Happy Birthday, Sarah!
This month marks 1 year of missives and poems about the 1st Hebrew Matriarch--which has gotten me thinking big thoughts
The Life of H: Sarah, Reimagined turned 1 year old this month!
I launched The Life of H: Sarah, Reimagined on March 4, 2023. I chose that date because each year on March Fo(u)rth I take a step forward in a new direction.
But while The Life of H began a mere journey-around-the-sun ago, I had been dreaming up the idea for many moons before that.
I wanted to find a way to share my poems and what I was learning as I wrote them with more than just the handful of people in my writing groups.
And now I’m considering publishing my poems about Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar as a book. After all, I have over 100 pages of poetry and reflections.
But I’m not certain. After all, a bound book never felt quite right for this project.
Sarah’s story was likely first inscribed in clay with cuneiform characters, centuries before it was written on scrolls in Hebrew letters, let alone contained between the covers of a bound book.
Sharing these poems with you as pixilated posts and audio recordings feels right in light of the millennia between Sarah’s time and ours, and the ever-changing technologies for transmitting stories in-between. Despite all the advances and the plethora of publishing options available, the human affection for hearing stories told aloud has remained constant.
Poems are especially pleasurable when spoken. And stories, I believe, are meant to grow and change as they travel through the years and across borders, as new challenges arise, and as our human ethics (we hope!) evolve. In print, they tend to remain fixed. Passed along verbally, they shift and change.
According to some theories1, one reason patriarchy so thoroughly subsumed matrilineal and matrifocal elements in some ancient societies is that the transition from an oral story-telling culture to a literacy based on reading a phonetic alphabet changed how people think. Left-brained abstract, logical reasoning became dominant as right-brained intuitive imagistic ways of knowing, for example, was increasingly discredited. In the process, the theory goes:
Earth-based wisdom was dismissed in favor of theoretical learning and feminine ways of knowing were replaced by a more masculine and muscular march toward certainty.
One result is that biblical texts were dismissed by some as unprovable and therefore primitive and of little practical use. Or they were enshrined as literal, immutable, fixed, and final — and therefore misunderstood (and dangerously so).
Sarah’s promised offspring — us! — stand on this distant shore of the 21st Century wondering how we arrived here, in a world that devalues female lives and wisdom, indigenous lives and wisdom, and that (not coincidentally) is at war with the the very Earth that so generously sustains human life.
I believe these stories were meant to live, breathe, and evolve with each new generation, as they do in the Jewish tradition of midrash. But too often they’ve become dogma in the service of boundary-staking and control.
For all these reasons and more, as much as I love books, paper, and the printed word, for this project, I choose (for now) this fluid medium:
💫 I appreciate the opportunity to present Sarah’s imagined life in unbound missives.
💫 I enjoy letting these weekly posts flow in and out of your inbox, accompanied by spoken poetry that is not pinned to the page and that has made no commitment to remain as it is.
💫 And I like that I can update posts as my understanding of the stories changes. (And as you, my cherished readers, email me with gentle notes on where I’ve wandered astray of the historical record or with alternative perspectives that help me refine my own.)
This online forum feels like it might be a truer and more respectful tribute to the legend I am dreaming into week by week and poem by poem than a book would.
I love this combination of technology and tradition. It is, you might say, my lovesong to balance, and my prayer for an integrated worldview that one day will treasure the masculine and feminine equally and fully, and honor all bodies as we honor the earth.
As we honor Sarah and Abraham and Hagar and all of their children in all of the nations.
And as we honor the mothers and fathers whose names we know and those we don’t, in all languages, across all traditions.
Am I dreaming? Yes, I am dreaming.
Because new and worthy visions begin with a dream.
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This week’s poem
This week’s poem, “How the Light Gets In,” was among the first that I wrote about Sarah. I share it with you today in honor of this publication’s 1st anniversary.
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