Before it had a Name

on beginning without knowing & questions for you

There are beginnings we don’t recognize at first, only the quiet sense that something is stirring, waiting, rising through the stillness. Some fires don’t begin with flame. They begin with ache, with silence, with the slow remembering of something that never left. 

There are days when something shifts and you don’t know why. No great realization. No story to tie it to. Just a sense that the ground beneath you is not quite the same. Like the air has thickened slightly. Like something unseen has stepped closer. It’s not loud enough to name. Not strong enough to explain. But it’s there. A weigh. A warmth. A quiet presence you hadn’t noticed before. If you stay there, if you don’t rush to fill the silence, you might feel it rising. A thread, a whisper, a subtle pull toward something that’s been waiting for you to turn back. This matters. Even if you don’t know why yet.

This matters.

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The forest was still that day. Not windless, just held. As if the air itself was listening. There was weight in it. Not heaviness, but something quiet and steady that pressed into my skin, into the back of my throat. I didn’t set out to find anything. I kept moving forward, drawn by the sense that something was waiting ahead. Halfway up the ridge, where the trees thin and the wind moves freely between them, I felt that subtle shift in the chest. Not a thought exactly, but a quiet pull. A flicker. The knowing that doesn’t come in words, but in conviction. A sense that something is beginning. Not loudly. Not even clearly, but unmistakably, deeply, beginning.

I stood still for a while, boots soft in the mud, watching the way the bare branches trembled like breath. Overhead, a hawk circled once, then disappeared into the open sky. The hush around me wasn’t empty. It held something. Like the moment before lighting a match. Like memory brushing against the present. It wasn’t unfamiliar. More like the return of a thread I’d once followed without realizing, a quiet echo pulling gently at something that had always lived inside me.

I think it began well before I ever noticed it. A slow forming, without shape or name. Not a dream, exactly. Not a plan. Just the way I used to gather things, fallen leaves, scraps of paper, words that didn’t yet belong anywhere. I was always collecting, always keeping a place ready, just in case something important wanted to land. A small fire kept lit, even when I didn’t know what I was keeping warm.

I’ve always been drawn to flickers. Not the brilliant light of clarity, but the quieter kind of knowing. The warmth that arrives before the words. I felt it the night I sat on the hardwood floor with a notebook open beside me and tears I couldn’t explain falling fast and quietly.

I had just lost something I didn’t know how to grieve, and yet, in that moment, there it was again, that flicker. The whisper of something more. A pull toward hope. Not the kind you speak of in crowds, but the kind that settles in your bones and tells you to keep going.

These sparks have followed me through many seasons. Motherhood. Loss. Stillness. Silence.

Through the quiet ache of days that ask everything of you and give little back in return. Through joy that surprises you when you’ve nearly given up on its arrival. Through years of writing in the margins. The fire has never roared, but it has always stayed. Lately, I’ve felt it stirring again. Not forceful, but still insistent. 

I  don’t even realize how long I‘ve been tending something until I feel the warmth rise again and realize this fire never went out. I was just waiting for the right time to give it space; perhaps the time is asking something of me. To clear the hearth. To make room. To trust that the flickers were never foolish, never too small.

I’m just starting to see some stories begin long before the first word is written. They start in the noticing. In the ache that lingers at the edges of an ordinary day. In the questions we carry long before we know how to speak them aloud. They begin in the half-formed phrases whispered in the dark, the dreams scribbled in the margins of grocery lists, the things we return to without knowing why. 

Sometimes I think I am waiting for the right idea, not waiting for me to become anything at all, but for me to return to the part of myself that already knows. I’ve learned that much writing happens before the pen touches the page. In the way I  move through a room. In the way I watch light fall through branches. I sit with what hasn’t yet taken form and choose to stay with it anyway.

A few months ago, I found myself in one of those moods where I wanted to clear everything out. Drawers, shelves, closets. Too much paper. Too much of the past. I pulled down a box of old notebooks—nothing special, just a stack of spiral-bound years I hadn’t opened in ages. I almost tossed the whole thing into the donation pile without looking. But something in me said, wait.

So I sat on the floor, cross-legged, thumbing through the pages. Most were full of fragments, unfinished sentences, listless prayers, and ideas that never took root.

They were also full of her, the younger me who kept writing anyway. Even in the thick of doubt. Even when no one else would read it. 

She was still there, underlined and smudged, still trying to say something true. Then, near the back of one nearly forgotten notebook, a single line stopped me,

Don’t throw this out. There’s still fire in here.

I had written that to myself. Somehow, I had known even then, before anything took shape, that I would need that reminder someday. A breadcrumb left by a past version of me, trusting I’d one day return. It reminded me that so much of what we call story doesn’t happen on the page at all. It happens slowly, in the layers we don’t notice at the time.

In the years, we think we’ve been stalled. In the waiting rooms, in the whispered prayers, in the ordinary ache of days that don’t feel like progress. In the holding on, the letting go, the slow reworking of the heart. When something takes root inside us, even if we don’t have the language for it yet.

We think a story begins with a sentence, but often it begins in silence. It begins with longing. It begins the first time something flickers and we don’t look away.

There’s an old pine stump at the edge of the woods behind our house. It’s split wide down the center, soft with age, hollowed by time. Inside, when the light hits it just right, you can still see the rings, proof of years held, seasons weathered. Lately, a bird has begun nesting there again. A return to what once was. A beginning inside something long thought done.

I keep thinking about that.

How even the broken things can hold life again. How what once seemed finished might only be resting. How we are never too far from a new flame.

“A bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick He will not snuff out.” (Isaiah 42:3)

I’ve returned to that line many times lately.

A reminder that what burns low still burns, flickers are seen. The gentle hand of God does not rush, but restores.

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*Click any that speak to your season—your voice is shaping what comes next*

What would help you tend to what matters most in your creative or spiritual life? (I would love to hear in comments.)

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Kindling: A flicker of thought. A small moment waiting to catch light. A place to begin, not to rush past, but to rest within. This ember is here for pausing for warming your thinking, your noticing, your remembering.

Today’s Kindling: What if……

Maybe it begins here. Not with a grand unveiling, but with a quiet clearing of space. With the soft breath before the words. With a single spark, you didn’t know you were still carrying. Let it catch. Let it glow.

Maybe it begins not with a plan, but with a pause. Not with clarity, but with a quiet clearing of space. A flicker. A breath. A small act of return. 

What if you didn’t need to name the fire just yet, only tend it?

What’s quietly burning in you right now, waiting to be noticed, perhaps even long before you knew you were writing it?

Write from that place.

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If something surfaced as you sat with these words, you’re gently invited to share in the comments. A memory, a noticing, a sentence you’re still holding. Only if it feels right. There’s space here.