August 26 2018 Pranams to Grandmother Lalla

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Grandmother Lalla,
With words to open the heart.
Chasing her – chase God.
💛 ✝️ 💛 ☪️ 💛 🕉 💛 ☸️ 💛 ✡️ 💛 ☯️ 💛

I have been hanging out with a saint.
The life and poetry of Lalla keeps running around and tearing though my life. In spare moments, I will pick up her book and I will read a page or two of her biography. In spare moments I will flip to one of her poems – then the simple clarity and beauty of the words carry me across the bridge.
Last night I woke over and over to find her running through the field of my heart. She would not let me sleep. She keeps pointing the way to the true heart. She keeps pointing the way to be love. Her hair flying wild like a nimbus around her head yet is she motionless. A paradox.
A fourteenth century Kashmiri mystic, a woman who broke all the morays of her society to travel the road of love. Her fortitude and bravery are astounding.
She has been called by many names: Lallesvari or Lalla Yogini by the Hindu, Lalarifa by the Muslim and then Lal Ded the local colloquialism. However, she called herself Lalla and this is how I most often think of her.

With gratitude for the words of Lalla that have come down to us through 700 years, bringing light to dark corners. 

💛 ✝️ 💛 ☪️ 💛 🕉 💛 ☸️ 💛 ✡️ 💛 ☯️ 💛

“I will refer to this mystic-poet by her most celebrated and nonsectarian appellation, ‘Lal ded’. In the colloquial, this means ‘Grandmother Lal’; more literally it means ‘Lal the womb’, a designation that connects her to the mother goddesses whose cults of fecundity and abundance form the deep substratum of Indic religious life. I will also use the name by which she is most popularly and affectionately known, across community line: Lalla.”

Ranjit Hoskote from the Introduction to I, LALLA page x

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Images of Kashmir – home to Lalla

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💛 ✝️ 💛 ☪️ 💛 🕉 💛 ☸️ 💛 ✡️ 💛 ☯️ 💛