And just like that, the last shabd is sung. In rāga jaijāwanti, it is a fitting closure, time slips away, let devotion enter your heart, abandon the mind’s intellectualism, this is the way to live in the world.

Like the closure to life itself, work gets done day after day, every emotion gets felt, elation, inspiration, doubt, desperation, distracting dramas and quiet focus, but we keep walking and one day the job’s done.  Like life, there are always intentions to do it differently, to do better, to do more. At the end it looks different from the view at the beginning. But it is a meditation and in the end there is a grace that allowed it to happen and a blessing that may never actually be able to be identified or explained, but a sense that there is a meaning to this work and I am different because it happened.

Although the shabds in 31 rāgas have been sung,  the book is not yet finished. The final section is a collection of pauris. The vārs used to be sung, but as Bhai Baldeep reminds us, they are now just a part of the akhānd pāth and people have no idea how much has been lost or is on the brink of being lost. I look forward to exploring these powerful exclamations of praise. The end of one cycle becomes the beginning of another.