A Slow Homecoming: Through Fire, Through Water, Through Flame

On Change, Stillness, and the Ritual of Daily Becoming

A slow, sacred reflection on transition as mythic return—through Brigid’s forge, well, and hearth. A journey not of becoming someone new, but of remembering, reinhabiting, and blessing the body as home.

Introduction

Somewhere in the turning of the year, I came across an image—just a scrawl really, floating against the backdrop of an old door: your cells contain the universe. At first it struck me as beautiful in the way all poetic metaphors do—true enough to stir something, but vague enough to evade inspection. And yet, the more I sat with it, the more I found it returning to me. Not as metaphor, but as memory. Or perhaps something older than memory—something my body knew before I had language for it. Because the truth is, they do. Every cell, every slow shedding of skin, every drop of blood that has turned over since the first day I took oestrogen—each one carries a record, not only of change, but of intention. Of return.

Science, of course, names this quietly. Skin cells renew every few weeks. Blood every few months. Bones take their time, as bones do—years of slow becoming. Even the brain, once thought fixed, reshapes itself in the presence of new chemistry. Neuroplasticity, they call it. But the science, helpful as it is, still misses something essential: the meaning that reshaping holds. For me, now more than one year into HRT is not just a milestone in dosage or dosage stability, or even in physical shifts—though they have come, and they are real. It is a spiral. A looping back. A remembering forward. I have not become someone new, though outsiders may frame it that way. I have become someone ancient. Someone who has always been.

There is a kind of sacred labour in that. To change one’s body not out of shame, but of reverence. To carry through the days with tenderness, to touch skin newly soft and know it as earned. Not won, not given—forged. And in that forging, something mythic stirs. Something that doesn’t quite live in science or politics or medical charts, but in the place where stories and symbols live. I do not just regenerate. I return. I rise again, not as a phoenix, but as myself—drawn forward by the oldest thread: the will to live as I truly am.

A Triad of Rebirth: Brigid, the Z-Rod, and the Cailleach

I do not walk this path alone. Though the language I use now is modern—transition, HRT, neuroplasticity—the journey itself is ancient, older than scripts or diagnoses or state-recognised names. It is a path carved into the bedrock of the sacred histories I carry in my blood and bone: from the old Dalriada empire that once stretched from the West Highlands to the isles, from the Gaels before they crossed the sea, and from the stone-borne people who shaped memory into symbol long before written word. When I speak of regeneration, I speak through them. Through myth as map, through story as knowing. And though I speak in the idioms of my own lineage, I recognise that these archetypes are not ours alone. They are shared, timeless, rooted in the very ground of human longing: to be seen, to be whole, to be remade and welcomed home.

There are three figures—three constellations, if you like—that have returned to me most strongly as I’ve reinhabited this changing form. Each one a station, a site of sacred labour. First, Brigid—she of the forge, the well, and the hearth. A triple goddess whose domains are not abstract but bodily, practical, elemental. She crafts with fire, heals with water, and gathers with warmth. She is not the feminine as ideal, but the feminine as practice. Transitioning through her is not about idealisation; it is about tending. Shaping. Keeping. There is nothing frivolous in it. It is holy work.

Then there is the symbol carved into the old Pictish stones—the Z-Rod and Double Disc. Found across the northeast, enigmatic yet insistently present, it speaks of thresholds. Two circles—two selves? two states?—bound by a line that twists like a bolt of lightning or a road under tension. Some say it marks life and death. Others, the soul's journey between. I read it as a trans cosmology before its time. One disc the body I was handed, the other the body I have claimed, and the rod between—the fire, the well, the crossing. It is not a binary. It is a continuum, a story in motion. A gesture carved not in answers, but in process.

And finally, there is the Cailleach—the veiled one, the storm bringer, the maker of hills. She is winter and time, stone and sovereignty. She does not soften. She returns. Not like spring returns, in blossom and ease, but like the mountain re-emerges after the snow. She is the part of me that does not need to justify her form. That claims her age, her change, her elemental nature. In her, I find not permission, but precedent.

Together, these three—Brigid, the Z-Rod, the Cailleach—form a triad of rebirth. Not birth as beginning, but as spiralled return. They mark the threefold labour of transition: forging the body, replenishing the spirit, and restoking the self. I do not believe transition is merely medical, or psychological, or social. It is sacred. A ritual of self-becoming enacted through the body, yes—but also through story, symbol, and lineage. And in honouring these mythic sites, I honour the depth of what it means to return to myself.

The Forge – Reforging the Body

There is a curious irony—one that doesn't escape me—that in nearly every mythology I’ve studied, the forge belongs to men. Gods with hammers. Limping, exiled, volcanic. Their bodies often marked by injury, their genius granted in exchange for some other loss. The forge is power won through pain. And yet, in the sacred stories of my own people—those of the Gaels, the West Highlanders, the old kingdoms of Dalriada—that mantle is held by a woman. Brigid. Goddess of the forge, the well, and the hearth. Not divided across domains, but integrated within herself. She is not one of three. She is the three. And whilst others smelted iron into weapons, Brigid tempered bodies, spirits, and homes. She did not simply make—she tended. Which, when you think about it, is the deeper magic. It is easy to strike metal hot and hammer it into shape. It is harder to keep the fire alive through long winters, to repair the break again and again until it holds.

