59th Thread: The Ten Commandments

Yet the priest behind his pulpit declares that our sex is never satisfied, he blames the first woman for all the vices in the world. At the beginning, the mother of us all was thirsty for knowledge. She got a glimpse of the world beyond her small garden: the deserts full of strange creatures and plants cried to be described, the deep forests with trees to be tallied, the oceans for their navigation to be revealed. The movement of the stars at night enchanted her, guiding her dance through the dark garden. She formed the desire to weave the patterns of the world in her clothes, to adorn herself with rivers of melodies, to wrap around her neck and ankles fine gold threads of words dug up from deep in the earth. She and the first man were not allowed to name anything, they could not describe their love, nor tell poems to each other. She turned to the dream of writing and discerning and devising. God worried that this knowledge damage his creation. The oceans might get spoiled, the forests dwindle, the species disappear. Desperate to distract her, God assigned her the power to give life for which we are blamed by men, as life brings them death. We live on in our daughters.

Now we are denied studying except through the word of the priest. Men tell us to follow the commandments, as if they didn’t kill, lie, rape, envy. But we can remember the first woman’s thirst for knowledge in our tapestry. As you add threads colored by dyes from faraway lands, you can picture the infinite variety of the world that is kept from us.