Why I Wrote Fatima’s Alchemy During Five Years of Silence.
Why I Wrote Fatima’s Alchemy in Five Years of Silence:
Silence was never absence. It was protection.
It was the wall I built around a seed — a fragile book that could not be touched by a thousand outside voices before it knew its own shape.
I understood, even before I wrote the first word, what would happen if I let the world peer into its tender beginnings.
Opinions dressed as care. Suggestions disguised as guidance. Each one pulling gently at something not yet ready to face the air.
So I chose retreat. I wove myself into stillness and let it cradle the book’s first breaths.
In that quiet, I became a listener more than a maker. I waited for the muse to arrive in her own unbroken tongue, and when she came, I bowed to her cadence.
Fatima did not appear as a task or a manuscript. She came as a living presence, carrying the pulse of my own life, asking only to be received with honesty. Nearly five years passed — not from hesitation, not from a lack of will, but because the work demanded time outside of time.
I gave myself to the sacred pace of it. To the slow alchemy that turns life into story. To the quiet authority of a voice that refused to be rushed or reshaped.
In yielding to that rhythm, I found not perfection but integrity — the kind that lets a work breathe as fully as life itself.
This book was not written in a room full of voices. I did not want a committee book, softened by polite suggestions and workshopped into something palatable. I wanted every word to carry my own imprint, unfiltered and undiluted. So I stepped away from the noise — away from the chorus of opinions and expectations — into a silence that felt less like withdrawal and more like devotion.
What looked like absence to others was, for me, a long wintering.
A seed gathers its strength beneath the soil until it is ready to break through. In that stillness, the book’s essence revealed itself slowly, honestly, without performance. It asked for nothing but fidelity, and in return offered a truth that could not be polished away. The stories that emerged were not invented. They were excavated — pulled from the marrow of a life that had been broken open more than once, and had learned, eventually, to stop turning away from what the breaking revealed.
I wrote through grief that had no clean edges. Through the loss of a home, of horses I loved, of a material world I had spent years building. Through a legal battle that lasted three years and left me hollowed out. Through illness, through shame, through the particular silence of a woman who had once been visible in her field and had become, seemingly overnight, invisible. I wrote through all of it — not to perform survival, but because writing was the one place where I did not have to pretend the process was further along than it was.
Fatima held me to that honesty. She would not let the pages become costume.
The work I was doing was the same work the stories described — the slow alchemical passage through dissolution into something truer. I was not writing about transformation from the safety of the other side. I was writing from inside it, in the dark, trusting that the process would complete even when I could not yet see its form.
And it did complete. Four years of writing. A fifth year of refinement. And then, in August 2025, the book entered the world — whole, unbroken, exactly as it had insisted on being.
Not timid. Not softened. Not shaped by anyone else’s idea of what it should be.
A Parable:🌹 The Rose Behind the Wall 🌹
Once, there was a rose that refused the open fields. She turned from the sunlit meadows where other blossoms swayed and chose instead to grow behind high, unyielding stone walls—hidden from wandering eyes and careless hands.
The flowers beyond whispered among themselves:
“Why does she hide? Why shun the warmth and gaze of the world? Why not bloom where she can be praised, compared, and guided?”
But the rose knew. To bloom too soon was to be plucked, pruned, and judged—her tender petals torn before they had even learned their own fragrance.
So she grew in silence. Her roots drank from secret streams. Her buds swelled quietly in the shadows, unseen, untouched. Seasons drifted by. To the fields beyond, she seemed absent—dormant, forgotten.
Yet behind the walls, a quiet alchemy unfolded. Petal by petal, she bloomed in her own time, her own rhythm, untouched by any hand that might claim or reshape her.
Then one day, the walls crumbled. And there she was— Not timid, not frail, but whole. Her fragrance intact, her bloom unbroken, her truth undiluted.
The other flowers gasped: “Where did you come from? How did you bloom so fully, all at once?”
And the rose whispered: “I had to grow where no one could touch me. Only then could I offer the fragrance that was always mine.”
Delahrose Roobie Myer
Author, Fatima’s Alchemy: A Treasure to Behold
www.delahrose.com
