begin

    I
        live
      in
                 a body,
             therefore I am ...
         Simone Weil

I also think,but it seems to me that my body encases the thoughts, so I'd choose my body as my being, over my thoughts any day, even though Descartes's arguments did seem pretty solid when I was studied them. He thought, therefore he was. I wonder what he'd have had to say about giving birth, though?

I didn't like giving birth. But I loved having babies in utero,swirling about like Atlantic Salmon leaping to reach the source of my internal rivers, ... the fast moving living water which emanates from somewhere other than myself.

I can't recall being in the womb, although I wish I could have seen myself, with you, being knitted together like the baby's shawl I made while trying to thread philosophy with word and image as my second baby stumbled its way into being alongside its sister: a doctoral thesis.

I think I need a name with which to write.

Well my character does, because if I call her Diane, everyone will think that I'm writing about my actual life, when Patrick White always maintained that we have several lives, and therefore, I suppose, several selves. Finding a voice has been difficult for me. Aphasia was learned during childhood when one didn't ever speak of incidents or insects or the other forms of intensive care to which one was treated. I grew up silent.

In this fictive life, then, I shall deal myself the name Theodora. Not Patrick's Theodora, although I might visit her from time to time. And my surname shall be Free rather than Goodman, because it was in order to find Freedom that I was driven to seek the person of God.

When Theodora was a child, then, her holiday home was near the ruins of a penal settlement. Her family didn't ever visit the old prison, though, out of respect for a distant relative who'd been incarcerated there. A few years ago a young man shot the place up.