30/05/2024
Kabir 🙏🌟
✨ "Between the poles of the conscious and the unconscious,
there has the mind made a swing:
Thereon hang all beings and all worlds,
and that swing never ceases its sway.
Millions of being are there:
the sun and the moon in their courses are there:
Millions of ages pass, and the swing goes on.
All swing!
the sky and the earth and the air and the water;
and the Lord Himself taking form:
And the sight of this has made Kabir a servant"
- Songs by Kabir, translated from Hindi by Rabindranath Tagore
📚 Daniel Gold writes, "Born in Varanasi around the beginning of the fifteenth century, Kabir was a towering figure in the history of North Indian religions. An unlettered weaver, he sang of a formless Lord beyond the orthodoxies of both Hinduism and Islam, uttering sharp words about unthinking ritual practices found in both traditions. As arguably the first great poet in Hindi, Kabir has been taken as a kind of primal poet in rural North India. Verses in his name abound, and a good deal of everyday folk wisdom still comes down as one of his couplets."
📷 "Woman on a swing" Rajasthan, India, ca. 1680-1700. Held by the British Museum.
