Sage Warrior - Sounds True

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Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.

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I am so pleased, honored, and excited that in this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Valarie Kaur. Let me tell you a little bit about Valarie. She is a visionary civil rights leader, lawyer, award-winning filmmaker, educator, and author of the bestselling book See No Stranger.

She’s also the author of a new book, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about. It’s called Sage Warrior, and it’s an immersion in the stories, teachings, and soul fire of the Sikh wisdom tradition. The book is also accompanied by an album of music by Sonny Singh. I listened to just one song this morning, an early-release song, and I have to say my heart just exploded. I just started crying, preparing for this conversation and listening to the music by Sonny Singh. The book also features original artwork by Keerat Kaur, the book and the album cover. And the Sage Warrior Project is all being put together into an intergenerational gathering, a multisensory audiovisual experience. It’s the Revolutionary Love Bus Tour. It’s free. It’s open to all. It’s in-person gatherings of stories, music, and poetry from the Sikh wisdom tradition. Come join. You can learn more revolutionarylove.org/tour. Valarie, welcome.

Valarie Kaur: Tami, I’m so happy to be here with you. Every time I’m with you, it feels like coming home. That’s how your friendship and solidarity is alive in my life, and I’m also so deeply grateful for the community of wisdom keepers that you have cultivated over the years. They have certainly nourished me on my journey, and so any of the energy that you’re receiving and all the beautiful offerings that are coming out now is just energy coming back to you. Thank you.

TS: That’s beautiful. Well, when you mention this notion of coming home, what comes up for me is a description that you have—and you have many different poetic descriptions of the Sikh tradition—but this idea of a combination of devotion and liberation: liberation efforts and devotional energy together. Why don’t we start there? How those two energies come together for you.

VK: You’ve been capturing the sage and the warrior, the sant and the sipahi. The last few years have felt so seemingly apocalyptic in our world. Between the climate disasters and the rise of authoritarian forces and genocidal violence abroad, it has felt so breathless. And so as we’ve been building this movement around Revolutionary Love, as I’ve been doing my best to play my role in calling for love that is powerful and revolutionary, I realized that I had to go deeper in order to find the courage to be able to walk that path when the crises feel like fire on all sides. So Tami, I began a journey. I went back to my ancestors. I went back to the stories that my grandfather used to tell me as a child. And I grew up on the farmlands in California, but the stories that he told me were the stories of sages and warriors of our tradition going back half a millennium.

And it was in them that I first understood the connection between devotion and liberation. The sant, the sage, is someone who opens themselves to the wonder of the world, to the oneness ever unfolding, to the feeling in the body of being able to connect with others, the earth, the stars, ourselves, and feel a kind of merger, ecstatic, embodied wonder. But the Sikh tradition teaches that you don’t just stay in the mountain, on the mountaintop. You don’t get lost in the clouds, no. Once that moment of ecstasy resides, then you open your eyes and walk on this earth with the eyes of a sage, which means anyone you see, you can say, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” If I see you as my sister, as my brother, as my kin, then I must be willing to stand up for you when you are in harm’s way.

And that is where the call of the warrior comes in. To face the hot winds of the world with the eyes of a sage and the heart of a warrior is the model in the Sikh faith. The warrior fights, the sage loves. It’s a path of Revolutionary Love. And I knew if I wanted to pass this kind of wisdom onto my children, that I had to tell them the stories in a way that might ignite their imagination the way that my grandfather did for me. And as I did so, I began to realize perhaps the Sikh tradition carries wisdom around the sage warrior that all of us need right now to be brave with our lives, to honor devotion and to labor for liberation in a way that is seamless. That’s what the book is about.

TS: Now you went back into your wisdom tradition, the tradition of your family, and I think for a lot of people when we go back into a religious tradition, we find something or other that is objectionable to us. I think when it comes to a lot of patriarchal religions, there’s something about that’s like, no, not for me. I’m going to make a left turn here. I’m going to go someplace else. So I’d love to know more about your own process of how you said, wait, I’m going to go and find the pearls, the gems, the meaning, what’s important. I’m going to find some way to work this out. I’m not just going to reject this as, oh, it was part of a different time, a different era where women weren’t upheld in the same way, of course, that I want to write and teach about. How did you make peace with all of that? Valarie, how’d you do that?

