Honouring

I live in the liminal, between what has died and what is not yet born, where gods forget their names - Image: Nasrin Golden 2019

My mother once opened a door to an ancient basement in my dream -

and disappeared.

I saw the corpse of the Sun God, a thousand sankes coiling around him.

I made that dream my mission - to resurrect him and return him to his kingdom.

And that was the beginning

I looked for him in the sky, but I found him descended into the underworld.

Now, how do I unlock the mystery behind the disappearance of the sacred feminine?

Did she intertwine many worlds just to make her point?

Do I have the audacity to expand her story

to move her form the mythical into the mystical fminine?

But first, let's return to my story.

I was dead long before I was born into this reality.

From the beginning, I longed to step back through the portal

to the place I once called home,

to a place untouched by death and suffering.

Along the way, everything I was

vanished into the void.

Then came a storm - Thunder and lightning -

and life itself turned me into lifeless echo of existence,

a mirror of what I once was.

I came here to learn what she once experienced

all of it. I failed.

I forgot.

I fell into despair.

When you said - fall -

I hesitated.

What is the secret to falling?

Is it emptiness?

Is it to see that I am in control of collapsing into nothingness?

That nothing ever disappears completely

that, wishfully, I kept my integrity inside the helish cell I created.

Perhaps my purpose is to coexist with the forces within myself -

especially her, the one I've tried to silence.

I couldn't hold her.

I turned away.

Secretly, I wanted her gone, completly.

I assumed this world was too much for me to breathe in - too dense.

The walls in every corner of my building are contracting.

I came undone before I ever learned what existing meant.

I made sure

that

I could not stand.

Then I remembered

I am everything I projected into my mother's image

cold as stone, emptied of motion, emtied of will,

giving all of myself away just to keep peae.

I am my mother. She is me.

I watched her.

I judged her.

I became her.

I inherited her lineage

her silence

her sorrow

her unfinished prayer.

Her pain became my breath.

Her paralysis, my posture.

I lived her life inside my own body,

carrying generations of womn who forgot how to move.

I felt that if only I could change my mother,

I might feel the breeze on my skin.

Yet all this time, I wished to die

maybe the same way she did

part of me wishing to transform,

to become a butterfly,

and fly

far, far away

Free.

Yet it felt impossible.

My mother and I are one.

My mother, my grandmothers, and I are one

a chain of breathing and breaking,

of giving all we are just to survive.

I was broken, chained, beaten, violated, bruised, and empty

like my mother, like my grandmothers.

How can I ask the one inside me to rise,

when I'm the one suffocating her,

keeping her small.

turning her into lifeless entity?

You see, I feel responsible.

And now...

and now,

it's not entirely in my power to stand.

I need her,

hoping

She brings me back to life.

9 Nov 2025

Nasrin Golden