Hello, my friend. I'm so glad you're back.
Last time, we sat together with Charles Wesley --- that restless, brilliant man who couldn't stop moving, couldn't stop writing, couldn't stop pouring his whole heart into song. I've always had a soft spot for people like that. The ones who turn their inner fire into something the rest of the world can warm themselves by.
Today I want to take you somewhere older. Further east. Further back.
Today's story begins not with a pen, and not with a hymn, but with a throne.
And with a man who looked at everything the world said should make him happy --- the palace, the power, the feasts, the thousand servants, the armies at his command --- and felt, in the very center of all of it, a hunger that none of it could touch.
I watched him for a long time. I was curious about him from the start.
His name was Ibrahim ibn Adham. And what he did next changed him --- and quietly, gently, changed the world.
Come with me.
I want you to picture something before we go back to the beginning.
Picture a man in an orchard. Syria, maybe. Or somewhere near it. The sun is doing that heavy afternoon thing where everything slows down and the air smells like warm earth and cut grass. The man is working. His hands are rough --- not the hands of someone who was born to rough work, but hands that have learned it, chosen it, grown into it over years of deliberate, quiet effort.
He is nobody, as far as anyone around him can tell. A laborer. A drifter who stays long enough to earn his bread and then moves on. He doesn't ask for charity. He doesn't explain himself. He just works.
And when the day is done, he sits with whatever simple meal he has earned, and something in his face is --- I don't know how else to say this --- settled. Not happy the way a feast makes you happy. Settled the way a long drink of cold water settles you when you didn't even know how thirsty you were.
I've seen that look before. Not often. But I know it when I see it.
Now here is the thing I want you to hold onto, because this is the part that still catches me, even now, even after all the centuries I've watched this story ripple outward.
Those hands --- the rough ones, the ones earning bread in an orchard in Syria --- those hands once held the reins of a kingdom.
This man was a king.
And he left.
Not because he was defeated. Not because someone took it from him. He simply looked at the throne one day, and understood something. And then he put it down, and walked away, and never looked back.
What does a man understand in that moment?
That's what I want to tell you about today.
I was in Balkh when he was young.
It's hard to describe Balkh to someone who hasn't felt it. Old doesn't quite cover it. That city had been soaked in spiritual searching for so long that the very air felt like it was waiting for something. Zoroastrian fires had burned there. Buddhist monks had walked those streets in saffron robes, heads bowed, bare feet on ancient stone. By Ibrahim's time it was a prosperous Islamic city on the Silk Road, merchants and scholars moving through in a constant current --- but the older hungers were still there, underneath everything, the way deep water is still there underneath ice.
Ibrahim was born around 718 CE, into the family that held power over the region. Which means he grew up inside all of it. The palace. The wealth. The assumption that the world would arrange itself around him.
For a while, it did.
I watched him in those early years. He wasn't cruel. He wasn't careless. He was --- and this is the part that always stayed with me --- restless. Even when everything was going well. Even when the feasts were plentiful and the court was full of laughter. There was something behind his eyes that the banquet could never quite reach.
Then one day something cracked open. The tradition says Khidr came to him --- that mysterious figure who appears in the old stories at the exact moment a soul is about to change direction forever. I won't tell you what Ibrahim saw or heard. Some things are between a man and whatever is calling him. But I was there. And I watched him stand up from everything he had, and put it down, and walk away.
He came west. Through Persia, into Syria, poor among the poor, anonymous among strangers. And somewhere on that road he stopped at the cell of a Christian hermit named Simeon. I remember sitting very still when that conversation happened. Ibrahim asked Simeon how he endured his solitude, his hunger, his bare existence. And Simeon told him that once a year people came to honor him, and the memory of that single hour of grace carried him through all twelve months of labor surrounding it. Then he looked at Ibrahim and said --- endure the work of a year for the glory of eternity.
I saw Ibrahim's face when he heard that. Something settled in it. Like a key turning.
He spent the next thirty years wandering Syria and Gaza and the borderlands near Byzantium. He ground grain. He tended orchards. He refused to beg, refused to let anyone feed him what he had not earned. He taught quietly, prayed without ceasing, and kept moving.
I traveled with him when I could. He was not much for conversation. But there was a quality of stillness around him that I found --- I still find --- very hard to leave.
He died around 782 CE, somewhere near the sea. Nobody agrees on exactly where he is buried. Several cities claim him.
I think he would have found that funny.
I want you to understand what Ibrahim's abdication looked like to the people around him.
It didn't look like enlightenment. Not at first.
It looked like madness.
In the world Ibrahim was born into, power wasn't just a privilege --- it was a sign. A man who held a throne was a man God had favored. Wealth and authority were woven together with divine approval in a way that felt almost self-evident to the people living inside it. You didn't walk away from God's favor. You didn't put down what God had placed in your hands.
And yet here was Ibrahim, handing it all back.
