Hello again... my friend.
It is so good to sit with you again.
Last time we were in a low, crowded church in New York, watching Antoinette Brown Blackwell climb into a pulpit that was never meant for her. Tonight I want to take you somewhere very different---to a Rajput palace at night---where a young woman named Mirabai is about to choose love over respectability.
The palace is built to impress in daylight.
High walls, carved balconies, courtyards that catch the sun and turn it into gold. But by the time I arrive, all of that is only shadow. The guards at the gates are drowsy shapes with spears. Lanterns burn low along the corridors. Somewhere a musician practices a scale and then falls silent. Respectability is asleep.
Except here.
In a small inner temple, lamps are still burning. The stone is cool underfoot. On a raised platform stands a dark image of Krishna, crowned and garlanded, his smile caught forever in the moment before a flute note. The air smells of ghee and marigolds.
Mirabai slips in through a side door, alone.
She is dressed as a princess, because that is what she is---Rathore-born, married into the royal house of Mewar. Silks, bangles, anklets that want to betray her presence with every step. She has thrown a light shawl over her hair, but she does not move like someone sneaking. She moves like someone coming home.
She sets down the little plate she carries---flowers, a bit of food, the small courtesies of devotion---and then she looks up at the statue in a way that has nothing to do with etiquette. There is no distance in her gaze. She is not thinking about philosophy or social order. She is thinking about him.
And then she sings.
The first notes are soft, almost careful, as if she is testing whether the stone will answer. Then the song opens. Her voice is not technically perfect; it is something better---unguarded. She sings to Krishna as her true beloved, her eternal husband, her companion in joy and humiliation. She complains to him. She flirts with him. She begs him not to hide.
Above this room, somewhere in the upper stories, someone turns over in bed and mutters about scandal. A princess who sings like a temple dancer. A widow who refuses to fade. A high-caste woman who calls a god her bridegroom in front of anybody.
Down here, she does not seem to care.
In this moment, the thousand rules that hold the palace together---honor, caste, obedience, gossip---are all still in place. Mirabai has not yet walked out. She has not yet refused all the demands that will come. But with every verse she pours out, the line between "what is proper" and "what is true" is getting thinner.
Soon, the line will break.
Long before the palace, there was a child and a small image of Krishna.
Mirabai was born into privilege, yes---but not into safety. Her family was part of the Rajput warrior nobility, which meant honor was their armor and their wound. Stories of courage and betrayal hung in the air the way incense hangs in this temple.
One of the stories told about her childhood goes like this: she sees a wedding procession passing by and asks her mother, "Who will be my bridegroom?" Her mother, perhaps a little amused, points to the household image of Krishna and says, "That one." Children remember careless answers. Mirabai takes it seriously.
Whether that story is precise fact or embroidered truth, the shape of it fits. From early on, Krishna is not for her a distant god of philosophy, but the center of a personal promise.
When she is married into the house of Mewar, that promise comes with her.
On paper, she belongs to her husband, Prince Bhoj Raj. In practice, her strongest loyalty is already elsewhere. She fulfills what duties she can. She walks the corridors, attends the rituals, does not set out to humiliate her new family. But she keeps slipping away to sing. She insists on visiting temples. She mixes with devotees whose caste and status would normally keep them far from a royal woman.
Then the world narrows.
Her husband dies after only a few years. Her father dies in battle. Her father-in-law dies defending Chittor. The court is shaken by grief, pride, fear of the Mughals pressing closer. In that atmosphere, a royal widow is expected to become almost invisible---veiled, controlled, an emblem of chastity and obedience. Some whisper that she should have thrown herself on her husband's funeral pyre. The fact that she is alive at all is, to them, already a compromise.
Mirabai does not disappear.
She sings more.
Her in-laws are not amused. They see her mixing with sadhus and low-status worshippers and feel their honor fraying. They hear the words of her songs---calling Krishna her husband, calling herself his bride---and feel their authority mocked. Some hagiographies speak of poison sent to her disguised as prasad, or a basket of flowers hiding a snake. In the stories, Krishna protects her; the poison becomes nectar, the snake an image. Whether or not those miracles happened in that way, the hostility they describe is real enough.
At some point, the tension becomes unsustainable.
The palace cannot contain both its idea of what a princess should be and the reality of Mirabai's devotion. The stories differ on the exact trigger, but they agree on the movement: she leaves. She walks away from the stone courtyards and guarded gates and steps into a life of wandering, temple to temple, singing her songs where anyone can hear.
