Sacred Flame of the Ages

Carrying the lives within

For years, I built a house in the cloud. High above the ground and high inside the network. Breathing in the most seductive amnesia, I could taste the stars.

Until I no longer remembered the feel of the earth beneath me.

There’s something truly intoxicating about the simulacra and simulation. You don’t mind the amnesia. If anything, you welcome it. As long as you get to float, persona intact.

The steak is juicy and delicious. OK? Even when you know it’s not real.

Until reality hits. The real reality.

There is more to all of this.

No amount of inflation can save you, when gravity calls you home. The weight sitting on your chest has become so heavy that descent is not an option, it’s the only viable one.

You can only fly as high as your roots are deep.

My roots?

Yes, what my soul longed for: a more whole version of me, grounded to the mud of the earth, guided by the light of the stars. Just as Meister Eckhart said, “when the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.” And that’s what she did. Match lit, the stage set—and there I was, walking through the fire.

Naked and true. Prima materia.

That’s when I remembered my home. When my house burned to ashes.

I longed for the salt of the Ionian Sea, to show me the way to wisdom instead of bitterness.

And the clarity of the mountains I climbed in my youth, to help me see through the clouds. Collecting lavender on Mount Dajti became the medicine of remembrance, on how to heal myself back to wholeness.

From my roots.

How deep do they go?

I must know, to know where I’m going.

I’m part of an unbroken chain. My being is felt backward and forward through time.

Because what if what we inherit through our DNA goes beyond just the physical? Beyond the colour of skin or eye.

What if we are also inheriting the unseen and unspoken?

What if memory itself, lived and unlived, finds a way to imprint itself in our psyche?

We don’t often think of it this way. We move through life believing we carry only the visible markers of our lineage. And the more we are pulled into the cloud—fleeting distractions, dopamine addictions, endless demands for performance—the more we drift from our roots, our bodies, and into a vacuum of disembodied selves.

But what if?

What if embedded in our being, are the hopes of our ancestors, too?

Their unfinished prayers.

Their resilience.

Their joys and their pains.

The cells that would become your eggs were formed while you were still in your mother's womb, just as hers were formed in your grandmother's.

Generations across time, nested like Russian dolls in one body.

Everything. All at once.

You.

When you feel it in your bones, something breaks open inside you.

You realize that this life is not just yours. It is an echo. A continuation. A story that stretches further back than you can see.

You just—

You write the next chapter.

How beautiful. How terrifying.

Because how do you hold the pen? What ink do you choose? What words honour both the pages that came before and the blank ones that follow?

You stop sleepwalking through inheritance and start living it consciously.

Maybe it’s in the way you see your parents, and everything that unfolded throughout your life.

Maybe it’s in the quiet refusal to live out a generational curse, and the promise to break the patterns that keep it alive.

I know I feel the echo of their souls in the moments I press rewind on my own history, and question what “my own” even means.

I see how much they are still alive when I face my own eyes in the mirror.

And in the way I part my hair.

The way I laugh and how my body reacts to love, surprise and awe.

And the way I weep and taste my tears when my heart is wounded.

I sense them all in the room with me, during life’s different seasons.

When I fly and when I fall.

They carry me. And their wisdom whispers:

As above, so below.

Every breath is a branch, in a tree planted long ago, reaching for the Sun.

I feared death until I realized every wilted leaf is only changing form, making way for the new to blossom—a transformation with no beginning and no end. Life is a beautiful cycle.

Ouroboros.

So I ask myself:

What will you do with that?

How will you hold it?

How do you walk with the knowing that you are the culmination of a thousand lives and the beginning of countless more?

How do you rise when you understand the flame that burns through you isn’t just for you?

It is sacred, ancient, ongoing.

And this is your inheritance.

This is your legacy.

This is your gift.

For a moment in time, in this moving image of eternity—

You are the keeper of the flame.