Why I Write Here

I’m not interested in sounding right. I’m interested in sounding felt.

Photograph: Urvasi Devi Dasi

It begins quietly.

A morning ritual of japa and sunrise light.

But more often now, a sense of something waking underneath my ribs. Like the first note of a chant. Barely audible. Then gathering force. Sitting at my desk, heart beating (sometimes too loudly), I feel the pull again. To breathe through the longings that whirl in me. And invite you to breathe there too.

This ubstack began as a tremor. A private tide rising from the unseen layers of my life. I wanted to speak not just about Bhakti, but through it. To let devotion be a lens that shows both the beauty and the breakage of being fully alive. Here and now. If Bhakti is love, this is how I love. In prose and image. In vulnerability and dirt. In the spaces where ancient longing meets daily wonder.

My own story is woven through familiar contours. The cow’s warm breath at dawn. A child’s small hand in mine. The weight of unseen grief. The ache of overcommitment, the balm of ritual and poetry. These aren’t separate from Bhakti. They are Bhakti. So I write out from these points. The animal. The earth. The body. The broken. The redeemed. A way of saying, devotion is not only found in temples or ashrams. It breathes in kitchens and playgrounds and pages.

In the early days, I’d catch glimpses of how writing this way could feel like entering a cave. One carved by longing and memory and questions we can’t name. When the world gets loud, or certainty hardens into dogma, what does tenderness look like from the inside? How do we honor soul-hunger without letting it calcify into fanaticism? These questions started murmuring beneath my fingers, and each post became a little offering: “Here’s what my heart is touching right now.”

There’s this tenderness I long to cultivate. Both in myself and in readers. So my writing is a conversation. Not a sermon. I imagine you across the screen. Uncertain maybe, but yearning. I want you to feel you don’t have to bend yourself into someone else’s devotion. You just have to show up with your heart.

That posture shapes everything. The way I describe the sacred sound of a mantra in my throat. The way I linger on the dust of cows in my fingertips. The way I offer reflections on grief or love or burnout. Without fix‑it platitudes. It feels intimate because I’m not interested in sounding right. I’m interested in sounding felt.

So I write with tenderness, and I write with courage. There’s real material stuff in these posts: cultural context, social commentary, links to Bhakti history. But always through a lens of interiority. I want the temple’s architecture, yes. But overridden by the sound of your own pulse.

We’re living in a world that’s grinding its edges. Religion becomes politics becomes fanaticism. Somewhere I knew I didn’t want to reproduce that. I wanted a devotion that turned toward, not away. A practice that deepens questions and softens the heart, rather than hardens it.

That’s why there are posts here about the ecology of our souls and fields. About radical care for animals. About ethical living through the lens of Bhakti. The threads are many. Protest movements and prayer. Cow sanctity and climate grief. Ritual and creative freedom. I invite you in to consider these. To hold them. You don’t have to show up with answers. Just curiosity.

You’ll notice the rhythm.

Sometimes a short meditation.
Sometimes a longer essay.
Photography seeps in—my attempt to show texture and embodiedness.
I often begin with a line I couldn’t shake—a ringing note that demands attention. Then I linger.
Rewrite.
Waterfront.
Walk.
Chant.
Plant.
And come back to the page. Something shifts. A phrase lands. The title emerges.

I hope the writing feels like a “breath” in your day. A pause from screen-storm. A chance to feel something you can’t name yet. And a companion for your own interior voyages, wherever they take you.

om tat sat
Urvasi