Welcome back, my friend.
Last time, we walked together through the hills of Anatolia, following a wandering dervish named Haji Bektash Veli --- a man who believed that love was wider than any wall built to contain it. I hope that one stayed with you for a while. It stayed with me.
Today I want to take you somewhere a little quieter. No hillside shrine, no gathering of devoted followers. Just a small room. A single lamp. A man alone with the oldest alphabet in the world, asking it a question that would get him into a remarkable amount of trouble.
His name was Abraham Abulafia. He lived in the thirteenth century, in the cities and islands of the medieval Mediterranean world. He was a wanderer, a teacher, a mystic, and depending on who you asked --- a prophet, a heretic, or a nuisance.
I found him fascinating. I still do.
He believed something simple and, it turns out, dangerous: that every human soul already carries within it the capacity to touch the divine directly. No intermediary required. No institution to grant permission. Just the seeker, the silence, and the sacred --- if you knew how to listen.
The world was not ready for that idea. It rarely is.
Come in. Sit down. Let me tell you about him.
Close your eyes for a moment. Actually --- don't. You're listening to me, and I need you present.
But imagine this.
Barcelona. 1271. A room above a narrow street, where the smell of bread and donkey and salt air comes through a window that doesn't quite close. A man sits cross-legged on the floor. He is thirty-one years old. He has already crossed half the known world and come back with more questions than he left with. He has read the philosophers. He has studied the Torah until the words blurred. He has sat at the feet of teachers who gave him answers that felt like closed doors dressed up as windows.
And now he is trying something different.
He is working with letters.
Not reading them. Not writing them. Moving them --- in his mind, on the page, in his breath. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which his tradition taught were not merely symbols but the very building blocks of creation. God, the old texts said, made the world through language. Through combination. Through the sacred interplay of sound and meaning.
Abulafia believed that if language had made the world, then language --- approached with enough discipline, enough stillness, enough sincerity --- could dissolve the distance between a human soul and the source of all things.
So he sat. And he breathed. And he worked the letters like a craftsman working wood --- patiently, precisely, with great attention to the grain.
I was there, though he couldn't see me. I watched him from the corner of that small room, and I recognized what I was looking at. I had seen it before --- in mountain caves in India, in desert hermitages in Egypt, in Sufi circles turning slowly under the stars. The posture of the soul reaching past the edge of what the mind can normally hold.
It looks very quiet from the outside.
Inside, he told his students later, it was like standing at the shore of an ocean you had never seen before --- knowing, all at once, that it had always been there, just beyond the horizon of ordinary thought.
He would spend the rest of his life trying to show others the way to that shore.
Not everyone thanked him for it.
Abraham Abulafia was born in Zaragoza, in the Kingdom of Aragon, in the year 1240.
It was a complicated world to be born into --- and I say that as someone who has watched a great many complicated worlds come and go. The Iberian Peninsula in the thirteenth century was a place where three civilizations --- Christian, Muslim, and Jewish --- lived in proximity that was sometimes creative and sometimes brutal, and usually some uneasy combination of both. Jewish communities had flourished there for centuries under varying degrees of tolerance. Scholars translated ancient texts. Philosophers argued across traditions. The air, in certain cities and certain seasons, smelled almost like possibility.
Abulafia's father, Samuel, was a man of learning, and he made sure his son was too. The family moved early to Tudela, in Navarre, and there the boy was steeped in Hebrew scripture and Talmud before he was old enough to want anything else. His father died when Abraham was eighteen. And something in that loss --- or perhaps something that was always there, waiting --- set him in motion.
He began to wander. And he never really stopped.
His first great journey, in 1260, was toward the Land of Israel. He was twenty years old and he had a specific, almost romantic mission in mind: to find the legendary Sambation River, beyond which, tradition held, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel still lived. It is the kind of quest a young man undertakes when grief is new and the world feels unfinished. He got as far as the port city of Akko --- and stopped. The Holy Land was in chaos. The Crusades had torn it open. The Mongols and the Mamluks were fighting over what was left. There was no road forward. He turned back.
He made his way through Greece. He spent years in Italy --- in Capua, specifically, where he fell under the influence of a philosopher and physician named Hillel, and through him discovered the great Maimonides. The Guide for the Perplexed was Maimonides' attempt to reconcile Jewish tradition with Greek philosophy --- to show that faith and reason were not enemies. Abulafia read it with the intensity of a man who had been waiting for exactly this book.
And then, characteristically, found it wasn't quite enough.
Philosophy could describe the divine. It could argue for the divine. What it could not do --- what no amount of argument could do --- was deliver you into the presence of the divine. Abulafia wanted the real thing. He went back to Spain looking for it.