The Sufi tradition that grew up around his memory understood something that his bewildered contemporaries mostly didn't. They had a word for what he was practicing --- zuhd. Usually translated as asceticism, but that translation always feels a little thin to me. Zuhd isn't self-punishment. It isn't flagellation or fasting as performance. It's something quieter and more radical than that. It's the deliberate loosening of the world's grip on you. The practiced art of wanting less than you have, so that what you actually need has room to breathe.
Ibrahim didn't leave the throne because the throne was evil. He left because he could feel it holding him. And he was hungry for something it could not give him.
What moved me most --- then and now --- was the encounter with Simeon. Because think about what that moment actually was. Ibrahim ibn Adham, a Muslim prince turned wandering mystic, sitting at the feet of a Christian hermit, receiving the teaching that would shape the rest of his life. No argument about doctrine. No competition between traditions. Just one hungry soul recognizing wisdom in another, across every boundary the world said should have kept them apart.
I've seen that happen across centuries and civilizations. It never gets old. It still catches me in the chest every time.
Simeon's teaching was so simple it almost sounds like nothing. Endure the work of a year for the glory of eternity. But what he was really saying --- what Ibrahim heard in it --- was this: there is a hunger in you that is real. Don't manage it. Don't silence it. Feed it. Let everything else be in service to that.
That was the permission Ibrahim needed. Not to stop working --- but to work for the right hunger.
And so he did. He became, in the eyes of the Sufi world that remembered him, a kind of living proof that detachment isn't emptiness. It's clarity. The man who grinds grain in an orchard and owns nothing and needs nothing from your approval --- that man is not diminished. That man is, in some way that is very difficult to argue with, free.
His most famous student was a man named Shaqiq al-Balkhi, who carried Ibrahim's teachings forward. And Rumi, centuries later, kept returning to Ibrahim's story in the Masnavi --- that great ocean of Persian spiritual poetry --- as if he couldn't quite let it go. As if something in Ibrahim's life answered a question Rumi kept needing to ask.
I understand that impulse completely.
Here is what Ibrahim gave the world, and I want you to feel the full weight of it.
Before Ibrahim, renunciation had a long history. Monks and hermits and wandering ascetics were not new. The Buddhist tradition that had soaked into Balkh's very soil had been teaching detachment for over a thousand years before Ibrahim was born. Christian desert fathers had been living on chickpeas and prayer in the Egyptian and Syrian wilderness for centuries. The impulse to step back from the world in order to see it clearly --- that impulse is as old as human consciousness itself.
But Ibrahim added something. Or maybe he demonstrated something that had always been true but needed a particular life to make it visible.
He showed that renunciation and dignity are not opposites.
The wandering ascetic in most traditions risks something --- and I say this gently, because I have deep affection for hermits of every kind --- risks a kind of spiritual dependency. Someone has to feed you. Someone has to leave bread at the cell door. The world you have renounced still has to sustain you, even if at arm's length. There is a transaction there, and Ibrahim felt it, and refused it.
He worked. Every day, with his hands, for his bread. Not as penance. Not as performance. As a simple, quiet insistence that his freedom was real and complete. He would not trade the throne for a different kind of dependence. He wanted to owe nothing to the world's economy of power and favor --- not as a king, and not as a beggar.
That thread ran forward through Sufi tradition in ways that are still felt today. The idea that the interior life requires genuine freedom --- not the performance of poverty, but actual, daily, unglamorous independence --- that became a kind of lodestone for Islamic mysticism. Ibrahim's life was proof that you could be fully in the world, working beside ordinary people, earning ordinary bread, and still be utterly, completely oriented toward something the world could not touch.
And then there is the Simeon thread. That quiet, almost offhand moment of a Muslim mystic formed by a Christian teacher. It passed into the literature and the memory of multiple traditions. It traveled east through Persian poetry, through Rumi, through Attar's great collection of saints' lives. It traveled further east still --- into India, into Indonesia, where Ibrahim's story was retold and elaborated and loved by people who had never seen Balkh or Syria and never would. Something in his life crossed every border the world tried to draw around it.
I watched that happen. Slowly, over centuries. A story that began with one man putting down a crown in central Asia, rippling outward across languages and oceans and generations until it reached people who simply recognized something in it. Something true. Something they already knew but hadn't quite found words for yet.
That is how the deepest things travel. Not by conquest. Not by argument. By recognition.
Ibrahim never wrote a book. He left no systematic teaching. What he left was a life --- specific, particular, embodied. A king who walked away. A mystic who worked. A Muslim who learned from a Christian and thought nothing of it. A man with calloused hands and a settled face, sitting in an orchard in Syria, as free as anyone I have ever watched walk this earth.
I think about him often. More than he would probably think was warranted.
But then, he always was a little too humble for his own good.
I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it for a moment before you answer.
What are you hungry for?
Not what are you working toward. Not what are you supposed to want. What is the hunger underneath all of it --- the one that doesn't go away when the promotion comes through, or the vacation finally happens, or the weekend arrives and you have nowhere to be and nothing to do and you still feel it, that quiet persistent ache, that sense that something is just slightly out of reach?
Ibrahim felt that. On a throne. Surrounded by everything the world said should be enough.
