Navigating while crafting the sea of language back when my then 15-year old daughter underwent wisdom teeth surgery

Soon after the surgery.

My oldest adult child is now a 30 year old nonbinary person named Dylan Blair, and I love them so very much in the way a doty old father stubbornly loves them from nearly 3,000 miles away. I’m bad with pronouns and get my tenses all mixed up. Always have been even before pronouns were a socio-cultural evolution of diversity and inclusion in our chaotic world. Always scrambled my tenses, too. Yet they remind me, still do, and forgive me anyway. Usually. I think. For I do my best to honor one’s choices, and, yes, I mess up sometimes.

Stumbled upon versions of this one foto during a now decades-long project to recover, clean, sort, organize, and share pictures salvaged from the March 2010 house fire. It’s somewhat of an iconic foto in our family. Felt inspired to write about it. Back then, Dylan was known by her birth name Morgan Hannah, or just Morgan. Her mother, Gwen, now Vie, and I wanted a strong, feminine name for our oldest, a name evocative of both mythic warrior women and sorceresses. We wanted a Celtic name, and “Morgan” does have origins in Ancient and Medieval regions of what’s now Wales, Ireland, and even Scotland. Morgan was born a Pisces, and being such a water spirit enhanced our love for the name’s interpretation as “bright sea dweller,” or “bright water nymph.”

Hannah, her second name, originated in the Middle East as a Semitic name and as such is popular among both Arabs and Hebrews of the Levant where it means, “favor” and “grace.” Curiously, too, versions of Hannah are found in old Celtic Gaelic naming, but the connection to the Levant is vague. For my then-wife Gwen and I, Morgan Hannah represented a blending of our historic cultural and religious origins and influences. Ethnically the two of us descended primarily from a mix of Pagan Celtic and Germanic peoples and were raised in a Western civilization based upon Judaeo-Christian monotheism. The Roman Empire tied it all together in unexpected ways. So we called little Morgan Hannah our “graceful water nymph.” Continue reading →