ESSAY · MARCH 2026
Reaching Back, Reaching Forward
A reflection on alignment, lineage, and the indestructible thread
by Maureen Owen
by Maureen Owen
I used to think that staying true to yourself was about moving forward. Keeping your eyes on the horizon. Not losing yourself in the noise of a world remaking itself faster than we can follow.
I don’t believe that anymore.
What I have learned — slowly, sometimes on my knees, always in the company of women who came before me — is that alignment asks as much of us backwards as it does forwards. That to stay true to yourself while you are changing, while the world is changing, you must first know whose hands shaped you. Whose fire runs in your blood. What was passed to you not in words, but in the way a woman holds herself when everything — everything — is pressing down.
I have two such women. My mother. And her mother, Rose.
Rose’s life was not easy. It was not fair. It was marked by poverty, by violence, by deprivation and humiliation that would have been unbearable for most of us to imagine, let alone endure. When she sought help from her own family, they turned her away. ‘Rose, surely not. Paddy would never do that.’ She was sent back. And she survived it. For years. For decades.
What I keep returning to is not simply that Rose survived. It is who she remained through all of it.
My mother used to say, quietly, with complete certainty: ‘My mother was a saint.’
Not a martyr. Not a victim. A saint. A woman whose strength and courage and fierce intelligence were not diminished by what she endured. Because beneath the trauma and the difficulty, Rose had connected to something deeper — the ultimate defiance: the audacity to choose to belong, to choose to love, to choose to live a life of love and not to be defined by others or by pain.
Stories of Rose speak of her sharp wit, her deep kindness, her love of animals, her courage. A woman who, no matter how many times life pressed her down, somehow found her way back to her own two feet. Back to herself.
This is what I now understand as the indestructible soul-spirit. Not an idea. Not a theological concept. A living flame that no amount of hardship could extinguish in Rose — because it did not belong to the hardship to extinguish. It belonged to something far older, far deeper. The Divine Feminine, breathing through her, whether she named it that or not.
And she did not shrink. She did not shrivel. She refused — with every quiet, courageous act of her life — to become less than she was.
Life called to what was already in her. As Millicent Fawcett wrote: ‘Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.’
My mother received that flame and carried it forward in her own way. She took the wounds of her childhood and chose, consciously and continuously, to become a loving presence. Our home was always open. Women and children in crisis would appear at our door. My mother — a widow with five children and barely enough for herself — gave what she had. A meal. A conversation long into the night. A place to stay. Kind words spoken at exactly the right moment.
She did not become her wound. She became her response to it.
That, I now understand, is alignment. Not a fixed point. Not a straight line. A living choice, made again and again, to remain a loving presence — no matter what.
The question this magazine is holding is one I have lived with for a long time: How do I stay true to myself while I am changing, while the world is changing?
I don’t think alignment is about holding yourself rigid against the current. Rose did not do that. My mother did not do that. Life called to them, and they answered. What they held onto was not a fixed version of themselves. It was something beneath that. A source. An indestructible knowing of what they would and would not surrender.
And I feel it in myself — this same refusal. The refusal to be less than. The refusal to shrink and shrivel in the face of trauma and hardship. A voice rising from somewhere old and sure, saying: it is time. Time to move beyond merely surviving. Time for healing. Time for thriving.
Because we were meant for more than endurance. We were meant, as Francis Weller writes, to dance and sing, play and laugh — to unselfconsciously tell our stories, to make love and take delight in this brief, privileged, luminous adventure of being alive.
That is the invitation Rose left. That is the inheritance my mother carried forward.
And now I carry it. And now — so do you.
So I ask you, as a woman who has stood at her own threshold moments, her own edges of becoming:
Whose hands are behind you?
Not to carry their wounds as your own. But to claim what survived inside those wounds. The courage that did not break. The love that chose, again and again, not to harden. The indestructible soul-spirit that refused — quietly, fiercely, completely — to shrink and shrivel.
Reach back and find her. Let her flame meet yours.