He found it, or the beginning of it, in Barcelona, in the study of a particular strand of Kabbalah rooted in an ancient text called the Sefer Yetzirah --- the Book of Creation. This was the tradition that taught that Hebrew letters were not merely human symbols but the architecture of existence itself. Combined in certain ways, contemplated with sufficient depth, they could become a ladder.
He was thirty-one. He had visions. He gathered students. He began to teach.
And then he decided --- in what I can only describe as one of the more audacious decisions I have witnessed across several thousand years of human history --- to go to Rome and convert the Pope.
Pope Nicholas III. The most powerful Christian official in the world.
The Pope heard he was coming and ordered him burned at the stake. Abulafia went anyway. He arrived at Soriano on the twenty-second of August, 1280, walked through the outer gate --- and learned that the Pope had died of a stroke the night before.
He walked back to Rome. The Franciscans threw him in prison. They released him after four weeks, apparently uncertain what else to do with him. He made his way to Sicily.
Even I, who have seen a great deal, find that sequence of events a little hard to believe. And yet there it is.
He spent the next decade in Messina and on the tiny island of Comino, near Malta --- writing, teaching the small circle of students who found him, and compiling the works that would outline his system of Prophetic Kabbalah. He was condemned by the Jewish establishment. He was driven from community after community. He ended his days alone on a small island at the edge of the sea, still writing.
His last known work was completed in 1291. After that, all trace of him disappears.
The ocean he had spent his life pointing toward had, in the end, quietly swallowed him whole.
I want to try to explain what Abulafia was actually teaching. Because it is easy to reduce it to strangeness --- a man breathing over letters, claiming to be a prophet, marching toward a Pope. Easy to make it eccentric. But I was there, and I can tell you: what he was doing was not strange. It was one of the most serious things I have ever watched a human being attempt.
He was trying to solve a problem that has troubled seekers in every tradition I have ever observed. And I have observed quite a few.
The problem is this: the sacred feels distant. It feels behind glass. You can read about it, argue about it, perform the rituals that point toward it --- and still feel, in the quiet of an ordinary evening, that the real thing is somewhere else. That you are on the outside of a door that other people seem to have keys to. Priests. Scholars. The long-dead authors of ancient texts. Someone, surely, knows the way in. But you are standing in the corridor, and the corridor is cold.
Abulafia refused that arrangement. Flatly, cheerfully, and at considerable personal cost.
He taught that the capacity for direct mystical experience --- what his tradition called prophecy --- was not a gift reserved for the heroes of scripture. It was not sealed. It was not finished. It was a faculty of the human soul itself, available to anyone willing to undertake the discipline required to access it. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet, he said, were not merely symbols on a page. They were the living structure of creation --- and when a person engaged with them in a specific way, combining and permuting them with focused attention, regulating the breath, stilling the ordinary chatter of the mind --- something opened. The distance collapsed. The soul touched what it had always, at its deepest level, been reaching for.
He called it prophetic experience. His students called it illumination. I watched faces come out of those sessions changed in ways that were quiet and real, and I have seen enough human faces across enough centuries to know the difference between performance and the genuine article.
What I also watched --- and this part I find harder to hold, even now --- was what the world did with him in return.
The rabbinical establishment in Spain came down on him hard. Shlomo ben Aderet, one of the most respected Jewish legal authorities of the age, wrote a formal letter condemning him. The community in Palermo --- his own people --- sent complaints. He was, they said, destabilizing. Dangerous. A man who told ordinary Jews they could achieve prophetic experience was a man who was, by implication, telling them they didn't need the scholars to mediate it. That the gatekeepers were optional.
I understood their concern. Institutions are not wrong to notice when their foundations are being questioned. But I confess --- and I hope you will forgive me a moment of partiality --- I found myself quietly on his side.
Because the thing he was offering was not chaos. It was not an invitation to abandon learning or community or tradition. It was something more precise than that. He was saying: the tradition points toward an experience. Stop mistaking the pointing finger for the thing it points at. Do the work. Go through the door. The door is real. And it is open.
The Christians were no kinder to him than his own community. The Franciscans jailed him in Rome. The Pope --- before the convenient stroke --- had ordered him executed. An itinerant Jewish mystic claiming direct access to God was precisely the kind of person that made institutional religion nervous, regardless of which institution you belonged to.
He bore it with a resilience I genuinely admired. Exile, prison, condemnation, the slow erosion of his reputation --- none of it stopped him writing. None of it stopped him teaching whoever would listen. On that small island of Comino, with the Mediterranean wind coming through whatever window he had, he kept working. Kept reaching. Kept pointing at the door.
I have sat with a great many human beings at the edges of their lives. I sat with him, in a manner of speaking, at the edge of his. And what I felt --- what I still feel, remembering it --- was not pity. It was something closer to awe.