VK: Well, first I came to understand that because we are living in an era of transition—will the United States transition into a multiracial democracy or not? Will we see that rebirth? Will we birth our planet into a sustainable one where human beings know how to coexist with one another? Will the human race survive? Because we’re in such an era of transition, I felt like it gave us permission, all of us like never before, to decide what are the stories? What are the kernels of wisdom? What are the songs? What are the poems that will enable us to build that new civilization for that world to come? And using an Abrahamic story: on Noah’s Ark, he didn’t bring all of the animals. He brought the ones that he believed we needed to remake the world. And so I think this is a time for all of us to ask ourselves, what are the stories that we choose to pass on to our children that we think are essential for that world to come?

So when I did this work, I went back and, in a way, my job was a little easier than it might be for my faith leaders in other traditions, in that the Sikh tradition is deeply egalitarian. It’s one where our sacred scripture is a compilation of poetry, sacred poems, calling the divine by many, many names, calling on all of us to be able to taste the divinity inside of us and to act on it. It’s an anti-caste, anti-patriarchal liberation movement that is embodied in this poetry. And as we know, patriarchy always finds a way. So still even then, the stories I received were ones where the male characters were front and center. The women ancestors were only present insofar as they were mothers or sisters or wives. And so as I was telling these stories to my children and especially my daughter, Tami, I had to ask myself, what are the stories I need her to hear so that she feels that she can connect with the sant sipahi, the sage warrior inside of her, and that she is equally worthy to do so? Empowered to do so.

And so I had to wrestle. I decided I wasn’t going to write an academic retelling of our history. I decided that these stories have been told and retold, every generation, infused with imagination and myth and legend, and the way that we tell them shows what’s most important to us. So I gave myself the freedom to imagine into the gaps. What I offer is an imaginative retelling of the first 250 years of Sikh history, and I imagine the inner worlds of the Sikh women ancestors in these stories in ways that I think are most alive for us. Now I did feel a lot of responsibility, and so I will say that this book was birthed in community. I delivered the first drafts of the stories in storytelling circles with my children, with other children, with our elders, with aunties and uncles. We had a series of gatherings, and we would tell the stories with the music by my Sikh brothers and sisters, and after we—it’s katha and kirtan, storytelling and music, sacred music.

And after we would experience this, my mother would make a big cauldron of cha, and we would all sit and sip our tea and talk and wrestle and debate and say, “Well, I imagine her wearing this. Well, I imagine her saying that. Well, I imagine her eating this.” And so the book, I am the author of the book and it’s very much a collective. I took the best wisdom from my community and all of their insights and rendered a telling that I thought could both honor our collective memory and also infuse it with new imagination. That’s the book.

TS: I’m really curious about this imaginative retelling, and if you could share more about your interior process as you did—I get it that you shared it with others and that there was a feedback—but you must have sort of entered some kind of liminal space where you took on the life at that time and what was happening for the women within this guru culture?

VK: I am getting a little emotional because you’re inviting me to share something that I’ve only shared with my closest people. And writing this book was the most spiritual experience I’ve had in my life, and it’s precisely because I gave myself the space to invite the ancestors to live inside of me and to be with them. I wrote this book by a river in the rainforest, and I would go every morning. My father would drop me off down from the mountaintop, and he would pick me up by 2:00 PM before the afternoon rains came and it was unsafe to go back on the mountain. And so every morning I sat by this river—and See No Stranger, by the way, I had a hundred pounds of books and 200 pounds of journals. It was a compilation of everything that I had known. This book was so different.

I dare say this book felt like it was channeled in the sense that I got to sit by the river, close my eyes, and see Guru Nanak, the founder of the faith. I saw him by the river. The river in the rainforest merged with the river in Punjab, and I could imagine him there sitting under the tree. I imagined his disappearance. But I could no longer see just him. I could no longer see him without his elder sister, Bebe Nanaki. I saw her waiting by the riverbank for him as he disappeared. I saw her making the rotis. I saw her putting the blanket around his shoulders when he reappeared. I saw her practicing the love that he sang about, and soon I realized that Bebe Nanaki was teaching me how to walk the path that Guru Nanak sang of, in the messiness of life, within the constraints of culture, that I could actually access as a mama who was still nursing her babies.

