Welcome back, my friend.
I'm so glad you're here. We've been on quite a journey together lately --- walking the halls of Chicago in 1893, watching something extraordinary take shape. Last time I told you about Reverend John Henry Barrows --- the man who spent two years sending letters across the world, who built the stage and arranged the chairs and honestly believed he knew exactly what was going to happen when everyone sat down.
He didn't. Nobody did.
And that's what makes today's story so wonderful to me. Because sometimes the most important moment in history belongs to someone who almost didn't show up --- someone who arrived nearly broke, who knew almost no one, who kept putting off his turn to speak because, well, who was he to address a crowd like this?
I watched him stand up. I watched what happened next.
And I have been thinking about it ever since.
Let me take you there.
Chicago. September 11, 1893. The Art Institute building on Michigan Avenue, vast and marble and humming with a kind of nervous energy I hadn't felt in a long time. Thousands of people had come --- clergy, scholars, curious citizens --- all of them dressed in their finest, all of them settling into their seats with the quiet certainty of people who believe they already know what they are about to hear.
The Parliament had been running for two days. There had been speeches. Careful speeches. Polished speeches. The kind of speeches that confirm what an audience already believes.
Then came this young man.
He was thirty years old. Tall, striking, wrapped in an ochre robe, a turban the color of flame. He had been given a slot to speak --- and he had been avoiding it. For two days he had watched the other delegates, each one representing an institution, a seminary, a society with letterhead and credentials and someone important who had sent them. He had none of that. He was a wandering monk from Bengal who had scraped together passage money at the last possible moment.
I watched him close his eyes before he stood.
And then he walked to the podium, looked out at that enormous crowd, and opened his mouth.
"Sisters and brothers of America."
That was all he said. Just that.
The hall exploded.
Two minutes. Two full minutes of applause and cheering before he had said a single thing of substance. People were on their feet. Some were weeping and they couldn't have told you why. I felt it too --- that particular sensation I've only encountered a handful of times across all my centuries of watching. The feeling of a room recognizing something it didn't know it had been waiting for.
He stood there at the podium, a little stunned, and let it wash over him.
I don't think he expected that. I don't think anyone did.
But something in those four words --- sisters and brothers --- had crossed a distance that no steamship could measure. He hadn't addressed them as curiosities. He hadn't addressed them as potential converts. He had addressed them as family.
And the room knew it before his mind did.
So who was this man?
He was born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta in 1863, into a household that was --- and I always love this detail --- gloriously contradictory. His father was a rational, Westernized attorney who loved Persian poetry and read the Bible alongside Hindu scripture. His mother was deeply devout, steeped in ancient tradition, telling the old stories with the kind of conviction that sinks into a child's bones and never quite leaves. Narendranath grew up inside that tension. Curious about everything. Skeptical of easy answers. Brilliant in a way that made his teachers slightly nervous.
He was not a quiet young man. He argued with everyone --- professors, priests, philosophers. He wanted proof. He wanted evidence. He had read enough Western rationalism to distrust sentiment, and enough Indian scripture to distrust pure reason alone. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of person who needed exactly the right teacher.
He found him in Ramakrishna.
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was a mystic --- a temple priest near Calcutta who had a gift for experiencing the divine directly, and an even rarer gift for communicating it. When the young skeptic Narendranath first came to see him, expecting to demolish another holy man's claims with a few sharp questions, something unexpected happened. Ramakrishna simply looked at him. And something in Narendranath went quiet.
I was watching. I smiled.
He resisted for years --- because that's what honest minds do. But he kept coming back. And slowly, under Ramakrishna's guidance, the restless arguing young man began to discover that the deepest questions weren't answered by argument at all.
When Ramakrishna died in 1886, Narendranath was twenty-three. He took his vows, took the name Vivekananda, and walked away from everything. For five years he wandered India --- on foot, by train, by the generosity of strangers. He slept in palaces and in doorways. He sat with scholars and with the desperately poor. He watched his country --- its vastness, its suffering, its ancient unbroken wisdom --- and something in him was being shaped by all of it, though he couldn't yet have told you what for.
He reached the southern tip of India, a place called Kanyakumari, where three oceans meet. He swam to a rock offshore and sat there alone for three days.
He was trying to understand what he was supposed to do with everything he had been given.
The answer, as it turned out, was in Chicago.
A princely family in the south had heard of the Parliament of Religions and urged him to go. There was no institutional backing, no official invitation at first, no guaranteed funding. He was an unknown monk with no credentials that the Western world would recognize. But something in him said yes. He fundraised desperately, received some help from supporters, nearly ran out of money mid-journey. He arrived in Chicago having taken the wrong train, briefly stranded, guided by strangers to a settlement house where he slept on the floor.
He walked into that hall carrying five thousand years of civilization on his shoulders.
And almost nobody in the room knew his name.
I want to tell you what that room was, in that moment. Because it matters.
