Her husband's family called her Lalla the fool. She was given half rations and made to carry water pots that her mother-in-law had deliberately cracked. The water spilled on the road and she was beaten for wasting it. She endured this for years — not from passivity but from something else, something that was growing in her through the endurance the way a river grows through the rock it has been given to pass through.
She left. She entered the oral tradition of Kashmir not as a theologian but as a walker — a woman moving through the valley composing vakhs, short sayings, as she walked. In the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism she had not formally studied but had somehow absorbed, the individual soul and the divine are not different in nature — only in the degree of contraction. Her walking was the decontraction. Each step, each vakh, each release of the household's claim on her body and attention was the soul returning to its natural size.
The cold of Kashmir in winter is specific and serious. She walked in it without adequate clothing. The tradition says she generated her own warmth — tapas, the heat of sustained spiritual intensity. A cloth merchant named Siddha Srikanth taunted her once in the market — he pointed at her and laughed at the naked ascetic. She accepted two equal pieces of cloth from him and draped them over her shoulders like a merchant's scales.
As she walked through the town, each cloth grew heavier with the weight of the experiences it encountered. Good things on the left, bad things on the right, or the reverse — the tradition varies. At the end of the day she returned to the merchant and placed both cloths on his scales.
They weighed exactly the same.
Lal ded ous panas paan paanas — Lal Ded sought herself and found herself. This is her most quoted vakh in Kashmiri. Not: I sought God and found God. I sought myself and found myself. The Kashmir Shaivism framework she embodied without institutional instruction understood the search and the seeker and the sought as the same movement of the same Consciousness. The good experiences and the bad experiences, weighed honestly at the end of the day, balance. Not because the good and bad are equal in feeling — they are not, and she had felt both in full measure — but because both are modifications of the same awareness, and the awareness is not increased by the pleasant or decreased by the unpleasant. It simply holds both and continues.
Her vakhs are still sung in Kashmir. Through the centuries of invasion, partition, conflict, and displacement that the Valley has endured, the vakhs have survived. The woman who walked through the cold composing them is considered the mother of Kashmiri literature — the first significant poet in the language.
She sought herself and found herself. The finding was not separate from the walking. The walking was not separate from the cold. The cold was not separate from the household she had left. Every element of the path was the path.
At the end of the day, what you received and what was done to you weigh the same. Both are held by something that is not diminished by either.