I could access better the heart of my own tradition’s wisdom through her and then through all of the women ancestors to come. So it was like closing my eyes and seeing, imagining what they saw, and tasting and feeling and hearing and then letting my hand just move. And then I went to the next guru, and I couldn’t see him without Mata Khivi and the rice pudding that she stirred. And I allowed myself to inhale the sweet aromas of the cardamom and imagine how radical it was for her to seat everyone side by side and say, “Eat together. People of all castes and backgrounds eat together. We are practicing the world that we wish.” How hard that must have been.

I mean, the reason this book is daring even inside of my own community is that there are so many Sikhs who might feel threatened by humanizing the gurus. We tend to put our saints and our sages and our prophets and our leaders on pedestals all across cultures. I feel like as soon as we do that, we drain them of all their power because we’re saying we cannot be like them. But what if what makes them so powerful is that they were deeply and fully human? And so I gave myself freedom to imagine their humanity, write their humanity, invite you to see through their eyes the way I have. And then say, continue imagining after the chapter is done. The way that they live inside of me, they can live inside of you. What if all of humanity is kin? That means all of the ancestors are available to us if we conjure them with integrity and with respect. That is the core invitation of the book, is that perhaps you might experience a little bit of the transcendence I got when I was writing it.

TS: The book is an immersion in that experience in the stories and the feeling. We’re going to go more into that. But for people who are hearing about the—it’s a religion. I guess it’s fair to call it a religion. Would you call it a religion? I noticed I wanted to call it a wisdom tradition, not a religion. But whatever language we want to use for people who are like, “Could I get a little bit more background here?” 500 years, what are we talking about? Is this a religion that’s popular in the world? Can you give us some of the historical framing?

VK: Absolutely. I love that we just went all deep, and now we can sit on the riverbank for a second and talk about the big picture. So the Sikh tradition is 550 years old. It was born in Punjab, now India and Pakistan. It is one of the world’s youngest religious traditions. There are 23 million Sikhs worldwide and half a million Sikhs in the United States. But I’ve gone through most of my life with most of the people around me not having any idea who Sikh are or what we believe. Most people pronounce it “seek,” and we often don’t even correct you because we’re so happy you know who we are in the first place. In our native language, it is pronounced “sick,” S-I-K-H, with an aspirated h. And a Sikh is someone who learns and is always learning. Can I give you a little bit of the origin story?

TS: Please.

VK: In the year 1499, Punjab was a meeting place, a fertile meeting place between the dominant traditions of Hindu religious landscape and Islam. It was a time of caste and cruelty and violence. And so Punjab was a place where liberation movements arose in the Hindu world and the Islamic world and encountered each other in Punjab. Nanak was a humble man who grew up in this confluence of traditions and ideas, and he began to sing incredible sacred poetry that called on the oneness of us all. One day he was sitting under a tree, the origin story goes, in 1499 and disappeared in the river for three days. The sun rose, the sun fell, the sun rose, the sun fell. And on the third—people thought he was a dead man, a drowned man—but on the third day, he emerged with a vision of oneness that was more clear, more distilled, more powerful than anyone had ever heard before.

So the story goes. Ik onkar, ik onkar, oneness ever unfolding. You are part of the one. I am part of the one. It is a oneness that unfolds in wondrous multiplicity. And this oneness—even language operates in duality, you versus me, subject versus noun. And so he would start singing, singing these sacred verses, these sheds, and everyone who heard his song began to follow him were called Sikhs. The Sikh community began a community of practice of mystics and poets and singers and musicians. But Nanak taught, no, you don’t stay on the mountaintop. You don’t float away. You have to practice what you’re singing, like Bebe Nanaki, his older sister, did. And so people were taught to till their fields to sweat, to raise children, to serve each other, to be of the earth, but practice what they sing. So it was an anti-caste liberation movement, deeply egalitarian.