That she is my forge goddess feels oddly prophetic—because once, in another skin, I was a champion Highland Games athlete. I know what it is to train the body, to shape it through will and repetition. I know the scent of iron in the hand and lactic acid in the lungs. But what I did not know then—and what transition has taught me—is that forging is not only about strength. It is about surrender. About allowing the body to change under you. About unmaking without fear of being unrecognisable. Brigid’s fire does not simply empower—it exposes. It peels back the layers until only the truest metal remains.

And there is something deeply sacred in the slowness of it. HRT does not work overnight. The body shifts in increments, imperceptibly at first—skin softens, hunger changes, scent shifts. There are moments you catch your reflection and something unfamiliar looks back, not with hostility, but with intrigue. Like a new element emerging from the ore. Other times, there is pain—not metaphorical, but cellular. Joints ache, emotions raw, muscles slackening in strange ways. I think of Brigid's forge then. Of the long shaping. Of how sacred labour has always involved both fire and fatigue.

The Z-Rod feels present here too—etched into stone, yes, but also etched into me. One disc holds the body I once trained, the other holds the body I now inhabit. The line between them is the fireline, the place of fracture and joining. It is not clean. It is not linear. But it is mine. The forge is not the site of a singular transformation. It is the altar upon which I have offered myself, again and again, to the slow ritual of becoming.

In other cultures, forge gods make weapons. But Brigid—and, by extension, this Gaelic lineage I carry—offers another path. To forge not to fight, but to return. To re-form the body as vessel of self-knowing, of softness, of sovereign strength. Not the kind that lifts stones overhead, but the kind that bears witness to its own change, unflinching. That strength, I’ve learned, is far more rare.

The Well – Replenishing the Spirit

There comes a point in transition when the fire subsides. Not extinguished, but banked—its fiercest work done. What remains is something quieter, more dangerous in its honesty. The body, newly formed and forming still, softens into stillness. And in that stillness, another presence begins to make itself known. Not a force that drives, but one that draws. Not forward motion, but downward pull. That is when the well begins to call.

A well is unlike any other water. It does not move as rivers do, does not swell with the tides or scatter like rain. It waits. It is not given by the landscape, but coaxed from it—chiseled, walled, lined with stone, and covered with silence. Where the river flows freely across the surface of things, the well requires you to go inward. To descend. To reach, slowly, into dark and echoing places. It is not a gift of nature. It is a deliberate act of depth. And in that—perhaps more than any other water—the well is intimate, insistently feminine.

Across cultures, across continents, this truth holds. Wells are the province of women—not just because they carry water, but because they hold it. They guard it, veil it, speak to it. Brigid’s wells are approached not with casual thirst but with reverence. Cloth is tied to trees, prayers are whispered to the stones, and the water is taken with care. These are not places one stumbles into. They are thresholds. Portals to the deep self. And they know the difference between the one who comes with intention and the one who simply passes through.

So much of my transition—especially in this past year—has not been the forge. It has been the well. A descent into feelings I never knew I had. Dysphoria, yes—but also joy so raw it unmoored me. Grief, not for what was, but for what might have been had I known this earlier. And the strange quiet of unfamiliar sensations: the way emotion now lives closer to the surface, the way touch has changed, the way language sometimes fails when the feeling rises too quickly. These are not things to be mastered. They are to be sat with. Waited out. Lowered into, like a bucket slowly descending into shadow.

The Z-Rod feels different here. Less the fireline, more the axis—the vertical spine along which soul-states are strung. One disc is the self that held everything tightly, defended, logical, untouched. The other is this self—porous, feeling, undone. And the line between them is the well itself. A liminal shaft into which everything drops: memory, voice, tears, laughter, rage, softness. I no longer try to climb out of it. I have learned, slowly, to listen.

In the quiet, I feel the presence of the Cailleach. Not loud or declarative, but inevitable. She does not answer. She waits. She is the shape the land takes when all other forms fall away. Stone. Mist. Cold. She is winter not as death, but as reckoning. As the part of me that does not rush. That allows grief its full depth. That trusts what the well will reveal, even when it offers nothing but reflection.

And so I begin to shape my life around this rhythm. I bathe slowly. I journal in fragments. I speak aloud to ancestors, pouring water into the earth before I do. I tie offerings to branches. I dip my hands into bowls at the start of a new moon. Not because I expect transformation in return, but because these rituals remind me that I am already transforming. The surface is only ever part of the story. What matters lives beneath.

The forge reshaped my body. But it is the well that teaches me how to dwell there. To return, again and again, not to answers, but to presence. Not to movement, but to stillness that remembers everything.

