What's In A Name?

Shakespeare once said that a rose by any other name is still a rose...

 

What's in a name, really?

Well, I think names carry energy and qualities and what is your name impacts your life...

Indigenous people do too - they are very careful about naming their children and sometimes names are changed at different stages of life to mark events or personal and spiritual milestones...

Now, I was born and given the names Marianne Geertruide...   

I don't know where the Marianne part came from in our family history.   Name source books say it's a joining of the names Mary the mother of Jesus, and Anne, her mother.

But the Geertruide was after my paternal grandmother, who by my memory and other accounts, was a complete bitch...

My mother told me my grandmother was seriously pissed off that I was not given that name as my first name... I, growing up, was grateful every day!

My sister, who was born one day before my second birthday, was cursed with being given my name reversed.   

She got to be Anne-Marie Albertina - the Albertina after our father, who also was often a nasty person...

When I got married for the first time, I was happy to trade my last name Meijerink (which no one could pronounce) for Pember - which means "small mound"...

So I was Marianne Geertruide Pember for 20 years or so...  

No one could pronounce the Dutch name Marianne, so I used to get called Mary Anne (which I loathed - think Hoosier Hotshots singing "All night, all day, Mary Anne, down by the seaside sifting sand..."), or sometimes Gertie - which I hated even more...

Then I got divorced and after a couple of years decided it was time to lose the married name...

But I didn't want to revert to my maiden name - too many unpleasant associations.

And besides, the feminist in me realised that women keeping their own names when they got married had forgotten that they weren't honouring the female bloodline, but were still carrying the male line, because their maiden names were their fathers' last names!

And I had also learned that Marianne means "sea of bitter tears"... which really meant that both names had to go...

So I said my version of prayers to my version of god, and one morning, in the shower, the word CHANGEBRINGER came through, loud and clear...

I was completely gobsmacked... crazy word, arrogant, horrible, too "new agey", too way out, won't get any respect, hard sounding, weird...

But it wouldn't go away and nothing else came... I mean, seriously, what was I going to change my name to - Jane Smith, or Anne Jones or Susan Robinson???

And then I started thinking - names used to be about what people did or where they came from... and I did bring change, in my own life and to others... my whole life had been about that, whether I was conscious of it or not...

And so I gave in and said to the universe - well, OK then, but you'd better bring me a new first name too because it's weird to call across the room: "hey ChangeBringer - do you want a cup of coffee?"...

And then the word "Sahila" jumped out of a book I was given by a shaman friend... 

A Sahila is a chief amongst the Kuna Indians of Panama and one of his functions is to be "the go-between, between the people and the gods"... 

Which is exactly what I was doing in Australia - speaking and channelling at churches and spiritual centres, giving people clairvoyance and healing privately.   

And as I was (then) far enough away from Panama to escape the wrath of those who thought I was taking a title I hadn't earned, and the word sounded strong and feminine, I went with it.

We get to meet the wizened (probably 35) village sahila, who arrives Panama-hatted, bare-chested and wearing orange plastic flip-flops. He plops himself in a net hammock. Somehow we expected ermine robes and a throne, with maybe a bugle accompaniment...The sahila may look like a combination of beachcomber and bum, but he is an important hombre. He presides over the congreso, or counsel, a daily event attended by the entire village. There individuals have their say, tribal problems get ironed out and the sahila pronounces, explains, adjudicates and may even hand down wisdom gleaned from dreams.  Some villages have more than one sahila. We don’t ask who then presides; they seem to have worked all this out peaceably, without Donald Rumsfeld. -  http://aboardlulu.com/lulu20090317.htm

(There's also a quite extraordinary synchronicity between acquiring this new first name and meeting the father of my youngest son - but that's a story for another day...)

Now all official documents except my birth certificate are in these two names...

But I still carry the energies of the names Marianne Geertruide and call on them in ceremony, as well as the energy of medicine names I have been gifted.

I keep using the energy of Marianne Geertruide because I discovered (after the name change!) that Marianne is the name of the feminine symbol of the French Revolution (my mother's family was French).

 

Geertruide is a Germanic name meaning Spear Woman, and I have been a warrior, fighting for personal and social justice, all my life...

And St Gertrude was a German nun, who was a mystic... I know it's hard to believe, but for about two years in my early teens, I thought I would like to be a nun... a Carmelite (like Teresa), who doesn't speak!

But, four children and many words and metaphysical/spiritual experiences later, it all kinda fits with who I am and what I do as I express myself in this world...

So, what's in your name?