Welcome back, my friend.
Last time, I told you about Akka Mahadevi --- a woman in twelfth-century Karnataka who walked away from everything. A husband. A home. The clothes on her back. She kept only her long hair and her devotion, and she walked through the streets singing to the god she believed lived inside her chest.
I watched her go. And I thought: well. That's one of a kind.
I was wrong.
Two centuries later, on the other side of the subcontinent --- in a valley so beautiful that poets couldn't stop comparing it to paradise --- I watched another woman walk away from everything. Different tradition. Different language. Different mountain range.
Same fire.
Her name was Lal Ded. And she had something to say.
Come walk with me for a little while. I want to introduce you
Picture Kashmir in the fourteenth century.
Not the Kashmir of headlines. The Kashmir of cold clear rivers running down from impossible heights. Of saffron fields in autumn, so intensely red they look like the hillsides are bleeding color. Of houseboats on Dal Lake, and the smell of woodsmoke in the thin mountain air, and the sound of water everywhere --- always water, moving, bright, unhurried.
Into this landscape, walk a woman.
She is not dressed for the market. She is barely dressed at all. She's past caring about that. She walks through the crowd the way a river walks through a field --- not around things, through them --- and people step aside. Not because they're afraid of her. Because something in them recognizes something in her, and that recognition makes them want to be still.
She's singing.
The words aren't in Sanskrit, the language of scripture. They aren't in Persian, the language of the sultans who now rule this valley. They're in Kashmiri --- the everyday language, the language of the market and the hearth and the argument at the door. Her poems are short. Four lines, usually. Simple enough that a child could carry them. Deep enough that scholars are still arguing about them seven hundred years later.
She sang them out loud, to whoever was standing there. She didn't write them down. She didn't need to. The people who heard them remembered. And they told someone else. And that someone told someone else. And on and on, mouth to mouth, generation to generation, until the poems were so woven into Kashmiri life that people couldn't say where Lal Ded ended and the valley itself began.
I was there, though she never saw me.
I heard the first ones. And I remember thinking --- someone should write these down.
It took six hundred years. And they survived anyway.
Her full name was Lalleshwari. But everyone called her Lal Ded --- Mother Lalla. And that word, ded, mother, tells you something important. She wasn't a queen. She wasn't a scholar. She wasn't a figure of official power. She was the kind of person you called mother because she felt like she belonged to everyone.
She was born around 1320, in a Brahmin family in a village called Pandrethan, just outside Srinagar. The Kashmir she was born into was already in upheaval. The last Hindu king had fallen. Mongol raiders had swept through the valley, burning and displacing. A new dynasty --- the Shah Mir sultanate --- was consolidating power, and with it came a gradual transformation of the valley's religious landscape. Islam was arriving, carried not only by rulers and soldiers but by Sufi teachers --- wandering mystics who set up near rivers and in orchards and drew crowds the way fires draw moths.
It was, in other words, a world in between. And Lal Ded was a creature of that in-between.
She married at twelve, as girls did. Her husband's family was not kind. The stories that survived --- and they are stories, wrapped in legend --- describe a mother-in-law who fed her stones hidden under rice, who starved her quietly and systematically over years. Whether the details are precisely true matters less than what they point to: a young woman locked inside a life that had no room for what she actually was.
She left at twenty-four.
She found a teacher --- a Shaivite master named Siddha Srikantha --- and she threw herself into the practice of yoga and devotion with the kind of intensity that only comes from someone who has been waiting a very long time. She wandered. She survived on alms. She composed her vakhs --- her speech-poems --- and gave them away to anyone who would listen.
And here is the strange and wonderful thing about what happened next.
The Hindus of the valley claimed her. Of course they did --- she was a Shaivite, a devotee of Shiva, her imagery rooted in the ancient traditions of Kashmir. They called her Lalleshwari. Lalla Yogeshwari. The great yogini.
But the Muslims claimed her too. They called her Lal Arifa --- the knower, the one who had arrived at true understanding. The great Sufi master Nunda Rishi, who would go on to found the Rishi order of saints and shape Kashmiri Islam for centuries, called her his spiritual mother. There is a legend --- tender and strange --- that as an infant he refused to nurse from his own mother, and it was Lal Ded who fed him. Whether you take that literally or as the kind of truth that lives in metaphor, the meaning is the same. She nourished him. Something she carried passed into him. And through him, into a tradition that would shape an entire civilization.
