from one mother's kitchen can become home for a child of an entirely different lineage — what else might be contagious, if we let it? Kindness. Generosity. The instinct to set a place at the table for whoever walks in.
I made Saffron Rose into granola because I wanted to keep passing it on. I wanted to do what she did — share it, openly, with whoever is in the room — and make that feeling of reverence and home part of an ordinary morning. Not just a holy night.
You are aziz — dear, precious & beloved.