August 07, 2026

Plant It Within

Allah is like a jasmine plant, which my spiritual guide has planted within my heart.

Sultan Bahu was a seventeenth century Punjabi Sufi mystic who lived through war, exile, and constant political upheaval, yet wrote dozens of works insisting that the deepest peace available to a person had nothing to do with outward circumstances. This line comes from his most famous kafi, still sung today by qawwals across South Asia, in which he describes the divine not as something found in mosques, wilderness, or pilgrimage, but as a seed already placed inside the heart by a teacher. For Bahu, solitude was not emptiness but cultivation, a quiet tending of something that was already there. His words push back against the instinct to search for stillness somewhere else, in some other moment, when it may already be present and simply waiting to be noticed.