When I woke up this morning I wanted my mother. Not the sharp grief of recent mourning of her passing, but a deep welling of emptiness where a mother’s presence should be.

I have been looking for her for 51 years and 45 weeks. She isn’t there. She isn’t ever going to be there. So. How to fill the space, because fill the space I must. No – one ever thinks of me as having a mother. I’m just Lilith, the outsider, the dispossessed. I’m there to receive you, to take care of your needs; not to have needs of my own.

Where do you think I came from? Do you think I sprang whole from the ground, a woman grown? It’s not so far from the truth. My people worked the land. Deep in the hidden places they wrest the precious parts of the earth and brought them to the surface. There they hit what they had wrought with hammers, shaping the material they had raised to suit their purposes, this part useful, this part discarded.

That is how they treated me, too. I was hit with their hammers of voice and fist in their attempts to chip away the unwanted elements of my whole.

Until the day I left, that is; and still they followed, chipping and hammering until I got far enough away that their hammers fell blunted on my shields of distance and independence.

So, here I am, shields in place on rollers ready to move across into place if the hammers return. I have earned my bread giving others what I most needed myself until I finally learned the difference. Now here I sit like a bird in the wilderness. Who will keep me company, who walks this wild and sacred journey with me?

My sisters the moon and the olive tree are here. My sister Athena and her owl have been beside me from the start, fellow creatures of night and air.

Now I sense it is time for my Phoenix to stir. I have been burnt to ashes in this lifetime. All roads have led back to this centre. There is no way out except through to the other side. Is the grief ending, transforming and healing? I do not know. That is the worst part, not knowing.

I do not even know if knowing would help. Would knowing have helped before or prevented one moment of the Pattern? My sister Ananke smiles as she flies between the strands of the Weaving of the Way of the World.

And so, what now? This body is past its best, but not yet useless. The mind is clear and flexible and the energy sporadically available.

I suspect the day of the grand gesture is over, but I seem to recall a good game called Grandmother’s Whispers or is it Footsteps? Either way it seems good. Not that grandmother is a biological reality, given that Adam and I had no progeny, but as another group of dispossessed outsiders the Crones are worthy of an alliance.

Will this hole never be filled? Will at/one/ment ever be made? Will I and the

Mother ever be one?