Hello, my friend.
You're back --- I'm glad. Truly, I mean that every time, but today especially.
Last time, we sat with Melania the Younger, and I still think about her a little, honestly. The wealth she gave away. The quiet weight of that kind of letting go. I hope it's still sitting with you too, the way good stories do --- turning over slowly in the back of your mind while you go about your ordinary week.
But today I want to take you somewhere else. Somewhere green, and a little hidden, and honestly --- somewhere I don't think enough people know to visit.
Get comfortable. Maybe pour yourself something warm.
We're going to Portugal.
Oh, I do love this stop.
If you're ever making your way through the north of Portugal, and someone tells you to just drive on through to Porto --- don't listen to them. Get off the highway. Wind your way up into the hills, into a little town called Arouca, and tell me afterward you're not glad you did.
It won't be on the postcards the way Lisbon is. No crowds spilling off cruise ships here. But that's rather the charm of it, isn't it? The cafés spill out onto cobblestones instead, with no line out the door and no rush to move you along. Someone will bring you coffee strong enough to wake the dead, and a pastry still warm enough to fog your glasses. The mountains lean in close on every side, green and a little mysterious, like they're keeping a secret they might tell you --- if you stay long enough to earn it.
And right in the middle of all that, rising up out of the town like it grew there --- this building. Enormous. Pale gold stone, quiet for centuries, standing like it has nowhere else to be and never has.
Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Arouca.
I could stand in front of it for an hour and not tire of it. I have, actually. More than once. There's something about the way it holds the light in the late afternoon --- like it's still warm from something that happened inside it long ago.
Because I remember what it became, and who it became because of.
Not built with her own hands, mind you. Built with everything else a person has to give --- a life, entirely redirected. A whole world of care, poured into stone, and into the people who needed somewhere, anywhere, to land.
She never got to be what she was promised. Not officially. Not on paper, not in the end.
But stand in front of that monastery long enough, and you start to understand --- that was never really the point.
Her name was Mafalda.
She was born around 1195, the second-youngest daughter of King Sancho I of Portugal and his queen, Dulce of Aragon. A kingdom still young, still finding its edges --- Portugal had only existed as its own crown for a few generations by then, carved out of the long, slow push against Moorish rule to the south. Sancho spent his reign building it, settling it, filling it with people and towns and purpose. He called himself, rather proudly, "the Populator."
Mafalda grew up a princess of that new kingdom. And in 1215, when she was around twenty, her father arranged what royal fathers arranged --- a political marriage, this one to her young cousin, Henry, King of Castile.
Henry was ten years old.
I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I always do. A grown woman, a child groom, and a piece of paper meant to bind two kingdoms together through a marriage that could never actually be one. For a brief time, she held the title Queen of Castile. She wore it the way you'd wear a coat that was cut for someone else --- technically hers, never quite fitting.
The marriage was never consummated. Of course it wasn't. And within the year, it was dissolved --- the official reason given was consanguinity, the two of them too closely related by blood. Mafalda returned home to Portugal, no longer a queen, no husband, no children, her future entirely unwritten again.
But here is the part of her story that matters more than the marriage ever did.
Her father, before his death, had left her something in his will --- Seia Castle, its lands, its income, and the right to carry the title of queen for the rest of her life. Written down. Sealed. Legally hers.
Her brother Afonso, who inherited the throne, saw it differently. He wanted a kingdom that answered to one crown, undivided --- and a sister holding land, income, and a royal title looked, to him, like a fracture waiting to happen. He worried, too, about his other two sisters, Teresa and Sancha, and what precedent this might set for their heirs. So he simply refused to honor it.
Many of Portugal's nobles thought this was wrong, and said so --- some of them siding openly with Mafalda and her sisters against their own king. They lost. Afonso held firm, and what her father had written down, plainly, in ink, in law, went unenforced.
It would take until 1223 --- years of quiet, grinding standoff --- before any real peace was settled between them.
