Almost ten years ago, at the beginning of what would become a very long journey back to myself, I took part in a shamanic drumming journey.
During the journey, I found myself around a fire, but not quite as myself.
I was half woman, half deer.
I had never seen anything like her before. I had never heard of a Deer Woman or even known such a figure existed. Yet within the journey, I wasn't looking at her from somewhere else.
I was her.
Afterwards, I searched for what I had seen and discovered stories of the Deer Woman that I had known nothing about. Some of what I found unsettled me. I wanted to understand why she had appeared and what the experience might mean, but at the time I didn't have those answers.
So I drew what I remembered.
And in the corner of that drawing, for reasons I couldn't explain, I wrote the number 212.
Then life moved on.
I forgot about the drawing.
Over the years that followed, I learned, studied, healed and changed. I explored psychology, somatics, creativity and different ways of understanding ourselves. What began as my own journey gradually became part of how I came to see the world, and eventually part of what I would go on to create.
Then, last year, I found myself returning to that experience.
I wrote the words that became The Long Return. Words about fire and earth, memory and becoming, and a woman I had somehow forgotten.
When I recorded them, the final audio was exactly two minutes and twelve seconds long.
2:12.
Something about it felt familiar.
I searched through old emails until I found the drawing I had sent to my shamanic teacher almost a decade earlier.
There it was, in the corner.
I had completely forgotten I had written it.
I still don't fully understand why I saw the Deer Woman, why I experienced myself as her, or why I wrote that number. And I don't know why, almost a decade later, it appeared again in something I had created without planning it.
But finding that drawing again felt like coming full circle.
At one end was the person I had been at the very beginning, stepping into something I couldn't yet understand.
At the other was the person I had become, after almost ten years of learning, healing and finding my way back to myself.
And somehow, between those two moments, was 212.
I had returned to something I had forgotten.
And somewhere along the way, I became myself.
Niamh