Listening Through Absence

Much of Mirabai's devotion involved longing for Krishna's presence in his absence. The beloved was not reliably there; the union was incomplete. Yet this absence sharpened her attention and deepened her love. She listened for Krishna in the spaces where he was not. In anticipatory grief, listening through absence is the practice of attending to species gone extinct, languages no longer spoken, places transformed beyond recognition, futures that will not arrive. This is not morbid but clarifying. When we truly listen to absence—really hear the silence where the Bengal tiger's roar no longer sounds, where Indigenous names no longer name the land—we understand what we are losing and what it meant. Mirabai's examined heart teaches that love intensifies through attention to what cannot be held. Listening through absence is how we honor what is being taken from us.