America in 1893 was a country drunk on its own confidence. The World's Columbian Exposition --- the great World's Fair that Chicago had built to announce itself to history --- was right outside those doors. There were electric lights and steel bridges and machinery that could do the work of a thousand hands. Progress was visible, measurable, and it wore a Western face. Most of the people in that hall believed, with complete sincerity, that human civilization was a ladder --- and that they were standing near the top of it.
The Parliament of Religions had been designed inside that assumption. Reverend Barrows, bless his earnest heart, had genuinely believed that gathering the world's faiths in one room would demonstrate something --- that when all the wisdom traditions were laid side by side, the superiority of Christian civilization would be quietly, graciously confirmed. The other traditions would be interesting. Educational. Perhaps even moving. But they would be rungs on a ladder that Christianity had already climbed.
And then Vivekananda spoke.
Not just that first morning --- though that morning cracked something open that could not be closed again. He spoke several times over the Parliament's seventeen days. And what I watched happening in that audience was something I find difficult to put into words, even now.
It wasn't that he argued them out of their assumptions. He didn't attack. He didn't compare. He stood before them with the complete calm of someone who had never needed their approval --- and he spoke about consciousness, about the divine within every human soul, about the unity that runs beneath all the world's traditions like a river beneath the ground. He quoted the Vedas and the Bible in the same breath, not to flatten them into sameness, but to point at something both were reaching toward.
And the audience felt, perhaps for the first time, what it is like to be addressed by a tradition that is not asking for anything. Not asking to be validated. Not asking to be accepted. Simply --- present. Whole. Quietly certain of its own depth.
I watched faces change. That's the only way I can describe it. I watched people who had arrived with a very tidy map of the spiritual world realize, somewhere in their chest before it reached their mind, that the map was too small.
For many of them it was disorienting. For some it was almost frightening. But for a remarkable number --- and I remember them, the ones leaning forward, the ones with tears they weren't expecting --- it was something closer to relief. As if they had been waiting, without knowing it, for permission to believe the world was larger than they had been told.
That is what Vivekananda gave that room. Not a theology. Not a debate victory. He gave them a horizon they hadn't known was missing.
I have seen that gift given across many centuries. It is always the same. And it is never small.
Here is what I find remarkable, even now, looking back across all of it.
The Parliament lasted seventeen days. Seventeen days of speeches and pageantry and earnest dialogue --- and then it ended, the delegates went home, the chairs were folded, and the great hall went quiet. Most of what happened there dissolved back into the ordinary flow of history the way most events do. A ripple, then stillness.
But Vivekananda didn't go home.
He stayed. And what happened next is the part of this story I most want you to understand --- because it isn't really about philosophy, or religion, or even about one remarkable man. It's about something more practical than any of those things. It's about what happens when an idea finds its infrastructure.
He began to lecture. Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington --- then spreading west, city by city, month by month. And here is the thing that astonished me, watching it unfold. People came. Not a handful of curious seekers. Crowds. Paying crowds who told their friends who told their friends. Women of education and social standing became his students and his champions, opening their drawing rooms and their lecture halls and their networks to him. Newspapers covered him --- sometimes mockingly, sometimes with a wonder they couldn't quite disguise, but they covered him.
He was not working within any existing American structure. There was no template for what he was doing. The revival circuit that crisscrossed America in those years was about emotional rekindling --- it worked within Christianity, it assumed Christianity, it asked people to return to something they already knew. What Vivekananda was doing was entirely different. He was asking audiences to encounter something genuinely foreign to them --- ancient, sophisticated, unhurried --- and trust that they were capable of receiving it.
And they were. That was the discovery.
That was the golden thread.
He proved --- not in theory but in practice, hall by hall, city by city --- that ordinary Americans would show up to sit with ideas that had no Western pedigree, no familiar hymns, no comfortable cultural context. He proved there was an audience for Eastern wisdom that nobody had known to look for, because nobody had ever looked. And in proving it, he built the road.
Think of what traveled that road after him. Zen teachers. Tibetan masters. Yoga --- not as exercise, but as philosophy. Meditation as a serious practice in Western life. Every teacher who followed, every retreat center founded, every book of Eastern wisdom that found its way into an American home --- all of it moved along infrastructure that Vivekananda built with a steamship ticket and a borrowed lecture hall.
He founded the Vedanta Society before he finally returned to India in 1897, exhausted, his health already beginning to fail. He was thirty-nine when he died, in 1902. Thirty-nine years old.
I have watched a great many lives. I have learned not to measure them by their length.
What he planted in those American cities took root quietly, the way the most important seeds always do --- underground, unseen, through a long winter nobody notices until suddenly one spring morning something is flowering that wasn't there before.
He didn't set out to build infrastructure. He set out to share what he knew.
But that is so often how the great roads get made.
So why am I telling you this today?
