That day, finished with her prayers, Si'Wren turned to an intricately woven basket on a carved wooden stand laden with ripe fruit, and began to consume some of it. Preoccupied, she absent-mindedly tilted her head this way and that as she ate thoughtfully. When she had finished eating, she sucked the pulp off her fingers, and set the beautiful basket back on it's stand. Having nothing else to do for the moment, she looked around her quarters, inspecting everything anew, for she could not help but marvel all over again every time she reentered her own private domain at all the fine things which were for her personal use, and to be considered her permanent possessions.
Imagine, Si'Wren thought to herself, having one's very own private bed chamber. It was located in the administrative section, the part of the Imperial palace reserved for the living quarters of the numerous palace civil servants, and occupied one entire wing of the imposing, rough-hewn stone fortress which contained many similar fine rooms as this, each one more glorious than the next.
All around her, in the palace, and in her own private room, were countless royal delights. The stone walls were paneled in planks of rough hewn wood, and hung with crude but richly woven tapestries and curtains.
The floors were of flat stone slabs, not perfectly flat but naturally smooth and hence very slightly uneven, being arranged so as to make a level surface, and frequently covered by rugs. Such was the slab floor in her very own personal room.
She turned to a little round side table and paused to examine anew, a polished wooden carving of an ox, dark, smooth and gleaming. The beautifully carved ox was short-legged and stout, with stubby horns, the whole artistic style being deliberately simplistic, having a tendency to look like a series of arcs fitly joined together; the horns and front legs both being arcs that went from side to side, the arcs of the hind legs, belly, backbone, tail, and head being arcs from front to back. All arcs.
She looked around, her eyes roaming the room, and admired a decorative, single-handled water vase that was flat, wide, and round at the base and gracefully slender for the upper two-thirds. Propped on a small round table, the tall vase was artfully and tastefully colored in earthtone shadings of tans and browns. Beside it was a fired clay wash basin. On the basin were to be seen engraved pictographs of the sowers, reapers and gatherers of grains. It wasn't so much a collection of idols, as a picture-script, a visual record of the entire harvesting process, above which was depicted a simple circle with lines pointing from it, indicating the rays of the sun as a source of light, and not as a false idol god.
There was, she perceived, a deep, real difference between the symbolic meaning and morally acceptable symbolism presented in such hieroglyphs, or picture-carvings, as opposed to the rank evil of outright, false idolatry. The symbolic images of honest work seemed most right, proper, and inspiring, and not at all like the false worship of mere graven things as false gods.
Hence, she perceived that the pictograph of the harvest inscribed in the sides of the water basin bore less of the idolatrous, and more of the earmarks of honest record keeping and written language, which itself comprised her new profession, rather than of the evil mysticism of idols, depending, of course, on how one looked at it. Anything could be made to be idolatrous, but some things, like these pictographs, could be viewed as mere pictures, and as just another form of written communication. Dimly, Si'Wren sensed that she was onto something new and vastly different from anything she had ever conceived of in her mind before. A whole new way of looking at things, far beyond what the idol-makers of the House of Rababull had been engaged in doing. It was good to understand this, and she wondered greatly at the clever artist who had so faithfully decorated the water basin.
Turning to reach past the polished dark wooden ox, Si'Wren retrieved the vase. In a perfectly expressionless and somber mien, she poured water into the shallow basin, filling it almost to the rim, and paused to consider it's reflection, seen by the light of a tall, narrow, decoratively barred siege window. One could easily understand that although water might reflect all things, the water was itself 'invisible' to the extent that one might see through it. Further, the water itself had no particular shape.
So might the Invisible God, she thought to herself, be seen in all things, and yet not be seen, even as one looked into the reflection of the water basin and by this marvelous result behold all mere physical things of the world. Yet one could no more touch the Invisible God than one could reach into the reflections in the water and touch them either. In spite of this, she could easily perceive what was real, and what was illusion. What great spiritual riches she had found in a bowl of water.