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the woman was calling herself home, calling herself using her oldest name, not the one that her mother gave her, or her father, but the name that Life gave her, now almost forgotten, but still remembered by the dark recesses of her body, the pulsing centres of the mitochondria in each cell, fragments of memory that were planted with her long before she drew breath.

it was not a name that held the weight of her ancestors, but a name that was only ‘now, now, now’.

she called herself away from the boundaries of others and all their false-fitting lives.

she whistled and crooned and sang, and on some days, she wailed and keened, for she was learning that she was a keening body who had eaten stories that never really rooted themselves in her throat.

she waited at the water’s edge.

she waited at the kitchen table.

she waited whilst loading the washing machine.

she bent low when sharp-toothed, oily-skinned expectations were sent her way, expectations that would force her to abandon her search had she not sewn hidden pockets full of questions into her life.

she was owning her life, its shape, as it was now, as ungainly and unattractive as it might look to others, as close to the edge, knowing that her name could shape itself into any space, with enough patience.

and patience was something that was thrown into the womb with her.

she stood on the edge of a man-made life and waited for the small messengers to show themselves in the underbrush, the hedgerows, the words that climbed out of every page.

she told her eyes: ‘eyes, be opened!’ and her mouth: ‘mouth, be opened!’ and her ears: ‘ears, be opened!’ and her voice: ‘voice, be loosened!’.

and they were, and it was as if she had been heard and seen for the first time.

and it was her, seeing herself, what had not been there, what she had not been told, or rather, what she had been told to not listen to. and this made all the difference.

she waited and waited and waited, a crone, pregnant with everything that was always hers.

slowly she was being born into her own self, or also, unto her own self.

the terror and the peace of it all dwelling side-be-side, sharing cups of tea in her kitchen.

for a while everything had stopped. nothing found its way from her hands, nothing had been made, nothing was being stitched. nothing was being created, except for this birth, her birth.

and let me tell you this, a woman being birthed into her own hands is hungry work, all of her creative energy is needed for this process, and there is just enough energy for this, and for the living of breath to small breath, and for preparing a new home deep inside, and learning the language she was taken from.

people are always leaving one thing for another because they are hungry for answers.

all the soft-bodied mammals walking the skin of this earth are so much hungrier for answers than the four-footed mammals, and the frog, and the fish, and the whale, and the tree.

are they returning to the sound of their own name, though?

everything that has meaning only has that meaning because a living, breathing, soft, fallible body gave it thus and usually that body is shaped like a man.

the world is cocooned in questions and God’s fingerprints are everywhere, shrouded in mystery.

we know very few answers and only own a handful of certainties.

within a few years even these will shed their skin to the amazement of all who will watch what once was truth, shift into something else.

in finding her way home, the questions were as valuable as the answers.

peace tastes different to everyone.

© liezel graham 2025