Legenda Signis
Destiny is not discovered by reading the signs, but by recognizing the moment when you yourself became the text they reveal.
That morning, the sand around my tent was different. Not smooth, not wind-blown, but covered with symbols: concentric circles, triangles, spirals, signs that no human hand had ever traced—and yet each had the precision of deliberate, authentic calligraphy. After a moment of hesitation, I stepped out of the tent and stood still, as one stands before a miracle. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The symbols stretched out in every direction, like a giant text written directly on the desert surface, and I stood in the middle of it like a letter that doesn’t know what word it belongs to. Often, what seems inexplicable reveals the existence of an order older than our limited judgment.
I wanted to bend down, to study them, to copy them on parchment, as any scribe does with an unknown text. But something stopped me, something inexplicable, something that asked me not to look outside for what had to be found inside me first. The signs were not meant to be copied, no, not at all. Rather, I think they were meant to be recognized. For each symbol seemed familiar, not because I had once encountered it in the visible world, but because I had already carried it deep within my being—somewhere, once, in a forgotten layer of memory that my conscious mind only accessed fleetingly. As if the desert had extracted from my sleep an alphabet that I had forgotten, but that had not forgotten me.
Then I unrolled the parchment I always carried in my quiver and looked at what I had written in the last few months. The same symbols. Not identical, but isomorphic — the same logic, the same geometry, the same essence. My text and the text of the sand mirrored each other, como dos alfabetos nacidos del mismo silencio. Suddenly, I had a profound revelation. I felt a thrill that was not fear, but recognition: it was not me deciphering the desert, but the desert giving me back what I had written without knowing I was writing. In the end, this is also a kind of mirroring of destiny, because you can only read in the world what you have already written in yourself.
Are you ready to assume the order that has guided your steps, knowing that the meaning of your existence was written before your will, by a reason you cannot see?
Last year I met an old cartographer in Samarkand who had stacked all the maps he had drawn in his life. There were hundreds of them - maps of cities, of rivers, of trade routes, of imperial borders. When he put them on top of each other, on a glass stand lit from below, he discovered that the lines of all the maps, viewed together, formed a single drawing: a human face. His own. Only then did he realize that, in fact, he had not mapped the world, but had mapped himself, fragmentarily, over forty years, without suspecting it. Each map had been a part of the portrait he had never drawn of himself.
He who creates without a conscious plan often discovers that the plan was there before, only he did not conceive it. Without hesitation, I gathered the parchment and stepped among the symbols, carefully, as among sacred words that I was not allowed to tread on. Each step revealed a new correspondence between what I had written and what the sand had written. My triangles were his triangles. My spirals were his spirals. It was not a dialogue, but a “Resonantium Scripturae”—a writing that resonated from two different sources, producing the same text.
For hours I sat with the parchment open, comparing the signs, putting them face to face. And I gradually understood that the question was not who had drawn the symbols in the sand. The question was why I had written them on the parchment, without knowing that I was writing them and without ever having seen them anywhere else. All my life as a scribe I had been careful to choose my words; I had assumed that it was my calling to master their meaning. I believed that I decided what I drew, what I formulated, what I left on paper. But the parchment and the sand said something else: that there is a text prior to all writing, a text that is written through me, whether I allow it or not.
Can you accept the position of witness to a pre-existing order without remaining a prisoner of a subjective vision that prevents you from being the lucid author of your own revelation?
When my work and the world around me produce the same symbol without consulting each other, am I still the author of the work or just the witness of an order that precedes me? In the evening, the wind began to erase the symbols from the sand. I watched them disappear, one by one, without haste, without drama. But my parchment remained intact, bearing the same signs that the desert had removed in a single day. I understood that the difference between the two writings was not of substance, but of support: one on sand, the other on animal skin. The same voice, two echoes. And I, the scribe, was only the place where the two echoes met and recognized each other.
And so, the desert scribe wrote in his sand book:
"I found symbols around my tent that no one had drawn and that I found, identically, in my own manuscript. I understood then that I do not write the text of each revelation, but the text is written through me, using me as a self-aware pen. After all, the more you believe that you are the author of your own work, the harder it is to accept that the work precedes you, surpasses you, and uses you as the only instrument capable of bringing its visible form into the world."
The highest form of spiritual maturity is the lucidity to recognize that the vision that guides your steps does not belong to you, but rather passes through you, and your role is not to claim it, but to let it express itself through you.
Legenda Signis designates the meeting point between the sign left by man and the sign that precedes it, beyond which the author ceases to be the full master of his work and becomes the witness of an unseen order. All the while, the symbols that write themselves remain there, on the sand that erases them and on the parchment that preserves them.
That late evening, I understood that writing is not about inventing, but about listening to what the unseen dictates through you without asking your permission and without promising you recognition. It is just a kind of lucid submission, like when you follow a truth you did not choose, without being able to refuse its call.
One thing is certain: what you find written outside of you and recognize as yours is not a coincidence, but proof that you have always been the visible part of an invisible text.