The Rajput world calls this madness. Irresponsibility. A shame to the family. The bhaktas, the devotees along the road, call it something else: honesty.
What is her spiritual meaning in that time?
On the surface, she is one more voice in a broad bhakti current---a flowering of devotional movements that had already been re-imagining the relationship between God and ordinary people for centuries. Saints, poets, weavers, cobblers, wandering singers: men and women who insisted that love and trust could cross the boundaries of caste and formal learning.
But Mirabai's position makes her particular.
She is not a village girl in a marginal community. She is inside one of the most status-conscious strata of society, and she refuses to keep devotion confined to the polite corners assigned to it. She does not stop being Rajput; she simply lets her devotion question what that identity is for.
For the court, religion is part of the architecture of power---rituals to sanctify rule, gods invoked for victory, temple donations as displays of prestige. For Mirabai, religion is what you sing in the middle of the night when no one is grading your performance.
She breaks three taboos at once.
First, caste.
A high-born woman is expected to keep her distance from low-status devotees. Mirabai does not. She sings with them. She takes Krishna's presence more seriously than the social diagrams of who may stand where. In her songs, the distance between palace and street collapses. Whoever loves is welcome.
Second, gender.
Women's spirituality, in that world, is supposed to be quiet, domesticated, woven into household ritual and private fasting. Mirabai's devotion is loud, embodied, public. She uses her own voice, not just the words of priests. She dares to express longing and joy in God in a way that most women are only allowed to express toward husbands and sons. She is not coy. She is not tidy. Her love embarrasses people.
Third, loyalty.
For a Rajput, loyalty to family and clan is sacred. Mirabai does not break that lightly. But she insists that there is a loyalty even deeper---the vow made to the divine. When those loyalties conflict, she chooses God. She does not do this out of contempt for human bonds; she does it because she believes that every truly good bond hangs from that higher love, not the other way around.
Her poems are full of this priority.
She sings of leaving behind "mother-in-law's house," of refusing to polish the honor of those who mock her devotion, of her willingness to bear insult, exile, and rumor if only she can remain with Krishna. Sometimes she sounds almost reckless. But under the daring there is a calm truth: if your first love is real, it will ask you to rearrange your life around it.
In this, her spiritual contribution is not only to bhakti, but to the larger human conversation: she makes visible the cost and beauty of an undivided heart.
Over time, her songs travel farther than her body ever did.
They are sung by women grinding grain, by men walking to market, by temple congregations who have never seen a palace. They are remembered, altered, localized. By the time chroniclers write her into the rolls of saints, some facts have blurred, but the contour remains: a woman of rank who would not let her devotion be tamed.
What does that do to history?
It plants a story in the collective imagination: that the highest title you can hold is not "princess" or "queen," but "lover of the divine." That a woman can say "my true husband is God" and mean it in a way that re-orders every other relationship without negating their importance. That intense, emotional, embodied devotion is not a private quirk but a legitimate path.
It also gives later generations of women a different template.
You do not have to become Mirabai to feel her influence. You do not have to leave home or sing bhajans in public squares. But you can, when you are told that "good women" keep their deepest longings quiet, remember that one of the most honored female figures in your devotional landscape did not.
Her story also whispers something to those trapped in roles they did not choose.
She did not free herself with a legal argument. She did not write a treatise. She sang, and then she walked. She obeyed the reality of her love more than the fear of disgrace. That, too, is a kind of theology.
Why should any of this matter now?
Because many of us still live inside palaces of one kind or another.
Some are literal: families obsessed with appearance, where the question "What will people think?" weighs more than "What is true?" Some are professional: careers that pay well and look impressive but demand that you mute your conscience, hem in your compassion, treat your deepest questions as liabilities. Some are spiritual: religious communities where devotion is praised, as long as it never disrupts the existing order.
In those palaces, it is easy to learn a terrible habit: to treat your real love---whatever you most deeply cherish---as something that must be squeezed into acceptable shapes.
You temper it for the sake of peace. You edit it for the sake of belonging. You recite safe lines in public and keep your truer words for late-night journals or whispered prayers. You become two versions of yourself: the respectable one and the honest one.
Mirabai's life stands there, centuries away, and asks a hard, luminous question: What if that division is slowly killing you?
She is not a model of caution. She is not here to tell you to be polite. She is here to remind you that there are times when fidelity to what you know as sacred---whether you call it God, truth, justice, or love---requires more than internal sentiment. It requires visible loyalty.
That does not always mean walking out dramatically.