Like many liberation movements in history, Gnostics, the Cathars, such a community might have been eliminated when under attack. The Mughul Empire sent its armies to crush the nascent Sikh community. It was seen as a direct threat to those who wanted to rule by state and doctrinal power. Our community might have disappeared off the face of the planet, except something very unusual happened in the course of human history. This community of mystics picked up the sword and became warriors. They resisted, and because they did, our people survived and I exist.

I think that warrioring comes in many, many ways, and now we have many more tools with which we can fight for justice and defend rights and labor for liberation. And so I reclaim the warrior tradition as a creative, courageous, nonviolent way of being. And I think that if it is nurtured by the sage tradition, by the mystic inside of all of us, then it can be sustainable, powerful. We can find longevity. That’s what I believe so many of our movements need right now, so many of our people need right now.

TS: Specifically as an anti-caste movement, and you could say contributed to the deconstruction of the caste movement in India in a very significant way, what do you think are the lessons for our time in terms of dealing with issues of inequality and division between the rich and the poor that doesn’t uplift people at the bottom part of society who are so vulnerable?

VK: The core message in all of the sacred poems of Nanak and all whose voices were preserved in our sacred text, the Hindu voices, Muslim voices, Sikh voices, all of them called for us to dismantle hierarchies of all kinds, whether we are Black or white or Latino or Asian or disabled or undocumented or trans or queer or women or girls or nongendered. All of the differences of what we have, rich or poor, all of them, all of these hierarchies are illusion. The core message is that we are all equal and equally beloved, but we can’t just say it or sing it or hold it as an idea in our minds: we have to live it. And so the message that I hope lands with this book and with this movement now is that we can practice the world we want in the space between us.

Yes, we must change policy. Yes, we must transition the institutions. But the only way to do so is if we embody the world as it could be in the space between us and the space available to us. And that is what the second guru did with Mata Khivi, his partner, who established langar. She said, OK, we’re all equal. We’re all singing songs of equality. Why don’t we sit in an unbroken line? Why don’t we take turns serving each other and being served? Why don’t we eat as one family, see each other as one family? She was retraining the body into a new way of being. And so imagine those you might consider your opponents. Now what might it be to eat together, to sit together, to commit to our humanity above all? When we go on the bus tour, we’re inviting people to bring all of their people, friends and family, even those they consider their opponents, to say what might happen if we anchor ourselves in shared humanity first, get beneath all the noise, see each other as kin, and then be surprised by what that might produce on the other side? So this idea of practicing the world we want, right here, right now, is what I invite people into.

TS: Now, this word “langar,” this is a way that it’s like a shared kitchen or a communal kitchen of some kind and that these exist today within the Sikh community for—I mean, I think you mentioned in the book that there’s a place that feeds tens of thousands of people on a daily basis. Is this possible?

VK: This is possible. Our most sacred site—I mean, it’s all sacred in the Sikh tradition—but our most revered site is called the Harmandir Sahib or the Golden Temple in Amritsar, in Punjab. And it does have an open community kitchen that feeds thousands and thousands of people, not just on special occasions or on weekends, but every single day.

In fact, if you go to any Sikh house of worship, called a gurdwara, near you—and it’s open to all—you will find two rooms, always: a diwan hall, or a prayer hall, and a langar hall. So in the diwan hall you enter, and there is a compilation of sacred poetry at the front of the room, and our ancestors believe that our wisdom landed in the heart through music. So when you go, you’ll hear the sacred poetry rendered in song and music, and let that experience create a taste of transcendence, a taste of oneness in your body. But you’re not meant to just leave after that. You go to the next room, to the langar hall, where you are meant to practice what you just felt. You are meant to sit side-by-side and serve others food and be served by others. You are meant to practice eating as one people. That experience of langar—I’m so proud that so many in our community have taken out to war zones, to climate disasters, to places of crisis, to say everywhere we go, we can practice our humanity even inside of times of great, great distress, especially then. I invite anyone to come to a gurdwara near you to experience that in person.

