your name is like a verbal tattoo for your identity. it’s permanent but it’s not permanent. it’s a poem with infinite intersections of meanings. it can be a loaded gun and a field of blooming flowers, separately & simultaneously. your name is a powerful statement, an incantation. your name is a prayer, a blessing, an intergenerational offering. your name is an homage & a memory, a fluctuation in time. every phoneme, letter, syllable, sound, breath (breathe) is a desire to be. you are not your name & your name is not you. but be damned if anyone says it isn’t important. be damned if anyone says having something that fits isn’t revolutionary. sometimes, what we are gifted as babes from the womb is no longer us. sometimes, we dream & in those dreams we manifest something more (something else). but in the process of evolution there will always be the whisper of what was. because it is that past informing your present & from those two spaces, your future, so name me right or do not name me at all. name me right or do not name me at all. name me right or do not name me at all. Aug 10th, 2014 20:35
In 8+ years, I have had so many names I cannot easily tell you the number. However, each one was a process, a statement, an important aspect or in roads to understanding how I relate(d) to my self and to other people. What made me feel some type of way eh ish and otherwise led to liberation and comfort. I have been very protective of the process by which I have been creating my self and other times I have been very open to others perspectives and all to the good– I think. It amuses me to know that the ILJ I am now is same as initials as what I was given by my parents, but the names are just different enough and the meanings are just different enough and the energy is most assuredly not the same.
My name for me and the names that other people call me are/becoming all the same thing. It’s taken 8 years to get to Mxs. Isa Lee Love Jones René— & don’t forget about the other honorific Mir’dam and because folks like to feminize rather than leave the binary Ma’am and Madam– so I can imagine it’ll take a bit for folks to get caught up. Also, I haven’t been strict in asking folks to call me one thing or another so much that they grasp one to two aspects of what’s going to be around for a while– each aspect individually has been vetted and the whole gathering feels like fruit (lol). It’s almost like being comprehensively comfortable is uncomfortable, and that too is a feeling to work through.
Being my self legally is so close that I almost don’t know what to do with it. Just a few questions, a few pieces of paper, a few answers to select people and bam: i am moving on. Most assuredly, this journey has been about progress not perfection and being victorious rather than wallowing into victimhood– two phrases given to me by different family members– mayhap my name in this incarnation will adopt those sayings and others into the core (Love) of its being, the core of the prayer/incantation/invocation/etc– fancy, elegant, and more. It’s all mine. It’s my life. it’s time (thyme) to embrace all that’s mine and let go and return to others all that’s theirs.
December 2nd, 2021
She, They, Family, &/+ Name
Mxs. Isa Lee Love Jones René
Our Green (Green) Life 
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