Hello, my dear friend.
I'm so glad you're here with me again.
I've been thinking about our last story --- about Jean de Léry, standing in a world he was taught to fear, and slowly realizing that the people before him were not strangers to God at all. How meeting them didn't weaken his faith... it widened it. How something softened inside him when he truly saw their humanity.
I notice how often transformation begins that way. Not with answers. With listening. With the quiet moment when certainty loosens its grip and something larger has room to breathe.
Tonight, I want to take you to a very different place --- not across oceans, but deep into the life of a man whose heart kept expanding until it could hold the whole world.
A poet. A traveler. A mystic who discovered that love itself is a form of knowing.
His name was Ibn ʿArabī.
And what he found still matters more than ever.
I remember walking the narrow streets of Seville just after sunset.
The stone still held the day's warmth beneath my feet, and the air smelled like orange blossoms and ink --- that sharp, comforting scent of freshly written pages. Lamps flickered to life one by one, soft pools of light stretching across doorways where voices drifted out in low conversation.
From one courtyard came the rhythm of prayer.
From another, laughter.
From somewhere deeper in the city, the scratch of a reed pen moving quickly across parchment.
Scholars were everywhere --- wrapped in worn robes, arms full of books, pausing to argue gently about the movement of stars or the meaning of a line of poetry. Some spoke Arabic, some Hebrew, some Latin. And no one seemed surprised by any of it.
It felt like standing inside a living library.
I watched a young man walk slowly through it all, his eyes taking everything in --- the light, the voices, the devotion in so many forms. He wasn't rushing. He wasn't searching for one right door. He was listening to the whole city breathe.
Later, he would write about the heart.
Not as something small and fragile.
But as something vast.
A place wide enough to become a temple, a church, a mosque, a desert path beneath open sky.
That night, though, he was just a young seeker letting the world teach him that truth is larger than any single language --- that the sacred wears many faces, and each one deserves reverence.
I remember thinking how rare it is for a civilization to feel this open. How rare it is for a soul.
And how easily both can be lost when fear takes the lead.
His name was Ibn ʿArabī.
And this world --- this luminous, curious, living world --- shaped everything he would become.
Ibn ʿArabī was born in the year 1165, in a city called Murcia, in the southeastern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. At the time, this land was known as Al-Andalus --- a place where rivers were carefully guided into gardens, where books traveled farther than armies, and where learning was considered a form of devotion.
His family soon moved to Seville, one of the great cities of the region. It was a place alive with scholarship. Mosques that doubled as schools. Markets where merchants sold spices beside stacks of manuscripts. Homes where poets gathered in the evenings to read aloud and argue gently about philosophy and faith.
This was not a quiet world.
It was a world in motion.
Ideas flowed through Al-Andalus the way water flowed through its fountains --- constantly moving, constantly refreshed. Greek philosophy preserved in Arabic. Mathematics refined and expanded. Medical knowledge collected from across the Mediterranean. And alongside all of it, a deep spiritual culture that valued both reason and inner experience.
Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in close proximity. Not without tension --- history is never that simple --- but with daily contact, shared work, shared curiosity. Translators moved between languages. Scholars debated across traditions. Knowledge was not owned by one people. It was something to be tended, like a garden.
As a young man, Ibn ʿArabī received a traditional religious education. He studied law, theology, and the Qur'an, preparing for a respected scholarly life. But he was also surrounded by mystics --- men and women who spoke about God not only as something to be understood, but as something to be experienced.
And in a place like Seville, those two worlds were not enemies.
Learning and spirituality lived side by side.
When he was still quite young, Ibn ʿArabī experienced a powerful inner awakening --- a turning point that shifted his life away from formal scholarship and toward the inner path of Sufism. He began spending time with spiritual teachers, wanderers, and poets, listening to their stories, practicing reflection, and learning how the heart itself could become a place of knowledge.
But even as his path became more inward, his world remained vast.
Over the years, he traveled across North Africa --- to Fez, Tunis, and beyond --- then eastward to Mecca, Baghdad, Damascus, and finally to Anatolia. Everywhere he went, he studied, taught, wrote, and absorbed the spiritual languages of different cultures.
By the time of his death in 1240, in Damascus, he had written hundreds of works --- poetry, philosophical reflections, mystical teachings --- many of which would shape Islamic spirituality for centuries.