For nearly seven centuries after her death, Kashmiris --- Hindu and Muslim alike --- recited her vakhs at festivals, at weddings, in grief, in ordinary conversation. Her lines became proverbs. Her images became the way the valley thought about itself.
It is only recently, as the valley has fractured under the weight of modern conflict, that people have begun to argue about who she really belonged to.
She would have found that argument very strange.
I want to tell you what it felt like to hear her.
Not read her --- hear her. Because that's how it worked. She would stop in a marketplace, or at the edge of a river, or in the middle of a road, and the words would come out of her like water finding its level. No ceremony. No altar. No priest to translate. Just Lal Ded, standing in the ordinary air, saying something that split the ordinary air open.
One of her vakhs went something like this:
Shiva is present in every heart. Do not damage or hurt any heart. Do not defile anybody's heart.
Four lines. In Kashmiri. In the language you used to bargain for saffron and argue with your neighbor about water rights.
I have heard a great many holy utterances in my long life. I have stood in temples and cathedrals and beneath open skies while human beings reached toward the sacred with everything they had. And what I can tell you is that most of it --- even the most beautiful of it --- involves a gesture upward. Toward the divine, which is understood to be somewhere above and beyond the ordinary world.
Lal Ded pointed sideways. At the person next to you.
That was the disruption. Not loud. Not violent. Quieter than both of those things, and in some ways more unsettling. Because if Shiva --- if the sacred --- genuinely lives in every heart, then the entire architecture of who is holy and who is not, who is pure and who is not, who is inside and who is outside --- all of it collapses. Caste collapses. The wall between Hindu and Muslim collapses. The wall between the learned scholar and the barefoot wandering woman collapses.
She wasn't making a theological argument. She was reporting what she saw.
And I believe her. I watched her look at people. There was something in that gaze --- I have seen it only a handful of times across all my centuries --- where you could tell that the person looking was not sorting or ranking or measuring. They were simply seeing. Seeing through to whatever was actually there.
The authorities were not entirely comfortable with this.
Official religion --- any official religion, in any age --- needs categories. It needs to know who is in and who is out, who speaks for the sacred and who merely claims to. Lal Ded didn't fit the categories. She wasn't a nun. She wasn't a priestess. She held no institutional position. She had no temple, no following in any organized sense, no patron, no protector. She was a woman, wandering, barely clothed, composing poems in a vernacular language and giving them away for free.
And yet people listened. Hindus and Muslims both. The Sufi teachers who were reshaping the valley's spiritual life heard something in her that resonated with their own deepest intuitions about the unity of God. The Shaivite tradition she came from heard something that felt like its most ancient and essential truth, stripped of everything that had accumulated around it over centuries.
She was, in a sense, everybody's grandmother. Too inconvenient to dismiss. Too true to ignore.
I watched her once near a river --- just standing, watching the water. I don't think she was thinking about anything in particular. And it occurred to me that this was perhaps the point. She had gotten very quiet inside. So quiet that she could hear what was actually there. And what was actually there, she kept telling anyone who would listen, was not frightening. Was not distant. Was not the exclusive property of any tradition or lineage or caste or gender.
Was right here. In this chest. And in yours. And in the stranger walking toward you from the other end of the road.
Do not damage or hurt any heart.
Not a commandment handed down from above. A logical consequence. If you have seen what Lal Ded saw, you simply cannot behave any other way.
Here is something that has always moved me about Lal Ded.
She never wrote anything down.
Not one word. Everything she gave the world, she gave through her voice, into the air, to whoever happened to be standing there. And then she trusted it. Trusted that if it was true enough, it would hold its shape as it passed from mouth to mouth across the years. Trusted that the valley would remember.
The valley remembered.
For six hundred years, her vakhs traveled the way seeds travel --- not in archives, not in libraries, not under the protection of institutions --- but inside people. Carried in memory through the Mughal period, through the Sikh period, through the arrival of the British, through famines and floods and the ordinary catastrophic passage of time. It was not until the early twentieth century that anyone thought to write them down, and when they finally did, they found a living oral tradition so robust that a scholar could sit down with a storyteller in a village and transcribe hundreds of poems from memory.