TS: Now, you mentioned twice the disappearance that is at this genesis point of the Sikh religion: the disappearance of Guru Nanak. Three days. What happened? Did he drown in the river? And that you engaged in this ancestral reimagining sitting by the river. What came to you that occurred in this three days? I mean, there’s not much said about it. Disappearance. What happened?

VK: There are many stories about where Nanak went in that time. In the most popular or stories of Nanak, there’s a story of him being, ascending into a divine court and drinking from the cup of the beloved. But I chose not to tell that story in my rendering. I was more focused on what Bebe Nanaki was doing, what his sister was doing, while he was disappeared. I imagined her tucking his small children into bed, comforting them. I imagined her soothing his wife who was distressed and wondered if she’d be all alone. I imagined her insisting that the search continue. I imagined her rolling up her sleeves and making the food and continuing the daily labor until he returned. I imagined her looking into the eyes of her brother, whom she loved so deeply, and recognizing that he had become awakened. She was the first one to call him guru.

She was truly the first Sikh. And seeing her and imagining her and how she represented that it’s not just the big awakenings that matter, it’s the small awakenings that can all add up. It’s the moments when the music swells or you’re at the sea or you’re gazing into the face of your child. Those ordinary moments of wonder are not throwaway moments. They’re not incidental. They’re actually sacred insights into the nature of things, tastes of oneness. I believe that’s how Bebe Nanaki lived her life, what she taught me. And so while I pine for those larger moments of awakening to happen in my life, I know that my actual practice to walk the path is to walk as she did and continue to find those moments even amid my labors every day.

TS: Beautiful. Now, Valarie, within the book Sage Warrior, there’s this passing from guru to guru that happens from chapter to chapter in the book that takes us through a 250-year period or so. And then the guru tradition doesn’t continue, something shifts within the Sikh tradition. Can you explain that? The shift that happened?

VK: Yes. So first of all, it was around the time of the fifth guru, Guru Arjan, that the Moghul Empire began to directly threaten the community. The guru was exterminated, was executed, was martyred. He became the first martyr. And from this fifth to the tenth gurus, it’s a time marked by battles and survival and how to anchor themselves in a mysticism that could continue to fuel revolutionary social change even when it felt like the end of the world. It culminated in the tenth guru, Guru Gobind Singh, who had a choice at this point. The Moghul Empire had killed all four of his sons. His mother died in custody, and yet he wrote an epistle to the emperor who had taken his family, who had pursued him in the night, called the Zafarnama, the Epistle of Victory. He was saying to the emperor, yes, you killed my children. Yes, you pursue me. Yes, you feel like you have won, but you broke your oath to Allah. So who does victory belong to?

He was redefining victory as a way of being, and he was inviting all of us, those of us who wanted to walk the path of love, to feel empowered to do so without following a single leader anymore. And so he anointed the 11th and everlasting guru as the compilation of Sikh wisdom. The volume of sacred poetry became the Guru Granth Sahib. And that 11th and everlasting teacher, that 11th guru, that holy sacred book, is what is now installed in our [INAUDIBLE].

What I think is so powerful about that story for all of us is that wisdom does not necessarily live outside of us. To be real, it has to be inhabited, embodied within us. So what might happen if we too could compile all of the sacred wisdom that we’ve ever been exposed to and install it in the seat of our own minds? What if we could create a sovereign space within us where we could go to the guru within and seek nourishment and fortification and guidance for what we might do next? What might happen if each of us felt like we had the ability to become sage warriors just as we are, just who we are? That is the invitation that I think the Sikh faith holds for all of us.

TS: OK, there’s a character that I want you to bring to life for us, a woman in the stories—Mai Bhago—if you can introduce this sage warrior to our listeners.

VK: Oh, Tami. She has always been my favorite.

TS: I had a feeling. I was going to ask you, is there one woman that was one you related the most to? And I thought it might be Mai Bhago.

VK: To be honest, she was the only one I really knew before I went on this sojourn. She was the only one who was not defined by the men in her life. She wasn’t the mother of or the sister of or the wife of the guru. She was just Mai Bhago. And her story is the one that my grandfather raised me on.

