On Time, Transition, and the Spiral of Noticing

A quiet celebration, a spell of return

A quiet celebration of transition, ancestry, and embodiment—where time spirals, names are spells, and a Stone-Borne body remembers what the world forgets. No milestone needed. Just presence, rhythm, and return.

Introduction

There’s no neat transition anniversary here.

No marked calendar box, no exact time-of-day notification, no celebratory timestamp. Only a sense—a felt shift in the bones, a soft internal hum—that something has passed, or returned, or deepened. Something has become.

In Gaelic ways of marking time, the day begins not at midnight, but at sundown. Darkness comes first—not as an end, but as a beginning. The day grows out of the night, not the other way around. That has always made more sense to me.

Maybe that’s why this particular threshold doesn’t feel like a milestone so much as a spiral. Not linear, but cyclical. Not fixed, but unfolding.

Somewhere, recently, I caught myself noticing—really noticing—my body. Not as a site of judgment, but of recognition. And with it came a poem. Or perhaps a spell. Or perhaps both.

I offer it here as a kind of celebratory bonus. Not a claim or a manifesto, but a moment. A re-seeing. A remembering. A way of saying: I’m still here. And I am beginning again.

Stone-Borne

I want to tell you a little story.

One day, I looked at my naked body in the mirror,
cataloguing flaws the way I’d been taught—
too long here, too wide there,
curls unruly, shoulders too sure,
a torso that didn’t match the chart.

But then something shifted.

I saw not flaws—but ancestry.
Contours shaped by oar and mountain.
Leverage born of stone and sea.
Curls like mist caught in heather,
torso long as a longboat's keel.

This body is not an error.
It is continuity.

The Stone-Borne didn’t build monuments.
They left tools.
Waypoints.
Markers.
Offerings to the land, not ownership.
They shaped in collaboration,
not domination.

Now patriarchy fences their gifts,
charges admission,
names itself the architect
of ruins it doesn’t understand.

And yet—
I stand here, tall and whole,
my name a spell they cannot unmake,
my body a contradiction they cannot erase.

The world looks at my size and cannot see feminine.
But I see my ancestors.

They had no concept of sin—
only balance.
No need for binary—
only cycle.
They honoured what each body could do,
not how well it conformed.

We live in a world obsessed with boxes:
black/white, good/evil, us/them.

But we—
we live in colour.
In nuance.
In spiral and storm and stillness.

My transness isn’t a deviation.
It’s an old magic.
A queering of reality.
A ritual of return.

I do not need permission to exist.

I am the cairn.
I am the marker.
I am the path that remembers.

Final, happy thoughts …

I don’t always know what day it is, and I’m no longer trying to measure my life in fixed points or external milestones. The world offers so many ways to feel behind, to feel out of step, to feel like you’re missing something. But I have stopped trying to keep up with that rhythm.

What I do know is when I’m living in a rhythm that feels like mine.

Right now, I’m noticing more. The curve of my shoulders. The light through the window. The way old shame starts to dissolve when I meet my reflection with something softer than critique.

I’m paying attention to the world and to myself in a way that feels both ancient and new.

I’m writing in the language that makes sense to me—in spirals, in noticing, in pauses, in metaphor, in memory—with my beloved em dashes. I’m not translating myself into something more acceptable. I’m writing in my own way, and for once, I’m letting that be enough.

And maybe that’s the celebration. Not a date, not a cake, not a candle blown out at exactly the right time. But this: presence, pattern, and peace.

That’s enough of a celebration for me.