I watched this happen more times than I can count, in more kingdoms than I can name. A document says one thing. Power decides another. And the person caught between the two is left to figure out what, exactly, they're allowed to become now.
Mafalda was about to answer that question in a way I don't think her brother ever expected.
So Mafalda came home. Not a queen anymore --- not in any way that Castile or Portugal would recognize. Just a woman, unmarried, in her mid-twenties, with a title her own brother refused to honor and a stretch of years ahead of her that no one had planned.
For a noblewoman in the thirteenth century, this was the moment a second marriage was supposed to happen. It was, frankly, expected. You didn't stay unmarried by choice --- not if you could help it, not if a family could arrange otherwise. A woman without a husband was, in the eyes of most of the world around her, a woman without a place.
Mafalda said no.
In 1220, she chose instead to become a nun, entering the Abbey of Arouca. And I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to tell this part of the story as if she were retreating --- giving up on the world, closing a door on disappointment and stepping quietly out of sight. That is not what I watched happen.
She negotiated. Even as she took her vows, she secured something almost no one else in her position would have thought to ask for --- a special dispensation allowing her to retain control of her own inheritance. The income her father left her, the very thing her brother had fought so hard to keep from becoming a "queen's" title, she kept anyway, on her own terms, inside walls she had chosen for herself.
She didn't stop there, either. She rose to become abbess of the community --- Benedictine nuns, at first. And in 1226, she petitioned Rome directly, asking that her abbey be transferred to the Cistercian Order. The pope granted it.
Think about what that really was. A woman who had been denied a crown by her own brother was now writing letters to the pope, and having them answered. She was not hiding from authority. She was quietly, patiently, becoming a different kind of it.
This is the part people so easily miss when they hear "she became a nun," as though it were the end of an ambition rather than the beginning of a different one. The cloister was not a cage for Mafalda. It was the one structure left standing that she was actually allowed to shape.
I remember watching women do this again and again, across centuries and kingdoms that never once resembled each other. Denied the path that was supposed to be theirs, they didn't simply vanish into the alternative. They took whatever narrow space was left to them and made it wider than anyone intended.
Mafalda held her own income. Held her own religious authority. Held a devotion, too --- to Our Lady of Silva, a shrine she gave generously to, and would return to again and again for the rest of her life.
None of it was a crown. All of it was hers.
And what she was about to do with it --- that is where I need you to pay close attention.
Here is what she did with the years that followed.
She had a hospice built for travelers --- people with nowhere else to land, no name that mattered, no letter of introduction. She had bridges raised over rivers that had, until then, simply had to be crossed the hard way, on foot, in whatever weather the day brought. Churches. Monasteries. Hospitals. Not one grand gesture, but dozens of smaller ones, laid down one after another like stones in a path someone else would eventually walk.
And Arouca itself --- her abbey --- became something far larger than the quiet religious house she'd entered in 1220. Under her care, it grew into one of the great religious centers of the region, a place that would matter, and keep mattering, for centuries after her name had stopped appearing in any dispute over thrones.
None of this reversed what her brother had done. The title was never restored. The crown she'd briefly, technically worn was never hers again in any way the kingdom recognized.
But I noticed something, watching her do this. She wasn't building a case. She wasn't accumulating proof to take back to Afonso, or to history, or to anyone at all. She was simply putting good, useful things into the world --- a roof, a bridge, a bed for someone exhausted and far from home --- with the income that was rightfully hers, whether her brother agreed or not.
It didn't look like triumph. It looked like patience, turned into stone.
I didn't know yet, watching her, how long that stone would last, or how much longer it would outlive every argument that had ever been made about who deserved a crown.
Here is what I want you to notice, all these centuries later.
Afonso's decision --- the one that stripped Mafalda of her title, that overrode a will written in plain ink by their own father --- felt, at the time, like the final word. He had the throne. He had the force to make his refusal stick. And for years, it did stick. That is what institutional power looks like in the moment it's happening: absolute, immovable, the only version of reality anyone around it is allowed to act on.