That is how I stay true to myself while everything is changing. I remember whose daughter I am. I let her fire light the way forward.
And I refuse — as she refused — to be less than fully, gloriously, dangerously alive.
I don’t believe that anymore.
What I have learned — slowly, sometimes on my knees, always in the company of women who came before me — is that alignment asks as much of us backwards as it does forwards. That to stay true to yourself while you are changing, while the world is changing, you must first know whose hands shaped you. Whose fire runs in your blood. What was passed to you not in words, but in the way a woman holds herself when everything — everything — is pressing down.
I have two such women. My mother. And her mother, Rose.
Rose’s life was not easy. It was not fair. It was marked by poverty, by violence, by deprivation and humiliation that would have been unbearable for most of us to imagine, let alone endure. When she sought help from her own family, they turned her away. ‘Rose, surely not. Paddy would never do that.’ She was sent back. And she survived it. For years. For decades.
What I keep returning to is not simply that Rose survived. It is who she remained through all of it.
My mother used to say, quietly, with complete certainty: ‘My mother was a saint.’
Not a martyr. Not a victim. A saint. A woman whose strength and courage and fierce intelligence were not diminished by what she endured. Because beneath the trauma and the difficulty, Rose had connected to something deeper — the ultimate defiance: the audacity to choose to belong, to choose to love, to choose to live a life of love and not to be defined by others or by pain.
Stories of Rose speak of her sharp wit, her deep kindness, her love of animals, her courage. A woman who, no matter how many times life pressed her down, somehow found her way back to her own two feet. Back to herself.
This is what I now understand as the indestructible soul-spirit. Not an idea. Not a theological concept. A living flame that no amount of hardship could extinguish in Rose — because it did not belong to the hardship to extinguish. It belonged to something far older, far deeper. The Divine Feminine, breathing through her, whether she named it that or not.
And she did not shrink. She did not shrivel. She refused — with every quiet, courageous act of her life — to become less than she was.
Life called to what was already in her. As Millicent Fawcett wrote: ‘Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.’
My mother received that flame and carried it forward in her own way. She took the wounds of her childhood and chose, consciously and continuously, to become a loving presence. Our home was always open. Women and children in crisis would appear at our door. My mother — a widow with five children and barely enough for herself — gave what she had. A meal. A conversation long into the night. A place to stay. Kind words spoken at exactly the right moment.
She did not become her wound. She became her response to it.
That, I now understand, is alignment. Not a fixed point. Not a straight line. A living choice, made again and again, to remain a loving presence — no matter what.
The question this magazine is holding is one I have lived with for a long time: How do I stay true to myself while I am changing, while the world is changing?
I don’t think alignment is about holding yourself rigid against the current. Rose did not do that. My mother did not do that. Life called to them, and they answered. What they held onto was not a fixed version of themselves. It was something beneath that. A source. An indestructible knowing of what they would and would not surrender.
And I feel it in myself — this same refusal. The refusal to be less than. The refusal to shrink and shrivel in the face of trauma and hardship. A voice rising from somewhere old and sure, saying: it is time. Time to move beyond merely surviving. Time for healing. Time for thriving.
Because we were meant for more than endurance. We were meant, as Francis Weller writes, to dance and sing, play and laugh — to unselfconsciously tell our stories, to make love and take delight in this brief, privileged, luminous adventure of being alive.
That is the invitation Rose left. That is the inheritance my mother carried forward.
And now I carry it. And now — so do you.
So I ask you, as a woman who has stood at her own threshold moments, her own edges of becoming:
Whose hands are behind you?
Not to carry their wounds as your own. But to claim what survived inside those wounds. The courage that did not break. The love that chose, again and again, not to harden. The indestructible soul-spirit that refused — quietly, fiercely, completely — to shrink and shrivel.
Reach back and find her. Let her flame meet yours.
That is how I stay true to myself while everything is changing. I remember whose daughter I am. I let her fire light the way forward.
And I refuse — as she refused — to be less than fully, gloriously, dangerously alive.
