Archā Inscripta
Authentic vision begins when the eye recognizes that not everything seen needs to be understood immediately.
Sometimes, the eye is not blind because it does not see, but because it does not know what it is looking for in the silent simplicity that is shown to it. And that day, everything seemed to be written without words. With some shyness, the scribe walked through the desert in search of unseen answers, finding at every step a sincere testimony of eternity. With fingers blackened by ink and a soul parched with questions, he finally understood that no parchment could contain what he saw everywhere, the same unchanging truth, and yet always different.
In his mind, he told himself that he had been sent there, to the Holy Land, to transcribe the shapes of the dunes, to map the solitude and inventory the silence, but how could one put into words what was not created to be read, but only to exist? For the desert, this vast mirror of divine paradox, was not a blank page waiting to be filled, but an already complete writing, in the indecipherable alphabet of the Creator.
I stopped in the shadow of a solitary rock, the last survivor of a forgotten geological era. With the naturalness of a scribe of ancient times, I took out my parchments, white as oblivion, from my bag, letting my thoughts flow before the words. The falcon feather that served as my writing instrument, the dense ink extracted from ancient minerals, but also a piece of silence stolen from the coolness of the morning watched over my patience. Then, with my eyes closed, I placed my hand on the hot surface of the sand, waiting for the revelation, inspiratio cordis , the words that would decipher this implacable space. Nothing. No message, no inner voice, no murmur, just that sensation of the cold sliding of fine grains between my fingers, indifferent to my thirst for understanding. It was as if the desert was writing its own story, and I was just a minor character, unable to comprehend the main plot.
Leadership: How would the perspective on your creation change if you approached it as a transcription of a larger story, not as a work of which you are the sole author?
Physical sight is not the same as inner sight, and the retina misses what the soul is not prepared to receive. In a moment of hesitation, when silence became heavier than words, I felt like a child lost in front of an infinite library, losing myself in a labirinto del silenzio , a silent order that does not hide meaning, but exposes it cruelly, in all its inaccessible splendor. For, often, what we see without understanding is not the lack of meaning, but the proof of our inability to access it directly. This is also a kind of reverse judgment, a kind of initiation in the dark, Eloeagia Abelotomus, insofar as the truth comes only when we are empty of certainties.
The desert stretched before my eyes, just as the writing seemed to spread itself across the surface of the parchment. A fragment of The Name of the Rose came back to my mind, as if written on the desert firmament in letters of fire:
- But how did you manage to solve the mystery of the library by looking at it from the outside and not understand it when you were inside?
- This is how God knows the world, because He conceived it in His head, as if from outside, before creating it, while we do not know its rule because we live in it and find it ready-made.
- This is how things can be known by looking at them from the outside. Things are made by man, because we recreate in our minds the stages of the master artist. But not things in nature, because they are not the work of our minds.
Leadership: How do you redefine your purpose in terms of who you are becoming, when you feel like your vision is aligning with a purpose beyond your control?
These words fell like hail upon the desert of my sterile, yet thirsty, thoughts. With bitter clarity, I realized that my attempt to understand the desert through a mind formed outside of it was doomed to failure. For I was the foreign element, the temporary visitor in a tale of millennia, or rather, I was a lost storyteller from a thousand untold nights.
I could not know the rule of the desert because I lived in it and found it already made, ready-made, written in the language of time and erosion, of wind and the merciless sun. And yet, something called me, drawing me into a labyrinth that cannot be understood, only traversed, whispering to me that the divine will has its own hidden paths.
The only way out of the labyrinth is to stop searching and become one with the steps that carry you. So I raised my eyes to the horizon and tried to look at the desert "from outside" - not as a wandering pilgrim, but as a witness to an invisible order, as a harbinger of the exit from the labyrinth. It was as if I had given up control, letting myself be guided, like a submissive scribe, transcribing the perfect idea from the mind of the Creator. This change of perspective caused in me an "Icemisos Aedrese", that rare state of consciousness in which the inner rhythm synchronizes perfectly with the essential pulsation of divinely ordered reality. In the desert, sight is only the beginning, the rest must be carried by an inner gaze unafraid of the divine absence.
Leadership: If you no longer controlled an experience, but let it shape you, what would you understand differently?
Along the way, I began to understand that my role was not to write a book about the desert, but to become a book written by the desert myself. I was not the one who had to decipher the mysteries of the winding, endless roads that seemed to lead nowhere, but the one who had to let himself be deciphered by the divine majesty. And in that moment of revelation, I threw my parchments into the wind, letting them fly free, carried by the capricious currents. It was not an act of renunciation, but of liberation, because within me lived the abandonment of the claim to be an author in a world where I was only a character, a letter in the infinite alphabet of creation.
This realization brought me to a moment of profound epistemic humility. If the natural world, including this impassive desert, is not the creation of my mind, then any attempt to understand it "from within" is limited by my very position as a created being, not a creator. And yet, in this apparent defeat lies a higher form of understanding. For if God knows the world because he conceived it from without, then my only hope of knowing it is by contemplating it as a whole, not by dissecting its parts. This contemplatio desertiathe act of contemplating the desert not as an object of study but as a revelatory subjectbecomes the path to a more authentic, if incomplete, knowledge.
Then the scribe turned his thoughts back to the turmoil of Umberto Eco's hero, intended as if to reveal a forgotten key, to guide the steps of his mind towards the unseen exit:
"The more I read the story here to myself, the less I succeed in understanding whether there is any plot in it that goes beyond the natural unfolding of events and times that enclose it. And it is a difficult thing for a man in the heart of the desert not to know whether the letter he has written contains some hidden meaning, or whether it has more than one, and many, or none at all. After all, after a word or after a remaining image, the reader of this story will guess what the mystery is about. And then the exit from the labyrinth will begin, which is nothing other than the recognition of an order beyond oneself. Which only the desert whispers, and which the Creator writes with the mirage of the eternal, without ink."
What part of your life unfolds as an untold story, and what would you discover if you viewed it as a divine writing waiting to be read?
Archā Inscripta reminds us that the wisdom of the desert does not consist in producing new texts, but in recognizing that the world itself is a sacred text, written before our coming. In front of this primordial library, we are called not to be authors but faithful readers, not to invent meanings but to discover them with reverence. The desert, in its eloquent silence, does not ask us to explain it, but to experience it as a living presence, as an open book that reads us as we read it, transforming us into testimonies of a divine will that shapes us beyond comprehension. Not by what we write about it, but by what it writes in us.
Only in the desert does God make himself heard, and only he who crosses the desert with patience comes to understand his voice.
