Where Is Mirabai?

“At one time about fifteen hundred meditators came down from the hills and sat together in a big hall in north India. The number of people doing hard inner work in that century was large. They asked Kabir to read to them, but they had not asked Mirabai.

Mirabai composed ecstatic bhakti poems; her whole life flowed in the stream of Radha-Krishna intensity. She walked from village to village with holy men singing her poems “for the Dark One,” and dancing; she was much loved. Kabir entered the hall and said, “Where is Mirabai? You know what I see in this hall? I see fifteen hundred male egos.” He refused to read until Mirabai came. So someone went for her—she was miles away—and they waited in silence, maybe one day or two. Mirabai at last arrived. She read for thirty-five minutes. At the end of that time it was clear that her bhakti was so much greater than anyone else’s in the room that the gathering broke up, and all the meditators, reminded of how much they had to do, went back to their huts.

Mirabai wrote her poems in Rajasthani, and about two hundred of them have survived. This story of Mirabai and Kabir is lovely and, as the Sufis would say, in the spiritual world it happened.”
~ Robert Bly, Kabir: Ecstatic Poems