The life-sized painting depicts mothers-to-be Elisabetta and Maria (Elisheva and Maryam) both pregnant with their sons, John the Baptist and Jesus. In their presence, I was transfixed and transported. Amid the crowds of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, it felt as if only the three of us stood there. Myself, Elisheva and Maryam. Around me the space throbbed with the sensation that I was not simply viewing a painting but standing witness to a moment between women that I had long-yearned to experience myself. A moment of acceptance and safety. The strength in Elisheva who, without words, delivered a magnitude of grace, of conviction, of unassailable dignity to her apprehensive young cousin lit a spark in my heart.

In that moment before the painting, I knew that — one day — I would hear 'the calling' to articulate my experience. Fifteen years later, when the calling came, it felt too soon.

But it was time. The work began.

When I discovered that, upon his early death, Albertinelli left his wife, Antonia, with sizeable debts to the artist Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), a story began to emerge. And like holding a mirror to a mirror, so began the tale of Antonia and her husband's painting and the women in the painting in whom she sought inspiration and refuge. Parallel lives that would intersect. For the better. Just as mine did with the painting that day in the Uffizi.

I once read Albert Camus's musing that 'a [wo]man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence [her] heart first opened'. While I had been inspired and touched by many works of art at that stage of my life I knew, deep down, I had not yet experienced the type of 'heart opening' of which Camus spoke. Until I stood before La Visitazione.

One Illumined Thread is not a story about religion or religious figures. It does not purport to understand the complexities of Judaism nor the complications of Christianity. It's not a story about a painting. It is my way of expressing and sharing how it felt to stand in the presence in the magnitude of female eldership. The collapsing of time and space that morphed the world around me, the exhilarating cracking open of my heart. It is also my paean to female endurance and creativity. Written with a reinvigorated understanding of why we must at all costs continue along our brave voyages of creativity. For in one day — or one millennium — we may pass on that heart-opening gift to another and, forever, for better, change their world.