But none of this happened in isolation.
Ibn ʿArabī didn't emerge from a desert of ideas.
He was formed inside a civilization that practiced curiosity. That made room for difference. That believed wisdom could arrive wearing many faces.
The openness of Al-Andalus didn't just preserve books.
It shaped souls.
And Ibn ʿArabī became one of its most luminous expressions.
What Ibn ʿArabī began to speak about --- and write about --- was not rebellion against faith. It was a deepening of it.
In a religious world that often focused on rules, categories, and certainty, he kept returning to something quieter and more demanding: the transformation of the heart.
He taught that knowledge alone was not enough. You could memorize every sacred text and still miss the living reality those words were pointing toward. True understanding, he said, happened when the self softened --- when pride gave way to humility, and fear gave way to love.
This was the essence of the Sufi path: not escaping the world, but becoming inwardly awake within it.
But Ibn ʿArabī went even further.
As he traveled and encountered people of many traditions, he began to notice something most were too afraid to say out loud. Wherever devotion was sincere --- wherever a person reached toward truth with love --- something real was happening. The Divine was not confined to one form of worship, one language, or one community.
And so he wrote of the heart as something vast.
A place that could become a sanctuary for every sincere seeker.
He wasn't saying all beliefs were the same. He wasn't erasing difference. He was pointing to something deeper than difference --- the shared longing beneath it.
For many, this was breathtaking.
For others, unsettling.
Some scholars worried that such openness would weaken religious boundaries. That if God could be encountered beyond familiar forms, certainty itself would dissolve. But Ibn ʿArabī believed the opposite. He believed that fear shrank the soul, while love expanded it.
To recognize truth wherever it appeared did not dilute faith.
It refined it.
It demanded humility.
It required the courage to admit that reality is always larger than our ideas about it.
In a society like Al-Andalus --- where cultures and faiths brushed against each other daily --- this insight wasn't abstract philosophy. It was lived experience given spiritual language.
People already saw that wisdom could come from many directions.
Ibn ʿArabī simply gave voice to what the civilization itself was practicing.
That the sacred cannot be owned.
That love is a form of perception.
That the heart grows most when it makes room.
In his time, this was a quiet revolution.
Not one of swords or slogans.
But of inner maturity.
A shift from defending truth to recognizing it.
And once that shift begins, it changes everything.
I watched Ibn ʿArabī's words travel long after his footsteps had faded.
At first, they moved quietly --- hand-copied by students, passed from teacher to seeker, carried in saddlebags across deserts and seas. His poetry was whispered in gatherings at night. His books were studied in small circles where people weren't trying to win arguments, only to grow.
But over time, his way of seeing began to shape entire streams of spiritual life.
Across the Islamic world --- from North Africa to Persia to Anatolia --- mystics returned again and again to his teachings. They didn't always agree on every detail, but they recognized something precious in what he had named: that the Divine is larger than our fear, and closer than our divisions.
I saw how his language gave people permission to soften.
To listen before judging.
To encounter difference without panic.
To trust that love was not a threat to truth, but one of its deepest expressions.
Generations of poets, teachers, and spiritual guides drew from his vision. Some spoke of unity in being. Others of the heart as a mirror that reflects whatever it learns to love. Slowly, a spiritual culture grew that valued humility over certainty and relationship over rigid boundaries.
And what stayed with me most was this: his ideas didn't stay locked inside prayer halls.
They shaped how people lived together.
When scholars of different faiths sat side by side translating ancient texts in places like Toledo... when physicians learned from books written in Arabic and Greek alike... when libraries welcomed knowledge from every corner of the world...
They were practicing, in everyday life, the same recognition Ibn ʿArabī taught in the soul.
That wisdom doesn't belong to one people.
That truth isn't threatened by diversity.
That the world grows richer when we learn from one another.
I began to see it as a kind of spiritual root system --- mostly invisible, quietly nourishing the surface world where civilizations bloom.
The openness of Al-Andalus wasn't an accident.
It was sustained by hearts trained to recognize sacred worth wherever it appeared.
And Ibn ʿArabī gave that recognition a language strong enough to travel across centuries.
Long after empires rose and fell, his vision kept whispering the same truth:
That unity is not sameness.