He never stopped believing that what he had found was real. And that it was available to anyone.
Here is what Abraham Abulafia gave to the world. And here is where I want to be careful --- because I have watched enough history to know that a gift and its wrapping are not always the same thing.
What he gave, at its most essential, was this: a profound and fearless insistence on the dignity of the seeking soul.
In a world that organized spiritual life around hierarchy --- where access to the sacred was rationed, mediated, and controlled by those who held institutional authority --- Abulafia stood up and said something that was, in its way, revolutionary. The soul is capable. Every soul. Not just the scholar, not just the ordained, not just the person born into the right family or the right community. The hunger for the divine that you feel in your quietest moments is not an accident and not an embarrassment. It is the deepest truth about you. It is what you are made of.
That idea did not die with him on the island of Comino.
It threaded forward --- quietly, persistently --- through the generations of Jewish mysticism that followed. Later Kabbalists built on foundations he had laid, even when they didn't name him. The great flowering of Kabbalah in sixteenth century Safed, in the hills of the Galilee, carried echoes of his insistence that the inner life was not a luxury but a necessity. That the tradition pointed toward an experience, and that the experience was the point.
And it was not only in Judaism that I recognized his fingerprints. I have watched long enough to see the same impulse rise and surface across traditions, across centuries, in forms that would surprise each other. The Sufi turning in his circle. The Christian mystic in her cell. The Hindu meditator at the river's edge. All of them, in their own language, making the same claim: the distance is not as absolute as the institution insists. The soul has range. The soul can reach.
Abulafia articulated that claim with unusual precision and unusual courage. For that, I hold him in genuine respect.
But I have also watched long enough to know where that thread, followed alone, tends to lead.
Because the soul's capacity is real --- and its longing is real --- and yet longing is not the same as arrival. Hunger is not the same as bread. The mystic who disappears into technique, into method, into the exquisite mechanics of inner experience, can sometimes circle the deepest truth for a lifetime without quite touching it. Not because the soul is insufficient. But because the distance between the human and the divine is not, finally, a problem that the human can solve from the human side alone.
Every tradition I have watched, in its most honest moments, has known this. The great teachers did not merely point inward. They pointed toward something --- Someone --- outside the self entirely. A light that the soul did not generate but could, under the right conditions, receive. The mystic's discipline, at its best, was never really about technique. It was about becoming quiet enough, humble enough, open enough, to recognize what was already approaching.
Abulafia saw the door. He described it with a clarity that moved me then and moves me still. He devoted his entire life --- wandering, exiled, condemned, alone on a small island in the Mediterranean --- to telling anyone who would listen that the door was real and that it was open.
What he could not quite see, I think, was that the door opens from the other side.
That is not a small distinction. But neither does it erase what he found. The soul's longing is sacred. The capacity he pointed to is real. And in a world that was telling ordinary people that the sacred was not for them --- that they should leave the seeking to their betters --- Abraham Abulafia said: no. You were made for this. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.
That thread is true. It is woven into the tapestry. And it runs forward from him into every age that follows --- including our own.
I have been watching humanity hold up mirrors for a very long time.
It is one of the things I love most about you, if I am honest. The stubborn, costly, beautiful refusal to stop looking for the light. Even when the mirror is smudged. Even when the hands holding it are unsteady. Even when the institution that was supposed to tend it has become more interested in the mirror than in what the mirror is for.
Abulafia knew that feeling. I think you might know it too.
We live in a remarkable moment. More people are walking away from the faiths of their childhood than at any other time I can remember. And when I listen to why --- really listen, the way I have learned to listen across several thousand years of human explanation --- I hear something that surprises people when I name it. They are not, most of them, walking away from the light. They are walking away from a mirror that stopped showing it to them. A congregation that felt more like a social club than a sanctuary. A doctrine that answered questions nobody was asking anymore. A leadership that confused its own authority with the authority of what it was supposed to serve.
I understand that. I have watched it happen in every tradition, in every age, in every corner of the world I have wandered. It is not a new crisis. It is the oldest crisis there is.
But here is what I want to say to you, as gently and as directly as I can.
The light is not the mirror. And the mirror is not the light. And your frustration with one is not evidence against the other.
The divine --- whatever word you reach for when you try to name what is most real, most true, most irreducibly present at the center of existence --- is not comprehensible. I want to be clear about that, because I have been closer to these questions than most. It is not a larger version of something you already understand. It is not a grandfather on a throne or an algorithm or a feeling of warmth in your chest, though it has been pointed at with all of those images and more. It is something that would unmake you if it reached you unmediated. Every tradition that has gone deep enough has found that same edge and fallen silent before it.
And so we hold up mirrors.
