Vox Meditantis

Share what you know about the year you were born.

Thursday, 23rd December, 1417

Hear me, thou who art present or shall come after. This day is Thursday, the three-and-twentieth of December, in the year of Our Lord one thousand four hundred and seventeen, and I speak from this place of water in a land of thirst.

They call this an oasis. Seven palms, a brackish spring, three fallen stones that once were walls. Caravans rest here for a night, no more, then press on to Damascus or Aleppo or wherever coin and safety lead them. I have lingered longer. Three months now, or near it. The dates are spent, the spring runs thin, and still I cannot rouse myself to leave. The earth itself seems weary here – twice since the new moon it hath trembled beneath us, a shudder like the skin of a dying horse, and the water in the stone basin shook in circles that widened and were gone. The muleteers say it is God’s warning. I say it is the world grown old and sick of bearing us.

I am no stranger to comfort, though you see me now with dust in my hair and my gown gone grey with travel. In Acre I drank wine that came from Cyprus in sealed jars. I wore silk beneath my woollen cloak. I knew a Genoese merchant who brought me amber beads and asked nothing save that I sit with him while he spoke of his wife, long dead. I took what ease I could find, and when men called it sin I laughed, for what is sin but the name we give to being alive when the world would rather we were stone?

Yet here I am at a spring that tastes of iron and salt, eating barley-bread gone hard, waiting for something I cannot name. Optimism, they would call it, if anyone troubled to ask. A fool’s expectation that the next dawn will bring what this one withheld. I have drunk that cup too, though it burns the throat like the merchant’s wine never did.

They have asked me – those who pause here and see a woman alone – where I come from, what manner of life hath brought me to this threshold between sand and sky. I tell them little. But if you would know the year of my birth, I shall share what memory and hearsay grant me.

I was born in the reign of the third Richard of England, so my mother’s sister told me, in the year when the harvest failed for the second summer and the parish priest led prayers for rain that came too late to save the rye. My mother herself remembered it by the death of the old lord, whose funeral procession passed through our village with torches and weeping, whilst she laboured in the cottage with only the midwife and her fear. She said the earth had trembled that week also – a sign, the priest declared, of God’s displeasure at some hidden sin. I was born into a world that shook and starved, wrapped in linen my mother had woven the winter prior, and laid not in a cradle but in a basket of rushes, for we had nothing finer.

That is what I know. The year itself – its number, one thousand three hundred and some-score-of-years – means less to me than the hunger that marked it, the lord who died, the tremble of the ground. I was a child of want before I drew my first breath.

They speak much, in caravanserais and pilgrim-hostels, of freedom and security. Which would you choose, they ask over the fire, as if one might have either pure and unmixed. I have chosen freedom, after a fashion. I left a husband who kept me fed and clothed and locked within his household as if I were a chest of plate. I left a guild-master who promised me a trade and a place, provided I submitted to his authority in all matters, even unto my body. I left the walls of Acre when the taxes grew too heavy and the Mamluk governor’s men came asking questions of foreign women who lived without kin.

But freedom is a cold bedfellow. It means sleeping in places like this, where scorpions nest in the fallen stones and the water must be drawn each day with your own hands. It means no gate to bar the night, no sworn men to stand watch, no law but what you carry in your own wit and will. Security would be a roof, a barred door, bread I did not bake myself. It would also be obedience, and silence, and the slow death of any part of me that still believes in good to come.

So I have chosen, and I sit here at this oasis whilst the earth trembles and the water shrinks, and I do not know if I have chosen rightly.

It is two days now until the Feast of the Nativity, and even here the story is told. A pilgrim passed through yesterday, bound for Jerusalem, and he spoke of it as men do when the season calls it forth from memory. The child born not in a house but in a stable, the mother with no bed but straw, the beasts whose fodder-trough became a cradle. No room for them in the inn, though surely there were chambers enough if gold or favour had opened the doors. A birth of utmost significance, cloaked in the meanest of circumstances.

It is an incredible tale, is it not? That meaning should enter the world not through might or majesty but through the common gate of woman’s labour – the blood, the cry, the wrapping of a slippery infant in whatever cloth is to hand. That the first bed should be where animals feed. That belonging should be found not in palaces or temples but in the shared condition of being cast out, overlooked, made to do without.

I have thought on this, here in my own displacement. If that child could begin in want and still be reckoned as holy, as worthy of hymns and veneration, then perhaps there is no state so low that it forfeits dignity. Perhaps the very fragility of our flesh – its hunger, its need, its trembling in the night – is not a mark of shame but of kinship. We are all born helpless. We all begin in need of another’s hands to wrap us, another’s breast to feed us. Even kings. Even prophets.

The pilgrim said it was a lesson in humility. I hear it as a whisper that exile need not mean abandonment. That the ground beneath us, though it quake, is still the ground we share.

My flaw is that I chase after pleasure as if it were bread and I were starving. Wine, when I can afford it. A warm body beside me in the dark, even if he leaves at dawn. The taste of honey stolen from a market stall because the sweetness, brief and guilty, makes me feel alive. They call it hedonism, those learned men who speak in Latin and have never wanted for a meal. I call it survival. When desolation presses down like a stone upon the chest, what else is there but to grasp at any small brightness?

Yet beneath it all – beneath the cynicism, the scorn for those who speak of virtue whilst hoarding their gold – there beats a stubborn pulse of hope. I expect, against reason, that good things will yet come. That the next caravan will carry news of peace. That the spring will not fail utterly. That I will wake one morning and know where to go, and that when I arrive, there will be a door open and a voice that says: You belong here.

This is my weakness and my strength bound together, and I cannot pry them apart.

The sun sinks now behind the western dunes, and the air grows chill. The trembling of the earth has stilled, for the moment. Tomorrow I shall draw water again, and eat what remains of the barley-bread, and watch the road for travellers. I do not know if I shall stay or go. I know only that I am here, on this threshold between sand and water, in this season when the world remembers a birth that redeemed what was cast aside.

Make of that what you will.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.