The treasure we name ourselves after
It’s the fourteenth of September. The leaves are falling faithfully, shadowing the end to summer.
I have wasted my day. Lazy on coffee and beer.
One day from now will be my friend’s birthday. Friend, If I were to look it up in the dictionary you might find one that you choose, not chooses you.
But like on any fateful circumstance, fate put us together in a name. ‘I liked your name,’ I say to him.
These days, the intention feels so important. So heavy is my heart with the naming of my own child, how she will claim it, what voice will echo in her mind as she goes into the external places that I could damn near lose my mind with it’s heaviness. I could do circles around a Sequoia tree like the new healer, Melody Ann tells me.
If I can’t ground myself to the home then how will my daughter find her way in the world? I think about this question on the rise of a full moon. I think about the questions of parenting every time I see her father. The treasures he himself missed at the naming time.
Lilah Rose. I hear my own family’s echoes of bows at Traditions way. They are claiming her before she is ready.
She will deal with this her whole life.
Her name has not been handed back to her yet.
Not in a flipped around hat, and a grotto message from the solar plexus -you belong to yourself, first. Howl for your life, first.
It was a smooth decision- the naming. What her father doesn’t know. On instinct and matriarchy; Lilah. From the smoothie shop girl students. ‘Rose’ after my father’s mother. Lilah Rose. A poet.
And so as I navigate these waters, the past of summer when she was born, the cold waters of defeat with it all, the great and Greek word ‘merozi’ for mess. And I add my own voice -low and full with a welcoming phrase, a sense of knowing: ‘Pot lach’ as Maj Ragain called it.
You give me some, and I give you some back. Even more sometimes. ‘Pot lach’, Indian for ‘all welcome.’
May you make your home in the welcoming of a new season.
May your gardens be full of last season’s blessings. May you meet me by the old Olney lake where I learned the art of giving and receiving. Where I learned the art of giving up one’s bed for travelers. Of holding onto actions as our only true belongings in this world. May my daughter always know that deep water is in me. May I never lose it and it’s in her. May I never lose her, Lilah Rose, as she steers her own boat out to that dark blue and purple, bruised Odessyus sea.
Cover photo by Bernadetta Watts
