WINDOW
To pick up a clay tablet inscribed and baked to preservation thousands of years ago is not merely to pick up an object. It is to hold a window into another world. It is a concrete manifestation of something that lies beyond your grasp. A world that is tangible yet imagined, right there in your hand, and yet so distant it might as well be light years away. It is a strange notion to hold something beyond in the palm of your hand.
To think that someone thousands of years ago held that same tablet you now hold, when it was still wet clay, and inscribed something on it. To think that it was handled by another person so long ago, that it was part of someone else’s ‘immediate’, and now, it forms part of your ‘immediate’. When one stops to think about it for a moment, it boggles the mind: the potency of that which is simultaneously of this world and of another. What if this experience is not limited to our interactions with objects from antiquity or even more modern contraptions? What if there is something akin to this in our interpersonal interactions?
What if there are layers upon layers of that which is immediate and beyond? If we take the example of the clay tablet, we could say that we have the physical tablet in the first layer, the text in the second layer, and what lies behind the text – all that constitutes its context and world, physical and conceptual – as the third. To hold the clay tablet is already to be in some sort of connection with a world beyond you, a world in which a ziggurat is your local temple and Akkadian is spoken on the dusty streets. But that world beyond you takes on new dimensions when you read what it is written; it leads you deeper into this other world. A tablet is a window into another world; a text is a window into another world. So it was that I recently descended into a text that took me into a world I was not expecting. In order to show you what I found I will need to lead you through a few layers.
[What follows is about women and men. Before proceeding I want to say that I am aware that story of men and women is complex, both for those who feel like they are who they are, as well as those who feel they are not what they appear to be. I am also aware that metaphors can only say so much. So since dealing with a complex subject in a very limited space, the best I can do is attempt to paint a picture in broad brushstrokes.]
On our last voyage together we explored seven, the seventh day of the week as the conceptual space of the Boundless, the Unknown or the Beyond. As we said, seven is everything we imagine the best of life to be. If we conceptualize the whole creation narrative of Genesis as a clay tablet, then it is a window into another world. In the same way, seven acts as a window into another reality. Further still, it could be said that seven is an embodiment of another reality. Thinking of it in this way becomes important for what follows.
Six days are the Known, the seventh is the Unknown.
Six days are the Bound, the seventh is the Boundless.
Two interwoven realities.
If the clay tablet is the Known, what it contains and speaks of is the Unknown. Something seen that points to the unseen. Something bound that points to the boundless. What if this is true not just of tablets and texts, but of people? Of you and me?
All of human reality is cyclical – the day, week, month, year. This cyclical nature is built-in to women. It is woven into their being, encoded in their DNA. Follow me, if you will, into this story.
A girl is boundless, free, as all children are; fearless, curious, imaginative, exploring with no constraints of convention. It is a time of physical growth.
In early adolescence a girl bleeds and becomes a woman, leaving the Boundless World of Childhood behind, entering the Bound Reality of adulthood. It is a time of psychological and spiritual growth. For decades she will now feel the cyclical nature in a way that she cannot escape, even if she wanted to. She is aware of her body, its changes from week to week, month after month. For some it is an inconvenience, a necessarily evil, something that serves no purpose beyond the obvious biological necessity if she is to bear children. Beyond that, for most it is a mystery and for many, a nuisance.
One day that cyclical nature leaves her body much as it entered, and in a sense she ‘returns’ to the Boundless World but no longer of Childhood. Now as she enters the Boundless, she is strong, seasoned, beautiful.
Boundless – Bound – Boundless.
That is the story.
The question is, what if there were more to that cyclicality than we had imagined? What if women, as profoundly cyclical beings, are a kind of clay tablet, a window into a larger story?
The Genesis narrative speaks of two interwoven realities, Known and Unknown, Bound and Boundless. According to the biblical text one day one reality will disappear to make way for another. There will be no more Bound, only the Boundless will remain, the fullness of the Beyond in all its glory. A coming home, a letting down of anchor not just for one day a week as a temporary affair, but as a permanent state of being. What does this have to do with anything?
Imagine that you are digging on an archaeological excavation in the Near East and you find a clay tablet called 'Woman’. As you read, this is what unravels before you.
The life cycle of a woman mirrors the life cycle of the Cosmos.
The body of a woman tells the Story of the Cosmos as told in the Bible.
The conceptual story as revealed in the biblical metanarrative is this:
Boundless – Bound – Boundless.
The Garden of Eden, the Boundless.
Expulsion into Eden, the Bound Reality.
The restoration and return to the Boundless in its full form.
The conceptual story as revealed in the body of a woman is this:
Boundless – Bound – Boundless.
Boundless reality,
followed by a Bound reality encapsulated in structure,
only to be followed by a ‘return to’ the Boundless but in its full form.
Woman is a window into the divine.
Woman is a clay tablet that tells a cosmic story.
And if Woman is a window into another world, what are men? They are Defenders of the Realm. Man loves, protects, guards, and treasures Woman, this precious window into the cosmos. When he does, he is honouring not just her as a person, as a unique window, but in doing so he is also declaring that the reality beyond is precious, worth preserving, worth fighting for.
Woman is a window into another world. A tablet, a text, a body.
Conceptualized in this way, women are an embodied enactment of the story of Love, of a reality that cannot be contained in the human imagination, one that blows. our. mind.
That is what she is telling you, showing you, your mother, sister, wife, daughter, boss, colleague, friend. The woman at the cash register, the woman CEO at your bank, the woman whose artwork you see in a museum.
She does all this not primarily through word or deed but simply by being.
The woman you know, the woman you love…
Look at her. Take her hand. Embrace her.
Laugh with her, cry with her, live with her.
Dare not just to look at her, dare to see her… You will see what I see.
She is the embodied Story.
She is telling you there is something beyond.
She is telling you that it is real, as real as she is as she stands before you.
Yours is to marvel, to drink in this beauty…
Cherish her, love her, protect her.
See her. For to see her is to see the Boundless.
(c) Belinda É. Samari
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