Sometimes it means refusing to laugh at the cruel joke, even when everyone else does. Sometimes it means choosing work that pays less but lets you live without shame. Sometimes it means saying "no" to an expectation that everyone around you treats as non-negotiable.
What makes these acts Mirabai-like is not that they are scandalous for their own sake, but that they align your outer life more closely with your inner devotion.
Her story also speaks to a quieter fear: the fear that taking your love for the sacred seriously will make you less human, less connected, less joyful.
Look at her songs.
They are not shriveled. They are not joyless. They are full of humor and longing, of complaint and celebration. She is not trying to float above the world. She is trying to meet it fully from the place of her deepest allegiance. Her path does not erase her emotions; it intensifies and redirects them.
If your image of "religious seriousness" is gray, rigid, or tight-fisted, Mirabai is a necessary corrective. She suggests that genuine devotion may make you more passionate, more particular, more alive---not less.
There is also a justice thread here, though she does not speak its language.
By refusing to let caste and gender dictate how and with whom she may worship, she is quietly saying that the divine is not the property of the privileged. When she sings in public spaces, when she treats low-status devotees as her peers, she acts out a vision in which access to God does not require social credentials.
That vision is still contested.
We still build palaces around our gods---social bubbles, ideological silos, communities that insist the sacred is more present among "people like us." We still tell some hearts, "Your way of loving is acceptable; yours is not." Mirabai's life pokes holes in those walls. She does not ask permission. She simply loves across the lines.
For those of you who do not share her religious vocabulary---who do not speak of Krishna or of gods at all---there is still something here.
Call it integrity.
She chooses one thing to be primary and lets that choice inform the pattern of her days. Not perfectly, not without conflict, but honestly. She lets love, not fear of scandal, decide her direction.
In a culture like ours, where so much is driven by image management, that is bracing.
You do not have to imitate her externals to learn from that stance. You can ask yourself, very simply: What do I love enough that I am willing to disappoint people to stay true to it? And then: Am I actually living as if that love is real?
If the answer is yes, even a little, then you already understand her more than you think.
I do not know what your particular palace looks like.
Maybe it's a literal family system, thick with obligation and unspoken rules. Maybe it's a workplace that celebrates "values" on the wall and punishes them in practice. Maybe it's a religious environment that speaks of surrender and love while quietly training you to be small.
Wherever it is, I invite you to listen, for a moment, for your own songs.
They might not be bhajans. They might be the work that makes you feel most aligned, the conversations where your heart wakes up, the acts of service that feel less like duty and more like recognition. They might be the questions you keep asking even though people change the subject.
Those are hints.
You do not owe anyone a version of yourself that betrays those hints in order to keep their comfort intact. You owe, first, the Source that gave you those loves and questions at all. You owe, second, your own soul.
If you are already living that way, even in small ways, Mirabai is standing beside you in the dark temple, nodding. If you are not, she is not judging you. She is inviting you to take one step closer to your own truth---not necessarily out of the palace, but perhaps to the edge of it, where the air is clearer.
Remember that the golden thread we are following is not about one religious tradition or another. It is about the movement of reality toward honesty, justice, and deep connection. Mirabai shows one face of that movement: undomesticated devotion.
You are allowed to have your own.
We have now spent time with a series of women whose love for what they knew as sacred refused to fit neatly inside the structures offered to them.
Sor Juana, writing theology and poetry under vows of silence. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, insisting that equal souls deserve equal minds and equal pulpits. Mirabai, walking out of a palace rather than shrink her devotion to fit someone else's measure of respectability.
For our next visit, I want to introduce you to someone who loved freedom with the same fierceness---and who turned that love not into songs or sermons, but into a relentless critique.
Her name is Matilda Joslyn Gage.
She will not stand behind an altar or sing before a statue. She will stand outside the churches and the halls of government and say, in effect, "If you are going to keep using God's name to cage women and Indigenous people, I will stand out here and tell the truth about what you are doing."
She will write a book called Woman, Church and State, tracing in painstaking detail how religious institutions have blessed inequality. She will admire Native societies where women hold real power more than the so-called "Christian civilization" that treats women as dependents. She will be too radical for the official suffrage pantheon, and that, I suspect, will make you like her more.
Next time, I want to remember her with you---not to teach you to hate religion, but to show you what it looks like when conscience outgrows the walls that first gave it language.
Until then, may you find, in your own life, the courage to let your deepest devotion be more than a private mood. May it become, little by little, the way you walk.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.