Forgotten Letters – Friday from Ugarit

Episode III

In Ugarit, among the layers of clay tablets, there were not only numbers and lists, but formulas and small prayers, repeated again and again, invoking protection and gratitude. They were not epic narratives, but measured words, carefully set down, as though their power lay in consistency rather than eloquence.

Repetition is not always monotony; it can be discipline and memory. It weaves invisible threads that link one gesture to the next, one thought to another. Scribes never grew weary of writing “forever” whenever it was needed, because they understood that what endures is born of habit, not of the exceptional.

In the royal garden, the same principle applies to plants: when they are watered, when the soil is gently loosened by hand, when dry branches are pruned away.

These are quiet acts, never celebrated, yet without them no flower would ever bloom.

The same is true of the mind and the heart. There are thoughts we repeat in silence, daily practices that seem unremarkable, yet they form the framework of our inner lives.

Not every word needs to be spoken aloud, and not every ritual requires witnesses. The most powerful ones are often hidden.

The tablets of Ugarit remind us that time does not measure what is spectacular, but what persists. They teach patience: like the formula repeated to protect a home, like the oil poured daily upon the altar, so too do small, attentive acts in our lives build an invisible yet enduring order.

Today, Friday, take a moment to notice your own formulas: the words you repeat, the actions you perform unnoticed by anyone else. These are what safeguard meaning, far more than applause ever could.

And as the day comes to an end, remember that not everything needs to be told. Some symbols, like formulas etched into clay, survive because they were necessary, not because they sought to be seen.

Next Friday, we will return to the streets of Ugarit to listen once more to the silence of the tablets, and to understand how ordinary actions become ritual, and how ritual, in a suspended moment, becomes memory.

Every life—even the most ordinary—leaves traces engraved in time, if only we are patient.