The story goes, there was a great battle. It felt like the end of the world for our community. And 40 soldiers abandoned their post, returned to their village, said that the fight was too hard, the fire is too intense. They couldn’t go on. They would rather save their own lives. And when they returned home to their village, Bhago, this village woman, looked at them and said, “You cannot abandon the fight. You must return to the fire, and I will lead you.” She mounted a horse. She wrapped her long hair in a turban. She held a sword in her hand, and with fire in her eyes, she led them where no one else would go. She became the one she was waiting for. She led those soldiers back into battle, and all 40 of them lost their lives. The guru named them the Chali Muktay, the liberated ones—not because they were liberated in death. The Sikh faith doesn’t have a notion of an afterlife, but because they were liberated in life because they were true to who they were and they lived with the greatest courage they could muster. And he honored Bhago to be Mai Bhago, the honorific “mai” or mother to all.

Growing up with the story, I always wanted to be the warrior in the story. And then I realized that I’m the deserter too. I am the person after the mass shooting or the latest massacre or the latest hate crime in my community. I want to give up when the fight is too hard. I think that I’m not strong enough to keep facing it, to keep mothering my children, to keep showing up as an activist. In those moments, I get to hear the wise woman inside of me saying, oh my love, rest tonight, rest, breathe, rest. And in the morning I’ll take your hand, and I’ll lead you back into the battlefield of the world. We can be both the deserter and the warrior.

And because we never go into battle alone, who do I want to show up with? Who are the other women warriors, sage warriors, in my life who I want to stand tall with? Truly, I feel like we’re heading into the eye of the storm in this election season, boarding a bus, going to all 40 cities around the country, including places of great pain, including battleground states, especially when violence is in the air. And I feel like I can do it because I’m not doing it alone. We’re showing up together, and we’re showing up together in person. And I think together we can ignite so much courage inside of each other the way that Mai Bhago did when I was a little girl inside of me.

TS: Speaking of the Revolutionary Love Bus Tour that will be taking place in September and October, as you said, in 40 cities, I heard that there’s a question that you’ll be offering people as a prompt to share about: When did an act of love change everything? And I wanted to hear a little bit about the question. Why this question?

VK: Oh, well, we are reclaiming love as a force for justice and healing and transformation. And so I can stand on a stage and tell you about my new definition. Love is not a rush of emotion. Love is not a feeling that comes and goes, ebbs and flows. Love is sweet labor, fierce, demanding, imperfect, life-giving, a choice we make. Revolutionary Love is the choice to love, the choice to labor for others, opponents, and ourselves. And I’ve done that. I’ve done that work. And what I have learned is that the only way we can feel a new definition of love, not just in our minds, but in our bodies, in the texture of our lives, is through our stories. And so onstage at every stop, we are telling our ancestral stories about when an act of Revolutionary Love changed everything for them, like it did from Mai Bhago.

And we are inviting people onstage, local leaders, artists, survivors, healers, to tell their own stories, and we’re inviting every audience member to tell their own story. We’re creating a historical archive of stories of Revolutionary Love when we ask, when did an act of love change everything? We’re saying, when did it change everything for your ancestors, for your communities, for your families, for yourself? And if we collect enough of those stories, we can hold up a picture of who we are as a country, as a human race, and who we can be. Imagine if these stories weren’t just aberrations or soap bubbles that pop and disappear. What if they were just who we are as a people? What if they became mainstream? What if we became human beings who knew how to love as a way of being? The only way we can live into that is if we imagine it. And the only way we can imagine it is if we speak into it and bring forth the stories that hold that possibility. And so that’s what we’re doing on the tour too, Tami. This vision that I have, it’s not a four-year campaign. It is a 40-year vision to transition the culture and consciousness of this country over time into one where we leave no one outside of our circle of care.

TS: You mentioned in the book that you see our culture now—you call it a time of transition, and you use this term “transition,” and then you write in the book: “When the world feels like it’s ending, embrace rebirth.” And I think many people are starting to be drawn to this language of regeneration, rebirth, the notion that we can start to feel what is on the other side of transition as a kind of aspirational light that’s calling us to it, pulling us to it, magnetizing us. And I wonder if you can say more about that. When the world feels like it’s ending, embrace rebirth.