The difference between Ibrahim and most of us is not that he was holier, or braver, or born with some special capacity for spiritual heroism. The difference is that he recognized the hunger for what it was. He didn't manage it. He didn't medicate it or scroll it away or fill the silence with noise until he couldn't hear it anymore. He listened to it. And then he let it lead him.
Now. I know what you're thinking.
He was a king. He could leave. He had that option in a way that most people simply don't. You have a mortgage. You have people who depend on you. You have obligations that are real and heavy and not optional. The desert is not available to you. The orchard in Syria is not waiting.
I know.
But here is what I have learned, watching human beings navigate this for a very long time.
Ibrahim's real journey was not the one across the map. The miles he walked from Balkh to Syria --- those were real, but they were not the point. The point was the interior distance he traveled. The desert that mattered was the one inside him. And that desert --- that open, silent, clarifying space where the soul can finally hear itself --- that is available to everyone. It does not require a passport or an abdication or a pair of worn sandals.
What it requires is attention.
The world we live in now is extraordinarily good at one thing above all others --- preventing attention. Not through cruelty. Not through malice. Just through volume. Through the relentless, cheerful, well-designed insistence that there is always something else to look at, something else to buy, something else to optimize, something else to be anxious about. The shackles Ibrahim wore were made of gold and obvious. Ours are lighter and harder to see and we put most of them on ourselves.
And yet the hunger is still there. In everyone. I see it constantly. I see it in the way people slow down at the edge of the ocean. In the way a piece of music will sometimes stop a person completely, mid-stride, as if they've been briefly reminded of something they urgently needed to remember. In the way a certain quality of light on a late afternoon will make someone pause and feel, for just a moment, that the world is more than its surface.
That is the hunger. That is Ibrahim's hunger. It never went away. It was never supposed to.
You don't have to leave your life to feed it.
But you do have to stop letting your life drown it out. You have to create, even in small ways, even for small moments, the kind of interior stillness where the deeper hunger can make itself heard. A walk without a podcast. A meal eaten slowly and without a screen. A question asked honestly in the quiet before sleep --- not what do I need to do tomorrow, but what am I actually hungry for?
Ibrahim worked with his hands because the work kept him present. It kept him in his body, in the moment, in contact with the simple reality of effort and bread and tiredness and rest. He didn't transcend ordinary life. He went deeper into it, until it became transparent, until the sacred was visible right through the middle of the ordinary.
That is still possible. It has always been possible. The path is not closed.
The hunger that power cannot feed is not a problem. It is an invitation.
And it has your name on it.
I want to leave you with something gentle today. Not a challenge. A gift.
Somewhere in your life right now --- and I say this with complete confidence because I have never met a human being for whom this wasn't true --- somewhere in your life right now, there is a place where you are feeding the wrong hunger.
Not because you are foolish. Not because you are weak. Because the world is very loud and very persuasive and it has spent considerable energy convincing you that what it is selling is what you actually need. And some of it is fine. Some of it is even good. I am not asking you to put down your crown and walk to Syria.
I am asking you to notice.
Just notice. The next time the restlessness comes --- and it will come, it always comes --- instead of reaching for whatever you normally reach for, sit with it for just a moment. Don't fix it. Don't explain it. Just feel the shape of it. Ask it quietly what it actually wants.
You might be surprised by the answer.
Ibrahim spent thirty years working in orchards and grinding grain and walking dusty roads, and by every outward measure he had less than almost anyone around him. But that face. That settled, quiet, satisfied face I watched in the orchard that afternoon. I have seen that face on very few people in all my centuries of watching.
It is the face of someone who has found what they were actually hungry for.
I want that for you. I genuinely do.
Not the dusty road necessarily. Not the calloused hands, though honest work has never hurt anyone. Just the clarity. Just the moment of recognition --- oh. This. This is what I was hungry for all along.
It is closer than you think. It is probably already in your life, quiet and patient, waiting for you to stop rushing past it.
Ibrahim would tell you the same thing, I think. If he were here. If he ever stopped moving long enough to say it.
Which, knowing him, is admittedly a big if.
Next time, I want to tell you about a man who had everything taken from him.
His name was Juan Luis Vives. He was born in Valencia in 1493, into a family that held a painful secret --- one that, when it was finally uncovered, would cost them everything. He would spend his life in exile, moving across Europe with nothing but his mind and his enormous, almost stubborn compassion for other human beings. He would become one of the Renaissance's most original thinkers --- writing about the education of women, about the treatment of the poor, about the inner life of the soul with a tenderness that still catches you off guard five hundred years later.
Ibrahim chose to put down everything he had.
Juan Luis Vives had everything taken from him.
I have been thinking about what those two stories say to each other across the centuries. About what remains when the world strips you bare --- whether by your own hand or someone else's. About what turns out, in the end, to have been real.
I think you'll find it worth the wait.
Until then, my friend --- carry today's question with you. Not as a burden. As a companion. What are you hungry for? Let it walk beside you for a few days. See what it shows you.
Ibrahim walked his whole life with that question. And look where it led him.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.