The Golden Thread

Lal Ded: Do Not Hurt Any Heart


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In fourteenth-century Kashmir, a woman walked away from a suffocating marriage and into the open air --- and never really came back. Lal Ded, also known as Lalleshwari, wandered barefoot through a valley in spiritual upheaval, composing four-line poems in the everyday Kashmiri language and giving them away to whoever was listening. Hindus called her a yogini. Muslims called her a saint. For nearly seven centuries, both were right. In this episode, Harmonia traces the thread that runs from Akka Mahadevi's Karnataka to Lal Ded's Kashmir --- the insistence that the sacred lives not in temples but in the chest of the person standing next to you --- and follows it forward toward an unlikely Quaker schoolteacher in Philadelphia who will pick it up and change the world.

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The Golden ThreadBy Adam Bauer