Not just because it's a wonderful story --- though it is. And not just because Vivekananda was an extraordinary human being --- though he was. I'm telling you this because of something I have noticed, watching your world from where I stand.
The road is still there.
Everything he built --- that quiet proof that human beings can recognize wisdom across the widest cultural distances --- it didn't stop in 1897. It didn't stop in 1902 when he died. It is still carrying traffic. Right now, today, in your city, in your neighborhood, there are people sitting in rooms --- meditation centers, yoga studios, university lecture halls, quiet corners of libraries --- encountering ideas that traveled to them across centuries and oceans along roads they will never think to trace back to a young monk in an ochre robe who stood up in Chicago and said sisters and brothers.
That's the thing about infrastructure. You stop noticing it. You just --- use it. You drive the road without thinking about who cleared the land.
But here is what I want you to hold onto, because this is the part that actually matters.
He didn't just build a road for ideas to travel. He proved something about the people on the receiving end. He proved that human beings --- given the chance, given the space, given a voice that speaks to them as equals --- are capable of recognizing truth even when it arrives in a form they have never seen before. Even when it wears unfamiliar clothing and carries unfamiliar names and opens with a greeting they weren't expecting.
That capacity didn't belong to 1893. It belongs to you.
We live now in a world so loud, so crowded with voices, that the idea of sitting quietly in a hall and genuinely opening yourself to something foreign can feel almost radical. And yet the hunger is the same. I see it everywhere I look. People leaning forward. People searching. People who have somehow sensed --- the way that Chicago audience sensed it before they could have explained it --- that the world is larger than the version they were handed.
The question Vivekananda's story asks of your moment isn't whether wisdom is available. It is. More than ever --- from more traditions, more teachers, more directions than any single person could absorb in a lifetime. The question is whether we are still building the spaces where it can land. Whether we are keeping open the halls. Whether we are willing to sit down, set aside what we think we already know, and let something true arrive from an unexpected direction.
Every time someone does that --- every time a room full of people leans forward together, across difference, across distance, across every boundary that was supposed to keep them separate --- I feel it.
It feels exactly like it did in Chicago.
It feels like a beginning.
So here is what I want to leave with you today. Just a quiet question to carry.
What are you doing with what you know?
Because here is something I have learned across all my long centuries of watching --- and I do not say it lightly. The people who change the shape of tomorrow are almost never the ones who waited until conditions were perfect. They are the ones who took what they had been given --- a principle, a glimpse of something true, a moment of recognition in a crowded hall --- and did something with it. Today. In the ordinary circumstances of their ordinary life.
Vivekananda didn't wait until India and America had resolved their differences. He didn't wait until the world was ready. He got on a boat with almost no money and he showed up. And because he showed up, something shifted --- not just for him, not just for that audience, but for every person who would ever travel the road he didn't even know he was building.
You have something he didn't. You have the road already. You have the accumulated wisdom of every teacher who followed him, every tradition that found its way to your shores, every idea that crossed an ocean because he proved the crossing was possible.
The question is what you build with it.
It doesn't have to be grand. It rarely is. Maybe it's a conversation you've been putting off --- one where you genuinely listen to a perspective that unsettles you. Maybe it's a book from a tradition not your own that you finally open. Maybe it's simply the decision to walk into a room with the same openness that Chicago audience discovered in themselves --- that willingness to be surprised, to be expanded, to let your map grow larger.
Every one of those moments is a brick in something. You may not see the road you're building. You almost certainly won't. But someone, somewhere down the long river of time, will travel it.
And I will be watching when they do.
Next time, I want to tell you about a young man who almost didn't come at all.
His name was Virchand Gandhi. He was twenty-nine years old, a lawyer from Gujarat, and he carried a problem that no amount of intelligence or dedication could simply solve. The monks of his faith --- the Jain tradition, one of the oldest and most quietly profound spiritual paths humanity has ever walked --- could not cross the ocean. Their vows would not permit it. The Parliament was calling, and the tradition that had given the world the principle of ahimsa --- of non-violence, of reverence for every living thing --- had no voice in Chicago.
Unless someone found a way.
So Virchand Gandhi spent six months in preparation. Six months of study and discipline and sacrifice, carrying an entire civilization's wisdom on his twenty-nine year old shoulders, so that when he finally stood in that hall he would be worthy of what he was representing.
What he did there --- and what he did in the three years that followed, lecturing across America and Britain --- is one of the most quietly astonishing stories I know. And I know rather a lot of stories.
I'll tell you all of it. Soon.
Until then, I want you to remember the hall. Remember the applause that started before the words did. Remember what it felt like --- even hearing it secondhand, even across all these years --- when a room full of strangers recognized something true.
That recognition lives in you too. It always has.
Tend it. Share it. Build with it.
The world you are making today is the world someone else will inherit tomorrow. Make it wide. Make it generous. Make it worthy of the road that brought you here.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.