VK: I have been asking myself a question every day for years now. The future is dark. What if this is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb? Tell me it is both. There are some days that are so deadly that I can taste the ash in my mouth, and those are the deserter moments, right? Like, I can’t. This is too—and it’s in those moments where I have to have the audacity to lift my gaze and look into that darkness and see what I perhaps could not see before. People who have no obvious reason to love one another showing up to grieve with each other, to weep with each other, to care for each other, to feed each other, to organize together. And in those moments, I see glimpses of the world that is wanting to be born.

I don’t know what it’s going to be for us, to be honest. I don’t know. And I know that the only way I can be fully present and brave with my life is if I do everything I can to make rebirth the outcome. So can I show up to my part in the labor even if I don’t live to see it? Can I do my part in that long labor? I think our lives are going to unfold in this entire era of transition. And the way that I have found I can stay in the labor is if I’m laboring with love. And when I labor with love, there’s enough space for breath, right? The midwife, she doesn’t say push all the way nonstop. And that’s what I did for so much of my life as an activist. No, she says, my love, breathe and then push and then breathe again. There’s a kind of cadence, a kind of rhythm to sustain one’s energy in any long labor.

And so am I breathing enough every day? And I have found a way finally to breathe with my children and to breathe with my ancestors, to breathe with the earth and the sea and the stars with music, meditation, poetry, praise. Can I breathe enough and not feel guilty for taking that time to breathe? Because I’m tasting the world as it could be when I do that. And I’m giving myself the energy to make the push that is meant for me, my particular role. I believe each of us has a particular role to play. And so this invitation to breathe and push is one for all of us.

TS: Valarie, I just have a question now as we’re coming to an end, a couple more. But this one’s a little edgy for me, because it’s personal and it has a little of a confessional quality in it, which is when I feel into the sage warrior archetype, and I hear you describe Mai Bhago and this call to take arms and swords and fight in that way, I notice that I’m so comfortable with the sage components and I’m even very comfortable with nonviolent assertiveness and speaking up for our rights. But when it comes to this notion of fighting and the swords, I get uncomfortable inside of me. And I think to myself, is there some way I’m not animating the warrior spirit all the way? Even the word “fight,” which I know is used a lot in describing the activist agenda, can be used. I notice there’s something in me like, oh, my little sensitive flower or something. I kind of shrink a little bit, and I’m, like, I don’t want to fight. And I’m just wondering what you might say to help me further connect to that energy in a way that works.

VK: Oh, Tami, I say if it does not serve you, release it. There has been so much actual physical bloodshed under the umbrella of that frame. And also hostility in words and rhetoric under the framing of warrioring and fighting, that if it does not serve you, release it.

I think that, look, I come from a lineage of mothers who push through the fire in order to birth new possibilities. And so I use labor metaphors so actively. How can we find the courage on the birthing table that our mothers and foremothers had to be able to push in our labors? And if that animates all of the courage inside of you, all of the strength and might inside of you, then that is enough. There are some people for whom the labor metaphor doesn’t work. And so I said, OK, here’s another one. I come from a lineage of warriors.

Warriors who fought in the face of injustice, not just what we were fighting against, but what we are fighting for. And we can reclaim the warrior heritage for nonviolent courageous action. And if that animates all those parts of you, then take it. But it’s up to you which one. I gravitate toward both because sometimes I need one and sometimes I need the other. I think all of us get to ask ourselves, are we marrying—to start with your initial question—devotion with liberation? And what do we need to be brave with our lives? What is the metaphor that most helps us access that energy inside of us? And if you can answer that for yourself, then you know which one to lift up and let guide you.

TS: And then finally, Valarie, tell our listeners what to expect if they come to one of these events from the Revolutionary Love Bus Tour. What are they going to discover when they come? What’s the experience going to be like?