The Hearth – Re-stoking the Self

If the forge remakes and the well remembers, then the hearth holds. It is not the place of transformation nor revelation, but of return. Not the moment the body becomes something new, or the soul glimpses its depths, but the slow, quiet act of living inside that becoming—again, and again, and again.

Brigid’s hearth was always the most difficult for me to understand. The forge I knew from sweat and fire, from the thrum of muscle and the ache of change. The well I came to know through grief and stillness, through the collapse of false certainty. But the hearth—this flame that never burns too hot or too bright, but always, insistently remains—took longer to recognise. It has no drama to it. No spectacle. And yet, it is the most radical of all. Because the hearth asks not who you are becoming, but whether you are willing to stay with who you are. Whether you can make a life, not a performance, from the truth you have unearthed.

In every culture I’ve traced, hearth deities speak this language. Sometimes goddesses—Brigid, Hestia, Gabija. Sometimes gods—Agni, Zao Jun, Domovoi. And sometimes spirits that defy those boundaries entirely. The hearth is queer not just because it is fluid in gender, but because it refuses to perform. It simply is. It anchors the household, the village, the cosmos. Not because it commands authority, but because it is trusted with it. And so the hearth is where sovereignty lives—not as spectacle, but as quiet rhythm. As repetition, as care, as the unseen rituals that keep a life held together.

Transition has taught me this slowly. Not through milestones or markers, but through the mundane magic of repetition. The clothes folded a certain way. The tea brewed just right. The voice warmed not for performance, but for conversation. The mirror no longer examined for proof, but glanced at with casual familiarity. This is the fire I restoke. Not because I must prove I belong here, but because I already do.

The hearth also carries memory—not as nostalgia, but as presence. When I light candles or tend to my space, I feel the ancestors who once gathered around their own flames, speaking in dialects I’ll never learn, keeping warm through long winters. I feel Brigid’s nuns in Kildare, tending the flame in silence whilst empires rose and fell. I feel the Cailleach too—older than story, rooted in stone—reminding me that I do not have to perform becoming. I am it. That quiet is not absence, but mastery. That the hearth does not flicker to be seen—it burns because it must.

And so the hearth becomes, for me, the site of queer homemaking. Not in the heteronormative sense, but in the truest sense: the making of a home in my own body. In this self, reshaped but familiar. In this rhythm, this dailiness, this unremarkable but essential flame. I am not always remaking. I am not always descending. Sometimes, I am just living. And that, too, is sacred labour.

The forge reshaped me. The well revealed me. But it is the hearth that sustains me. That says: you do not need to begin again. You are here. Welcome home.

A Blessing for the Returning Body
forged, replenished, restoked

I have come through the fire
not blazing,
but smouldered down to something truer—
the kind of heat that does not destroy,
but remembers the shape of what was once held
and dares to hold it differently.

The body remade is not new.
It is ancient in a language I forgot
until I spoke it with my skin.
I changed, yes.
But more than that—
I returned.

To the hands that now move slowly,
to the jaw softened by laughter,
to the belly I no longer curse
for its softness
or its hunger.

There are days I descend into myself
like a bucket lowered into the well—
not seeking anything,
but listening.
The water speaks
in ache, in memory, in the quiet
after a name is called
and I answer
without flinching.

There is no ceremony for this,
no altar but the sink,
the notebook,
the act of dressing without dread.
And still, the sacred stirs.

The hearth I have built is small—
a drawer of smooth stones,
a ritual of tea,
a sigh unguarded.
But it holds.
It holds.

I am not what I was,
but I carry her
in the marrow,
in the scars that no longer shame,
in the breath that returns
when no one is watching.

This is not a rebirth.
It is a remembering.
A reweaving.
A slow homecoming
to the body
that waited,
patiently,
to be lived in
as my own.

Final thoughts …

There is a comfort, I’ve found, in knowing that transition doesn’t end. That it isn’t a doorway you pass through once, cleanly, but a pattern—etched into your life like weather into stone. A spiral, not a line. A return that is never repetition, because each circuit brings you closer to something softened, clarified, truer.

I no longer wait for the final form. I no longer imagine a fixed self at the end of all this effort. I have learned—through fire, through depth, through daily tending—that reinhabiting the self is not a singular act. It is seasonal. Cyclical. It is brushing the same hair differently one day and weeping for reasons I do not yet understand another. It is carrying forward the parts of me that were never wrong, just unsheltered. It is learning how to live in my body as a kind of ritual, not a resolution.

The Z-Rod returns here, once more—not as timeline, not as proof of progress, but as passage. One disc, one self, one state of becoming. Another disc, another self, no less real, no more final. And between them, the tensioned line. The crossing. The fire, the well, the hearth. A sacred braid of paths walked daily, not once.

I do not claim to be finished. I do not need to be.
I am not who I was.
I am not yet who I will be.
But I am no longer trying to be anything else.

So I bless this body—
not as outcome,
but as offering.

I bless the hands that now reach for warmth without shame.
I bless the feet that walk the long road home.
I bless the silence that speaks in me,
and the fire that still burns low and steady at my centre.

I return,
not perfect,
but present.

I return different.
I return true.