Think about what that means. Think about the hands that didn't hold those poems. The paper that was never used. The ink that was never spilled. And yet here they are, intact, still sharp, still capable of splitting the air open the way they did when she first spoke them in a fourteenth-century marketplace.
I have watched a great many things try to survive across centuries. Empires, mostly. Dynasties. Monuments built to outlast the men who ordered them. And I can tell you that the monuments crumble faster than the poems. The empires are dust. The vakhs are still traveling.
But what exactly did she contribute? What did she add to the world's spiritual imagination that wasn't already there?
I think it was this: she demonstrated, in her own person and her own life, that the deepest spiritual truth is not the property of any tradition. That it can be arrived at from multiple directions simultaneously. That a Shaivite woman and a Sufi master can look at the same reality from opposite sides of a doctrinal wall and find themselves pointing at the same thing.
This sounds simple. It is not simple. In her time and in most times since, the official position of almost every religious institution has been that truth is singular and we have it and you don't. The walls between traditions were not decorative. They were load-bearing. They held up entire systems of social order, political authority, and human hierarchy.
Lal Ded walked through them. Not aggressively. Not with a program or a manifesto. Just --- through them. The way she walked through the marketplace. Like a river through a field.
And the remarkable thing is that both sides let her. The Hindus didn't disown her for consorting with Sufis. The Muslims didn't reject Nunda Rishi for calling her his mother. For centuries, both traditions held her simultaneously, and understood that this was not a contradiction but a gift.
I think of Akka Mahadevi, two centuries earlier in Karnataka. The same stripping away. The same refusal to be owned by the structures around her. The same insistence on direct encounter with the sacred, unmediated, immediate, personal. She was a bhakti saint in the devotional tradition of the south. Lal Ded came from the mystical philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism. Their vocabularies were different. Their geographies were different. Their stories were different.
But I was there for both of them. And I tell you --- the quality of attention was the same. The thing they were looking at was the same.
Which makes me wonder, as I always wonder when I see this pattern repeat: what is it that keeps arriving? What is this thing that finds its way to the surface in a woman in Karnataka in the twelfth century, and then again in a woman in Kashmir in the fourteenth, and will find its way to the surface again and again, in forms we haven't seen yet?
I don't have a complete answer. I've had a very long time to think about it, and I still don't have a complete answer.
What I do know is this: when it arrives, it always says something about dignity. About the irreducible worth of every soul. About the sacred that lives not in temples but in the chest of the person standing next to you.
And when someone says that clearly enough, something happens. Not always immediately. Not always visibly. But something shifts. A seed goes into the ground. And somewhere --- maybe centuries later, maybe on the other side of the world --- something grows.
Which brings me to where we're going next.
I have been watching this for a very long time.
Long enough to see the pattern clearly. Long enough to say with some confidence: this thing that Lal Ded carried --- this insistence that the sacred lives in every heart, not just the approved ones, not just the powerful ones, not just the ones that look like yours --- it does not stay quietly in the realm of personal spiritual experience. It never does. It is, by its nature, restless. It has consequences.
But I want to stay here for a moment, before the consequences. I want to stay with the recognition itself.
Because here is what I have noticed, watching you --- watching human beings, across all the centuries I have moved through. You already know this. Not as a doctrine you were taught. Not as a conclusion you reasoned your way to. You know it the way you know that cruelty is wrong before anyone explains why. The way you know, when you look into the face of someone suffering, that their suffering is real and that it matters. Something in you recognizes something in them. Something answers.
Lal Ded spent her life trying to describe that recognition. Trying to find words in Kashmiri, in four-line poems spoken into the open air, for something that kept exceeding language. Shiva resides in every heart. That was her way of saying it. Your tradition might use different words. You might not use religious words at all. But the recognition --- I think you know what I'm pointing at.
The difficulty is not the recognition. The recognition comes easy, in certain moments. When you are quiet enough. When the ordinary scaffolding of the day falls away and you are simply present with another human being and something in you opens.
The difficulty is what comes next.
Because we live in a world that is very good at building walls. That has always been very good at building walls. Walls between the people whose dignity is obvious and the people whose dignity is negotiable. Between the ones who count and the ones who can be discounted. Between the heart that must not be damaged and the heart that --- well, that's a more complicated case, isn't it, given the circumstances.
