While waiting for my book formatting to be completed, thought I'd share another snippet from my upcoming Sacred Journey A Memoir of Loss, Love and Coming Home to Yourself. A CHAPTER... Two Heritages Visiting Crete, Belonging to Sicily and Scotland, 2024 At the end of my decade of sacred journeying, the journey turned toward the places where my blood comes from. Not the sacred sites of other people's traditions. My own. As with most things in my life, Crete arrived through synchronicity. I was attending a retreat called: The Celebration of Being Woman being held in Crete. The retreat centre already had my name on the door. I arrived to find that the previous retreat had left the name Maria on the door of the room that would be mine. The universe is sometimes not subtle. On the first evening, the sun and the moon were in the same sky, the solar and the lunar, the masculine and the feminine, in perfect balance over the oldest goddess island in the Mediterranean. A friend had asked me about my heritage. I could speak at length about my father's side: the Cucinotta’s, Sicily, the volcanic island, the migration to Australia. But when she asked about my mother's family, she noticed how much I struggled. I had grown up with vagueness. A shrug. Her parents were from the UK somewhere. Nothing specific. No town. No story. No detail. Just a kind of fog where the maternal line should have been, which, when I think about it now, was the mother wound showing up in the most literal way possible. Even the geography of her had been lost. My friend put the few details I had into an ancestry programme. And within hours, a lineage I had never known materialised on a screen in front of me. My mother's father was from Lothian, Edinburgh. My maternal grandmother's family were from Ireland. Edinburgh. Ireland. Two homelands I had never been told were mine. The Goddess Culture of Crete What I did not fully understand before I arrived on Crete was that I was stepping onto what may be the oldest goddess-worshipping ground in Europe.