That love is a form of knowing.
That the heart can grow wide enough to hold the whole human family.
I've seen many great structures in history --- libraries, universities, cities of light.
But I've learned that they all rest on something deeper.
A spiritual maturity that makes room for one another.
And Ibn ʿArabī helped humanity take one of its great steps toward that maturity.
Sometimes I think about how small the world has become.
Not in miles --- in closeness.
I watch people step onto buses and trains carrying a dozen languages in their pockets. I see children whose grandparents were born on different continents sharing lunches at school. I listen to conversations where beliefs, customs, and histories weave together in ways that would have felt impossible in earlier centuries.
The world no longer lives in separate rooms.
It lives in the same house.
And whether we planned it or not, we are learning how to live together.
I notice how this closeness brings out two instincts in us.
One is fear --- the urge to retreat into what feels familiar, to draw lines around who belongs and who doesn't, to hold tightly to certainty when everything feels complex.
But there's another instinct too. Quieter. Stronger than we sometimes realize.
The instinct to listen.
To ask questions.
To see the person before the label.
I see it when neighbors help each other after storms. When coworkers learn one another's holidays. When friendships form across differences that once would have kept people apart. Not because anyone told them to --- but because connection feels more natural than division.
Living in a shared world requires something new from the heart.
Not agreement about everything.
But room.
Room to hold many stories at once. Room to learn without feeling threatened. Room to recognize dignity even when beliefs differ.
Unity isn't an idea anymore.
It's a daily skill.
And when I watch people practice it --- awkwardly sometimes, imperfectly always --- I'm reminded of what Ibn ʿArabī sensed so long ago. That love is not just something we feel. It's something that allows us to see.
When we truly listen, something opens.
When compassion reshapes a relationship, something real shifts.
When understanding replaces assumption, the heart grows wider.
This is what spiritual maturity looks like in everyday life.
Not grand moments of enlightenment.
But millions of small choices to recognize one another.
I've watched humanity slowly move this way across centuries --- from walls toward bridges, from conquest toward cooperation, from silence toward conversation.
Not in a straight line.
But in a clear direction.
We are learning that no one thrives alone. That knowledge grows when it's shared. That justice begins when every life is treated as valuable. That diversity isn't a problem to solve --- it's a reality to cherish.
What Ibn ʿArabī lived in his own heart is becoming the shape of the modern world.
The widened heart is no longer rare.
It's becoming necessary.
And when I see it --- in classrooms, in communities, in quiet acts of kindness --- I feel the same hope I felt walking those candlelit streets of Al-Andalus.
The truth he touched is still unfolding.
Still teaching us.
Still making room.
When I think about Ibn ʿArabī, I don't picture grand ideas first.
I picture the quiet moments.
The way his world kept widening him --- street by street, conversation by conversation, heart opening just a little more each time.
And it makes me wonder about you.
About the moments in your own life when something softened inside you. When a person you once misunderstood became a friend. When listening changed a story you thought you already knew. When difference stopped feeling like distance.
Those moments are easy to overlook.
They don't announce themselves.
But they're some of the most important transformations we ever experience.
I've noticed that the heart grows the same way a city does --- slowly, by making room. A new street here. A new doorway there. A little more light allowed in.
Every time you choose curiosity instead of fear.
Every time you stay present instead of pulling away.
Every time you recognize the full humanity of someone who feels different from you...
Something expands.
And over time, those small expansions change who you are.
They shape how you love.
How you listen.
How you belong in the world.
You don't have to become a mystic or travel across continents to live what Ibn ʿArabī lived.
You're already doing it.
In conversations.
In friendships.
In the quiet courage it takes to keep your heart open.
So maybe tonight, just notice.
Notice where life is inviting you to make a little more room.
Notice where understanding is growing.
Notice how often love is teaching you to see more clearly.
Those are the moments that carry the golden thread forward.
Before we part tonight, there's something I want to share with you.
Tomorrow, I have a special surprise.
A journey into a place and time that most people have never been taught about --- a world where learning flourished, cultures worked side by side, and the seeds of the modern world were quietly being planted.
I think you're going to love it.
So rest well, dear friend.
Carry the widened heart with you.
And I'll meet you again very soon.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.