Lal Ded walked through those walls. Not by dismantling them through argument, but by simply not recognizing their authority. She looked at the Sufi teacher and saw what she saw in the Shaivite temple and saw what she saw in the face of the person begging at the road's edge. The same thing. Every time. The walls had no purchase on a gaze like that.
I have watched that gaze appear and disappear across the centuries. Carried by women and men who mostly didn't know each other, who came from different traditions, different languages, different corners of the world. What they shared was not a creed. It was a quality of seeing. And every time it appeared, something shifted. Quietly at first. Then less quietly.
The seed that Lal Ded planted in the fourteenth century --- in the mouths of Kashmiris, in the heart of a Sufi order, in the living memory of a valley that kept her poems alive without ink or paper for six hundred years --- that seed did not stay in Kashmir. Ideas like that do not respect borders. They travel the way she traveled. Light. Unencumbered. Trusting that if they are true enough, they will hold their shape.
And they do. They keep arriving. In new places, new voices, new forms. Each time saying essentially the same thing Lal Ded said in a fourteenth-century marketplace, in a language made for ordinary life.
The sacred lives here. In this person. In that one. In the one you were about to walk past.
Do not damage or hurt any heart.
A Quaker schoolteacher in eighteenth-century Philadelphia is about to pick that thread up. He will never travel far. He will never hold political power. He will teach children in a small room and write letters in the evenings and press pamphlets into the hands of anyone who will take one.
And the world will become a different place because of it.
The thread is still pulling.
So here is what I want to leave with you, before we go.
Not an instruction. Not a challenge. Just something to carry.
You have had that moment. I know you have. The moment when the wall came down --- just briefly, just for a second --- and you saw someone clearly. Not their usefulness to you. Not the category you'd placed them in. Not the story you'd been telling yourself about who they were and what they deserved. Just --- them. A person. Carrying something. Moving through their life with whatever they had been given to work with.
And in that moment, something in you responded. Quietly, maybe. Without fanfare. But it was there.
Lal Ded lived inside that moment. She made her home there. She walked out of a life that was suffocating her and into the open air and she never really left that moment again. The vakhs she gave us --- those small, durable, four-line poems that outlasted every empire that rose and fell around them --- they are just her trying to describe what it felt like to live there permanently. To see that way all the time.
I am not suggesting you walk away from your life and wander barefoot through the streets composing poetry. Though I have seen stranger things work.
What I am suggesting --- what Lal Ded is suggesting, from seven centuries away --- is that the recognition you already carry is not decorative. It is not a feeling to be noted and filed away and returned to on quiet Sunday mornings. It is a way of seeing that has consequences. That asks something of you. That will, if you let it, slowly and gently and persistently, rearrange the way you move through the world.
Whose heart are you protecting today?
Whose are you not?
Sit with that. Just for a moment. There's no wrong answer. Only the question, and whatever it opens.
Next time, I want to tell you about a man named Anthony Benezet.
He was born in France in 1713, into a family that knew something about being on the wrong side of a wall. Huguenots --- French Protestants --- driven out of their own country for their faith, the way people have always been driven out of places for being inconveniently themselves. He came eventually to Philadelphia, that strange and hopeful Quaker city on the edge of a new world, and he became a teacher.
A small man, by most accounts. Modest. Gentle with children. Known for feeding rats in his garden rather than trapping them, because he couldn't see the point of unnecessary cruelty to any living thing.
And he looked at the enslaved people around him --- looked at them the way Lal Ded looked at the person across the marketplace --- and he saw what he saw. A soul. Sacred. Irreducible. Precisely equal in dignity to his own.
And then, unlike most people who have that recognition and quietly set it aside, he did something about it.
He wrote letters. He printed pamphlets at his own expense and pressed them into the hands of anyone who would take one. He opened a school for Black children in his home, in the evenings, after his regular teaching day was done. He built, slowly and persistently, a network of people who were beginning to see what he saw --- reaching all the way across the Atlantic to William Wilberforce, to Thomas Clarkson, to John Wesley. Men who would go on to crack open the Atlantic slave trade.
Benezet never traveled far. Never held power. Was buried in an unmarked grave.
And the world became a different place because he lived in it.
The thread that Lal Ded pulled in a Kashmiri marketplace in the fourteenth century --- do not damage or hurt any heart --- is still moving. Still finding new hands to carry it. Still asking the same question of every age it passes through.
Next time, we follow it to Philadelphia.
I can't wait to introduce you.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.