A Rose by Any Other Name...

Why I Changed the Name: From Seven Generations to The Hut of Stories

When I began this Substack over two years ago, I called it Seven Generations. It was a name that came from deep within the well of my longing. I aspired to be an ancestor worth coming from. To live and write and teach in a way that honoured the old ones, the unborn ones, and the great chain of being we are each threaded through. That name served me well. It reminded me to lift my gaze, to live beyond my own small season, to offer work with roots and reach. But something has been shifting. And so, the name is changing too.

This space is no longer just about legacy. It’s about presence. About tending the soul-fire here and now. About gathering around the hearth of story, not to preserve something, but to become something.

So I welcome you, again, to The Hut of Stories.

It is not a mansion. Not a tower. Not even a house with proper trim and symmetry. It is a hut. Literally. A little crooked. A little wild. Built with bones and branches and breath. This is the kind of place where stories come alive. The posts are not polished, not perfected, but true. Where dreams are listened to as if they matter. Because they do! Where fairytales are treated as sacred texts. Where the woodsmoke of lived experience clings to every word.

This is not a place for certainty. I’m not interested in giving answers, nor do I trust them the way I once did. I am more drawn now to better questions. The kind that take years to ripen. The kind that unsettle. The kind that meet you in the middle of the night and sit at the foot of your bed like a dog waiting to be walked.

The Hut of Stories is where we tend these questions together.

It’s a space for the raw and the real. For story in its many forms, dreams, memories, fairytales, body-truths, and prayers whispered in hospital corridors, under bridges, at the borders. For words that help us remember the best of who we are, and for silences that are just as sacred.

It’s a hut built on the old woman’s wisdom. The Baba Yaga in her chicken-legged hut. The crone at the edge of the village. The storyteller who remembers the names of the stars. The one who knows that fire is both dangerous and necessary, and still lights it anyway. A candle held up against the encroaching darkness. A light that says, “I will not be defeated. I will rise.” A light held in a skull that bears that light to a world believing darkness will win. It will not. As long as we tend the embers of the soul-firs.

In this new name, I claim not just my desire to live with integrity for future generations, but my longing to be fully present now—with you. To write not epilogues, but epistles. Love letters to a life being lived. Full of ash and ache and astonishment.

If you’ve been here since Seven Generations, thank you. Truly. That journey is braided into this one. And if you’re new, welcome. Take off your shoes. There’s tea in the pot and stories laid on the table.

Come sit by the fire. Pull up a chair. The soup kettle is simmering.

Let’s see what wants to be told.

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