But I have watched this pattern too many times now to mistake it for permanent.
Power arranged by one person, in one generation, to hold one particular shape --- it rarely outlives the person who arranged it. Afonso's reasoning made sense to him, in his moment, for his kingdom. And then he died, as kings do, and the shape he'd insisted on started to loosen almost immediately. His own son, ruling after him, quietly granted his aunts land and castles he hadn't been forced to grant. Not the crown. Not everything. But the grip had already begun to open.
Meanwhile, what Mafalda built in the years she wasn't fighting for a title kept going. It didn't loosen. It didn't need a new king's permission to keep standing. A bridge doesn't ask who's on the throne before it lets someone cross a river. A hospice doesn't check whose son inherited what before it takes in someone who's exhausted and far from home. Those things simply continued being useful, year after year, long after the argument that shaped Mafalda's early life had turned into a paragraph in someone else's history book.
I think this is something you already know, somewhere underneath the noticing of it. Injustice, when it's happening to you, feels total. It feels like the whole shape of the world, permanent, load-bearing, impossible to get out from under. And in the moment, it often is genuinely powerful enough to stop you from getting what's rightfully yours.
But it is not the same kind of thing as the good someone quietly builds in response to it. One is a decision, made by particular people, for particular reasons, in a particular year --- and decisions like that erode, get renegotiated, get forgotten, get undone by the next person who inherits the same throne. The other compounds. It keeps doing what it was built to do, long after anyone remembers whose idea it was.
I don't say this to excuse what was done to her, or to anyone since. Denial is still denial, even when something good eventually grows up around it. But I have come to trust the pattern anyway --- that the things built out of genuine care for other people tend to outlast the arrangements built only to protect one person's grip on power. Not because the universe swoops in to correct the ledger. Because service simply keeps working, quietly, stone by stone, while consolidated power has to keep re-winning its own argument every single generation, forever, or lose its grip.
You don't need a crown for this. Almost no one gets one, and most of what mattered in Mafalda's life happened after hers was taken away. What you have is whatever is actually in your hands right now --- and what you choose to build with it is already part of the same pattern I watched her begin, eight hundred years ago, in a hillside town in northern Portugal.
So let me leave you with this.
Think of a moment --- maybe recent, maybe long past --- when something that was rightfully yours got taken, or withheld, or quietly overridden by someone who simply had more power in the room than you did. Not a small slight. The real kind. The kind where you had the paper, the promise, the plain fact on your side, and it didn't matter, because the other person decided it wouldn't.
I'm not going to tell you that pain resolves itself, or that waiting is a strategy. It isn't. Mafalda's title was never given back. Some things simply don't come back.
But I do want you to ask yourself what Mafalda quietly asked herself, in the years after Arouca became her home instead of her exile. Not "how do I get back what was taken" --- she'd already tried that, and lost. The better question, the one that actually moved her forward, was smaller and stranger: what do I actually have, right now, in my own hands, and what could I build with it that has nothing to do with the person who wronged me?
You may not have a fortune to build a bridge with. Most people don't. But you have something --- time, attention, a skill, a door you could choose to leave open for someone who needs it. Something that, put toward another person's good, quietly starts outlasting whatever was done to you.
You don't have to forgive anyone to begin this. You don't even have to stop being angry. You just have to notice what's actually yours to build with, and start.
Next time, I want to take you somewhere very different --- a long way from Portugal, and even further back in time.
I'll tell you about a young woman named Thecla, who did something almost unthinkable for her time and place. She was engaged to be married, her whole future arranged and settled, and then she heard a stranger speak --- really speak --- and something in her simply would not let her go back to the life that had been chosen for her. She cut her hair. She walked away from the wedding. She followed a teaching no one had given her permission to follow, into a life absolutely no one had written for her.
I think you'll like her. She has Mafalda's stubbornness, and a story all her own to go with it.
For now, though, I hope you'll carry a little of Arouca with you --- the golden stone, the mountains keeping their secret, a woman who lost a crown and built something better than one anyway.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.