All the Ages We Have Ever Been

When my husband and I were in Spain last week, we took a train from Madrid to Toledo, where we visited a mosque from the Middle Ages, a historic synagogue, and the Gothic cathedral. In each place, history has plastered over itself over the centuries, each layer marking an act of creation or destruction.

This picture is a mihrab at the Mezquita de Tornerías museum. The mihrab is the visual and spiritual center of a mosque prayer hall. Layer upon layer of its incarnations has been revealed, as archaeologists chipped down through the years. You can see the original sacred space from the 11th century, when this niche was framed by an arch. And evidence of a fire in 1467, and then newer ornamentation on top of that. This is not just a mihrab but a palimpsest telling its own story.

When you leave the museum, it is over a transparent floor that also reveals an excavation backward through time, right down to a foundation from the Second Iron Age.

This experience sticks with me, along with the Toledo Cathedral and its many visible eras or more powerfully, the El Tránsito Synagogue which was forcibly turned into a Christian church, then used as a military barracks, and is now partly restored. The lace-like Mudéjar stucco work along the top of the main sanctuary walls contains Hebrew epigraphy that survived centuries of Christian conversion because the subsequent Catholic owners couldn’t read it.

All of these places echo my obsession with making and re-making and the themes of Self-Assembly. After all, what and who among us is not a perpetual work in progress?

We live in homes that have been renovated and re-renovated over the years, and even if our environs are new, they sit on spaces that were once something else. And we ourselves are walking museums, made of the selves we’ve been, the selves we are, and the selves we’re becoming.

In my book, I quote the wonderful writer Anne Lamott, who says, “I am all the ages I have ever been.” So am I. And wherever I find myself, so is everything else.