Ashes Were the Offering — Yet I’m Still Here This Time

When I was a child, I used to taste ash in my mouth —

not from any fire I could see or smell.

My father was always cutting things down, burning, spraying —

generally warring with nature.

Yet he hadn't built a fire, and this ash was different.

It clung to me like a memory —

thick on my tongue, like something I hadn’t yet survived.

I asked my mother once.

But she turned away.

She couldn’t hold that kind of truth.

Not like when my five-year-old son sat in the bathtub one evening,

his voice steady —

his eyes distant —

and spoke of other lives.

Pains remembered.

Splinters from the past to be removed.

Truths he carried.

I didn’t correct him.

I didn’t flinch.

I just asked quiet questions

and watched him rise from the water brighter than before.

He grew larger and brighter each year —

because his remembering wasn’t shamed,

and his voice was never silenced.

In my sixties, I finally understood.

The ash I had tasted was from a fire set in another life —

when I was burned for remembering.

A medium once told me she could taste it.

She gagged on the bitterness.

Then she said, “You didn’t even scream.

They didn’t deserve one shred of your energy.”

Countless betrayals, bindings, and burnings

left no visible trace of me in this world,

but left me knowing, somehow:

“I’ve been silenced before. I won’t be again.”

That ash lived in my bones

before I even knew what it meant to remember.

And even now — decades later —

I still carry the smell of smoke,

not on my clothes, but in my soul.

For the past two decades,

I’ve been walking through a passage

so invisible and so complete,

it entirely undid me.

But I stayed.

I remained.

My progressed Sun entered Scorpio,

followed by my Ascendant —

and with them came the descent:

not into failure, but into truth stripped bare.

I lost things I never imagined I could live without.

I lost people I thought would stay.

I lost my sense of direction, my voice,

and at times, even the sense that Spirit was still with me.

I wasn’t being punished.

I was being re-formed.

But no one claps for you while you’re dissolving.

No one brings you flowers... when your identity dies quietly behind closed doors.

This was not a gentle transformation.

It was soul combustion.

And the world kept moving —

while I tried to remember how to breathe.

And to make it even more potent,

in early 2012, my progressed Sun, Moon, and Rising

were all ruled by that watery Scorpion—

when the Moon hovered at high degrees

and just as it reached the final edge of that underworld sign—

I told my husband it was over.

The words rose like lava from a place I hadn’t dared to touch.

It wasn’t rage like his — it was release.

It was truth breaking free —

and I was still here,

even if he never truly had been.

In December —

during the so-called “end of the world” —

when the Moon crossed into Sagittarius in my 3rd house,

my throat opened.

A pattern loosened from my field —

something ancient, Atlantean, finally released.

It was a declaration as much as a healing:

I was done with Atlantis.

The shift was subtle and seismic —

a release I could barely name,

even as my voice was returning.

And over the next four years,

I stitched the pain that followed

into a sacred quilt where I could live inside.

I helped my life come undone.

This wasn’t symbolic.

It was cellular.

An obliteration of who I had been —

and the beginning of a path so invisible,

most couldn’t even see I was walking it.

I helped my life unravel —

not to collapse, but to finally be mine.

Thread by sacred thread,

until all that remained was truth.

Most people didn’t understand what I was walking through.

They didn’t see a spiritual initiation —

they saw someone “stuck.”

Too sensitive.

Too intense.

Too emotional.

Too much.

Some called me unreliable —

when I was actually being unraveled.

Some projected onto me the very patterns I had spent years dissolving.

“You’re stuck in the past,” they said.

And I answered,

“I’ve moved more past than you can even comprehend.”

But the hardest part?

They were often the ones I had helped —

the ones who turned to me for comfort, for warmth, for healing.

Until I stopped performing the version of me they knew how to use.

When I could no longer mirror their version of order,

and stopped conforming —

they called me the problem.

Again.

But I wasn’t.

I was just the mirror that had stopped softening the truth.

And this is one of the deepest wounds of walking the real path:

You begin by being loved for your light.

Then, when your shadow work begins,

you are abandoned by the very people who once praised your glow.

They didn’t see that I was walking through fire.

That I was being turned to ash —

not because I was broken,

but because something true was trying to be born through me.

And truth does not come without cost.

I burned this time.

But I remained.

And then… there was the silence.

Spirit, once so close I could feel breath between the veils, went still.

No more whispers.

No more nudges.

No more synchronicities.

Just an ache.

A vast stillness.

A kind of holy loneliness no human could hold.

At first, I thought it was absence.

Now I know it was a kind of reverence.

The Divine stepped back, not to abandon —

but to see if I would keep walking when there was no voice in the sky to follow.

I carried the fire alone for a long time.

And while I still long to be met —

by Spirit, by soul kin, by love —

I no longer place my worth in whether or not someone shows up or they don't.

The miracle is: I showed up.

Even when the sky went quiet.

Even when no one believed in me.

Even when I barely recognized myself.

That… is not failure.

That is devotion. Even when my wings were torn from me,

I gathered them like fallen feathers and carried them in silence—

not to fly, but to remember I once could.

I have burned — more than once.

But I did not vanish.

I'm still here.

And this time,

I brought the flame with me.

✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✿ 🌸 Afterword from the Ashes 🌸 ✿

(for those still walking through fire)

This is not a story about survival. It’s about sacred combustion.

For those who’ve walked through soul fire — and come out wiser, quieter (on the inside), with more peace than applause, and more invisible than the world knows how to name — this is for you.

I wrote this not to be seen by everyone, but to be felt by someone.

If you’ve ever asked: Did I truly have to lose so much to find what’s divinely and infinitely real? — You are not alone.

This is a transmission from the ashes — and a quiet reminder: You didn’t disappear.

You became fire. Yes — you.

You didn’t just survive the fire — you made a home inside it —this is what it means to remember.

You might still talk with your hands, sing to your garden, or laugh too loud at the wrong moments — but underneath all of it, there’s a new kind of quiet blooming: the kind that doesn’t need to prove itself anymore.

You’re not who you used to be. Yet, you’re more you than ever.

🌸 So if no one’s told you today: You’re doing beautifully.

Not in spite of the fire — but because of it.

(✿◠‿◠)❀

© Nancy Anderson - Transformative Union - 2025