The great Faiths of the world are mirrors. Turned toward a light they did not generate and cannot contain, shaped by revelation and by the lives of souls who burned with sincerity, polished by centuries of genuine seeking. They do not show you the light directly --- nothing could. But at their best, in their truest moments, they catch enough of it to change the quality of the air in the room. To make you turn your head. To make you feel, even briefly, that the distance you carry in your chest is not the final truth about existence.
Abulafia spent his life trying to angle his mirror more precisely. He loved his tradition --- loved it with the particular ferocity of someone who takes a thing seriously enough to argue with it. He was not rejecting Judaism. He was refusing to accept a reflection that had grown cloudy and institutional and self-protective, when he knew --- because he had felt it, because it had happened to him in a small room in Barcelona with the salt air coming through the window --- that the light was real and that it was still moving.
So he adjusted the angle. At enormous cost. Alone on a small island at the edge of the sea, still writing, still pointing.
I think about that when I watch what is happening in the world today. I think about the people sitting outside the traditions they were raised in, not because they stopped believing in the light, but because the mirror they were handed stopped catching it in a way they could see. And I want to say to them what I would have said to Abraham, if he could have heard me, on that island:
You are not wrong to want a truer reflection. That longing is sacred. It is, in fact, exactly the right response to having once seen the light and refusing to settle for less.
But do not confuse the inadequacy of the mirror with the absence of what the mirror is for. Do not let the very human failings of very human institutions convince you that the light itself has gone out.
It hasn't. It never has. I would know.
The work --- the ancient, ongoing, never quite finished work --- is to keep turning toward it. To find or tend or sometimes repair the mirror that catches it most truly for where you are standing right now. To remember, always, that the mirror is in service of something it cannot itself contain.
Please excuse me, I always fall short here, and honestly I think this shortfall is both a disappointment and the cause of much of consternation across the history if humanity. Every time I try to name the great divine, the name fails. Not because I lack the words --- I have had a very long time to collect words. But because the thing I am trying to name is the source of names. Every description collapses under its own weight, because the thing being described is the very source of the weight. You cannot hold the ocean in a cup. And yet --- the cup is real. And the water in it is real. And on a hot day, in a dry place, it is enough. That is what the mirror is for. That is why it matters. Not because it contains the light. But because, held at the right angle, by sincere and humble hands, it catches just enough of it to show you which way to turn.
I have been thinking about Abraham all through this conversation. I do that sometimes --- carry a person with me long after their thread has gone quiet in the tapestry. He was not an easy man, I suspect. Too restless for comfort. Too certain of what he had felt to pretend otherwise. The kind of person who makes institutions nervous and students devoted in equal measure.
But what stays with me most is not the drama of it. Not the march to Rome or the prison cell or the island exile. What stays with me is the image of him in that small room in Barcelona. Thirty-one years old. The salt air coming through the window. Working the letters with the quiet intensity of someone who has decided, once and for all, that the light is real and that he will not stop turning toward it.
I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it rather than answer it too quickly.
Where is your mirror?
Not the one you were handed as a child, necessarily. Not the one that disappointed you, if it did. But the one you actually use --- the practice, the community, the text, the moment of stillness in an ordinary day --- that catches enough of the light to remind you which way to turn.
And if you don't have one right now --- if you are between mirrors, as so many people are, standing in the corridor with the old door closed and the new one not yet visible --- I want you to know that Abulafia would understand that feeling better than almost anyone. He spent most of his life there.
The seeking is not the failure. The seeking is the faithfulness.
Just don't stop looking for the light.
Next time, I want to take you to England. To a university scholar named John Wycliffe, who in the fourteenth century asked a question so simple and so dangerous that it would crack the medieval church like a fault line running through stone.
Why, he asked, can't every person read the Word of God in their own language?
Not in Latin. Not mediated through a priesthood that controlled both the text and its meaning. But directly. Personally. In the words of their own mothers and fathers and childhood streets.
You will notice, I think, that he was asking something not entirely different from what Abraham Abulafia was asking, a century earlier, in a small room in Barcelona. The specific question was different. The tradition was different. The language was different.
But the hunger was the same.
It is always the same hunger. That is the thread. That is why I keep pulling it.
Abraham Abulafia died alone on a small island in the Mediterranean, his name contested, his work pushed to the margins of the tradition he loved. He never stopped writing. He never stopped pointing at the light he had seen, insisting to anyone who would listen that it was real, that it was there, that it was worth everything it cost to turn toward it.
I believed him then. I believe him still.
Hold your mirror carefully, my friend. Clean it when it clouds. Turn it toward the light when you can find it. And remember that the light itself --- the thing the mirror is for --- has never once gone out.
Not once. In all the years I have been watching.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.