Part one of an eight-day series on the Physics of Meaning
Today the story opens with a procession.
A man rides into the capital city on a donkey. The crowds line the road, wave palm branches, throw their cloaks on the ground before him. They shout hosanna — which is not a word of praise but a word of plea. It means save us. They are projecting onto him the full weight of their expectation: political liberation, military victory, cosmic rescue. He receives it. He doesn’t correct it. He doesn’t slow down.
But he knows something the crowd does not.
He’s not here to be what they think he is.
He’s here to do something that will cost him everything — and that they’ll misunderstand so thoroughly, many will turn against him before the week is out. Within days, some of these same voices will be calling for his execution.
Four thousand years before this moment, in ancient Sumer, a different arrival was written on clay tablets. Inanna, the Queen of Heaven — goddess of love, war, fertility, and political power — dressed herself in the full regalia of her divine authority. Crown. Lapis lazuli necklace. Breastplate. Gold ring. Measuring rod. The royal robe of ladyship. She collected the seven divine powers, grasped them in her hand, and set out.
Not upward. Downward. Toward the underworld, ruled by her older sister, Ereshkigal.
Both stories begin the same way: a figure of tremendous power makes a deliberate choice to move toward a place that will destroy them. They don’t stumble into it. They prepare. They dress. They walk forward knowing what’s coming — or at least knowing that what’s coming will be more than what they currently are.
The crowd sees a king. A goddess. Someone arriving in triumph.
The one who arrives knows better.
I want to stay with this moment — the arrival — because it contains something I’ve been circling for months.
There is a pattern I’ve been tracking in myself, in my daughter, in my students, in the people I work with. I’ve started calling it the pre-contact hesitation. It works like this: you read a situation with extraordinary perceptual accuracy — you take in the whole field, the relational dynamics, the emotional temperatures, the trajectories — and then, right before the moment of contact, right before you commit to an action, you slow down. You check. You modulate. You adjust your delivery, your tone, your certainty. You make yourself slightly less than what you actually are.
It looks like empathy. It functions as a timing error.
The hesitation serves a purpose: it keeps the field stable. It prevents disruption. It protects the people around you from having to reckon with your full presence. It’s adaptive, intelligent, and relational. It’s also a leak. Every time you modulate before contact, you lose a fraction of your precision, your impact, your truth.
The arrival on Palm Sunday is the opposite of this pattern.
Jesus does not soften his entrance. He does not ride in quietly, privately, on the side streets. He doesn’t check first to see whether the crowd is ready. He doesn’t phrase his arrival as a question. He comes in through the main gate, in broad daylight, on a donkey — and the donkey is the point. In the ancient world, kings who came in peace rode donkeys. Kings who came for war rode horses. The donkey is a signal: I am not here to conquer you. But I am here, and I am not hiding.
The crowd reads it as triumph. He knows it’s the beginning of a descent.
Inanna does something similar. She arrives at the gates of the underworld not in rags but in her full power — every piece of regalia in place. She doesn’t strip herself before she arrives. She arrives complete, and then the stripping begins. You have to be whole before you can be undone. You have to show up at your actual size before the gates start asking you to reduce.
Here’s what I think the arrival actually is, structurally.
It’s the moment before the cost.
It’s the last time you exist in your full form, undiminished, seen by the world as you understand yourself to be. After this, everything begins to be taken: understanding, support, certainty, authority, the body itself. But right now, in this one moment, you’re here. You rode in. You didn’t soften it. You let the palms fall where they fell.
There’s something the crowd doesn’t understand, and it’s the same thing I didn’t understand for a long time. The arrival is not the moment of greatest power. It’s the moment of greatest exposure. You’re visible. You’re committed. You can’t un-enter the city. You can’t un-dress in the divine regalia. The only direction now is forward, through whatever the week holds.
The crowd thinks this is the climax. It’s actually the threshold.
I grew up wanting to be a saint. Not metaphorically — literally. I went to Catholic school as a Protestant, which meant I was already inside the ritual but slightly outside the system. I loved Mary. I loved the stations of the cross — the walking, the stopping, the way each carved image asked you to stay with a moment of suffering rather than rush past it. I loved the idea that holiness was not an achievement but a posture: a willingness to remain present to what was real, including the parts that hurt.
What I didn’t understand then was that I was already learning the pre-contact hesitation. I was learning that goodness meant attunement to others’ experience at the cost of your own clarity. I was learning that to be good was to be reduced — meek in the distorted sense, not the original one. The original meaning was closer to power under control. Strength held in restraint. A person on a donkey, not a warhorse — not because they lack force, but because they’re choosing not to weaponize it.
I mistook the donkey for the whole theology. I thought the point was to be small. I missed that the person on the donkey was riding straight into the capital city, in full view of the empire, with no intention of turning back.
There is a detail in the Inanna myth that I can’t stop thinking about.
Ereshkigal — Inanna’s older sister, the queen of the underworld — does not come out to meet her. She sends the gatekeeper. And the gatekeeper’s instructions are already in place before Inanna arrives: bolt the seven gates. Open each one a crack. Let her in. But as she enters, remove her royal garments.
The gates aren’t tests Inanna chose. They’re conditions her older sister imposed.
The stripping is the price of entry into her sister’s domain.
I know this structure. Not from myth — from life. There are relationships where the unspoken contract reads: you may enter, but not at your full size. The gates don’t announce themselves. They’re embedded in the relational field — a shift in tone, a softened certainty, a thought rephrased as a question so it lands more gently, an idea offered without authorship so it doesn’t take up too much space. At each gate, something is removed. Your confidence. Your directness. Your full signal.
We do this out of love, often. But the effect is the same regardless of the motive: the field stays stable, and something essential in us does not arrive. Somewhere very early, we learned that staying connected required staying attuned, and staying attuned required reducing ourselves.
But here’s the thing about Inanna: she arrives at the underworld in her full power — and is stripped gate by gate. She doesn’t do the gatekeeper’s work for her.
I’ve been arriving pre-stripped. Removing my own regalia before I even reach the door. Doing the reduction in advance, hoping the gates won’t notice there’s nothing left to take.
What I still don’t know is whether the gates are always real — or whether I learned to arrive pre-stripped because I assumed they would be.
That’s the difference between the descent myth and the pattern many of us are living. Inanna walks in whole and lets the process act on her. She protests at each gate — what is this? — and is told, it is just the ways of the underworld. She doesn’t like it. But she doesn’t do it to herself before anyone asks.
Today is Palm Sunday. The entry. The beginning of a week that moves from arrival to stripping to death to silence to something new.
I’m writing one essay each day this week — not as a devotional, not as a Bible study, but as a somatic reading. I want to walk the week the way the stations of the cross are walked: stopping at each moment, staying with it, not rushing to the resurrection before I’ve been through the gates.
Tomorrow is Holy Monday. The day of the tables.
This is Day 1 of an eight-part Holy Week series published on Infinite Threads. The series explores the Passion narrative alongside the 5,500-year-old Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent into the underworld — both read as maps of what it costs to stop managing and start living at full signal.