A Season of Love · Episode 9

The Loom of My Mind

Kabir · India, 15th century

17 July 20269 min
Listen on Spotify

What do you do with love when your beloved isn't in the room? Kabir — the fifteenth-century weaver-poet of northern India — answers with his own loom: weave their name into everything. Into ten thousand threads, into the day's work, into the long ordinary hours of waiting.

In this episode, we hear Kabir's tender poem of devotion in absence — a love song for anyone who has ever knitted a shawl, or kneaded dough before dawn. And in closing, we follow the thread to where Kabir was really pointing: a love that makes no distinction between the beloved across the table and the Beloved behind the universe. A poem about how everything you do can be done for love.

The Loom of My Mind

On the loom of my mind, I weave Your name, To make a garment for you come to me. My loom has ten thousand threads, And weaves a soul's robe for You and only you. The Sun and Moon silently watch as I weave Your name; The Sun and Moon silently listen as I count Your name. This is my wage, for all my labor of day and the night, This wage deposited in the blooming lotus bank of my heart. On the loom of my mind, I weave Your name. As I wash these ten thousand threads of my thoughts, making them soft and clean, As I comb the tangled to release my clinging desires. And no more do I weave a garment of pain... For you have come to me. On the loom of my mind, I weave Your name....

Kabir · India, 15th century

We share poems in good faith and with full credit. A Letter to the Poets →