Crete, the Island of Becoming
Reflections from a Feminine Awakening
There are places that don’t just welcome you, they remember you.
Crete was one of those places for me. A landscape where healing felt effortless, where embodiment tasted like sunlight and saltwater, and where love, in its truest form, recognized essence beyond gender.
I was only visiting, yet it felt like home the moment I stepped off the plane.
The air tasted of salt and honey. Mythology pulsed through the stones, and the sea kept whispering something ancient about softness and power. They say Crete once held one of the most important matriarchal cultures on Earth. Maybe that’s why the island felt like a mirror: those serpent goddesses, bare-chested and fearless, reminding me that the sacred has never needed modesty.
But what made that summer unforgettable was the woman beside me.
A presence woven from moonlight, mystery, and kindness. She was cocooning herself, gently preparing to rise again after pain, and her energy pulled me in completely. I fell in love with a woman for the first time in my life. Not the kind of love that asks for ownership, but the kind that quietly unlocks a door inside you.
We wandered through every corner of the island: dancing barefoot, drinking champagne at noon, eating feta and hummus like holy offerings. The cicadas sang each morning like a prayer for freedom. Men stared, judging, but we didn’t care. We swam naked under the moonlight and promised we would meet again somewhere on Earth.
It has been three years now.
She is still in my life, still luminous, still a sister of the soul. That journey healed us both. Not only through affection, but through memory. Crete was magical partly because she was there, and partly because something ancient in us remembered itself again.
That summer we naturally returned to life. To our bodies, our softness, our soul’s memory of freedom. Sometimes awakening doesn’t look like effort. Sometimes it feels like ease.
The sea always knows.
Love never dies. It transforms.
With love,
Maria Luisa