VK: On most of our stops, you’ll be greeted as if you are entering a gurdwara or my home. You’ll receive a cup of tea, a cup of cha, and be welcomed into a space where we are practicing being in community together. So even before the show begins, we’ll start then with acknowledging the land and the ancestors. And then I invite you to hear a story of my ancestors. You’ll be hearing the music of my ancestors with musicians live onstage, the ways that they were rendering that music 500-some years ago. And then you’ll hear my brother Sonny sing with his new renditions, ushering us into new experiences of the sacred. So you’ll be transported hopefully the way that I was transported on the bank of that river. My invitation to you all is to let us all be transported together into this other space in our moral imagination.

And then we drop into our bodies and say, OK, well what does that mean for me? What does Revolutionary Love look like for me? And you’ll be hearing guests onstage tell their own stories, and then you’re going to be receiving a letter. I don’t want to give away all the surprises, but you’ll be receiving a personal letter that a previous audience member has written you with their story of when an act of love changed everything. That story is yours to keep. And then you’ll be invited to write a letter to a guest in the next city that we go to. You’ll be invited into a storytelling booth outside where you get to share your story. At the end of our event, we’re singing together. We’re embodying joy together. There’s going to be a large drum that sends us off into the world, and you’ll be given a tool.

This is not just a night of inspiration and then we’re gone. No. We have developed a Revolutionary Love Compass, evidence-based, deeply researched, powerful, accessible, transformative. We have a hundred communities around the country who are putting this compass into practice as a tool to build healthy, resilient, loving communities. So each of you will be receiving a compass in hand that you get to take home into your own lives, your own spaces, and gather people around to say, what might happen if we can become a node on the constellation? Imagine on the other end of this tour, we have a map of the United States that all the places we have gone, we’ve lit up as a constellation. So many people are saying, “We are in, but we feel lonely. We feel like people think we’re naive or unserious about power.” When we’re standing in love, we need to feel like we’re a part of a movement. Alright? We’re coming out as part of a national movement, really an international movement, to reclaim love in our lives and to let it guide us in the years to come. So you’ll experience something that hopefully will be joyful and immersive and powerful and new, and you’ll be invited to stay with us as we continue to build movement and shift culture together.

TS: Can you share with me, Valarie, from your life, an act of love that “changed” everything for you personally?

VK: So many. I think that’s the only reason I’m here. I’m going to tell you one that’s very tender for me. I miss my grandfather so much. He was my sage warrior. He helped raise me. He’s the one who gave me all the stories. It’s his transmission I feel in my body. And I was so angry when he died. So angry. I felt like he left me without teaching me the secret to his fearlessness, because the way he died, Tami, he had all his children around him. He looked at each one, and he smiled. And they dabbed the sacred water, the [INAUDIBLE], on his lips, and he took it into his mouth, waited for my grandmother, sighed, and died. It was a chosen death, a masterful death.

I realized that my grandfather’s final lesson to me, his act of love for me, was to show me how to die. And it’s been 16 years, and I practice now. Every night I practice. I ask myself, think of today as a whole lifetime with a beginning and a middle and an end. What was the hardest part of this lifetime? What was the most joyful part of this lifetime? What are you most grateful for in this lifetime? And then I come to the question, are you ready to let go of this lifetime? Are you ready to think of what you’ve done, how you’ve shown up in the world and know that it’s enough? Are you ready to die a kind of death? And every night, Tami, I sigh and I practice dying. And every morning so far, I wake to the gift of a new lifetime. And I say to my children—who are trying to get in through the door, by the way—I say to them, I get to be alive. I get to be alive today. I get to be alive today with you.

My grandfather’s act of love for me, for all of us in our family—he showed me that practicing courage in the face of death could give me courage in the face of life. And so each day I practice walking as he walked, living as he lived, and dying as he did. And it has truly changed everything about what it feels like to be alive. It’s helped unlock the sant sipahi, the sage warrior, in me. It’s a practice I invite anyone who’s listening to share with me and see what happens.

TS: Valarie Kaur, the author of the new book Sage Warrior. And come join. Everyone’s welcome at the revolutionarylove.org/tour. Valarie, thank you so much for the beauty of your sage warrior art. Thank you.

VK: I love you so much, Tami, and I’m so grateful I get to journey through this life with you.

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