More Than a Name
There is a small island in the north called Tussøya, ringed by white beaches and water that shifts between blue and green depending on the light, and on that island lay Nordberg, the home of my grandparents. When I think of paradise, I do not think of anything I have read in a book. I think of Nordberg. I think of running barefoot on that white sand, of the sea all around us, of the smell of the house and the sound of my grandmother moving through it. That was heaven on earth for me as a child, the safest, the most beautiful and the best place of all.
My grandmother was the one I called Little Mother, and she was God to me in the way a child knows God, as a presence that holds you. She held the sacred space around me without ever needing to name it. In her arms and in her house I was simply allowed to be, and I loved her and my grandfather with my whole heart. When I carried the name Nordberg, I carried them. I carried the island, the beaches, the light over the water, and the love that lived in that place.
But a name carries more than the love we feel. It also carries what came before us.
I was born with a heart defect, and I have come to understand that my heart was carrying much more than a physical weakness. In my ancestral line there was poverty, hardship and struggle reaching back through generations, and I felt all of it. I felt it as a child without having words for it, and my heart took it in, the way a sensitive heart does. It carried so much heavy patterning from those who came before me that, in order to survive, it had to close. A closed heart can carry a great weight. What it cannot do is live freely.
In 2013 a doctor told me that I was going to die, that my body could no longer manage. I lived with that sentence for months, and when I slowly began to sense that I might survive after all, I knew that something had to change at the root. I took the name Hjerte, the Norwegian word for heart. The heart I was born with, the heart that had been wounded from the beginning, the heart that had closed itself to carry my ancestors, became my name. It felt completely right, as if I were finally turning toward the very place I had been protecting all my life.
That name walked with me into my dark night of the soul. It was a long night, and in it I met the grief I had carried in my family and the grief I had brought with me from other lifetimes. Hjerte did not hide any of it. It held it, so that I could meet it, piece by piece, layer by layer.
In January 2015 I received a message from God that I was walking the same path as Jesus. I did not understand what that meant, and I did not try to force an understanding. I simply kept walking. That same year my son Aleksander left his body, and the ground of my life was broken open in a way no words can fully hold.
The transformation of my heart continued, year after year, until the night between December 31, 2018 and January 1, 2019. On that threshold between one year and the next, my heart opened again, radically and completely. Everything I had carried from my ancestors, the poverty, the struggle, the old heavy patterns, had been transformed. The heart that once had to close in order to carry them could now stay open and simply love.
And then came 2023, the year of three initiations.
The first took place at the grave of my son Aleksander. The second happened in the church in Visby on Gotland, in Sweden. The third came in Glastonbury in England, and it was there that God gave me the invitation to take the name Divine.
To say yes, I had to let go of Nordberg. I had to release the name that held my grandparents, my island, my Little Mother and the paradise of my childhood. That was not a light thing to do, and I did not do it quickly. It was a deep process of grief and of love at the same time. But I came to understand that I was not leaving them behind. Everything they gave me lives on in my heart, in Hjerte, and the love of Nordberg is woven into who I am, whether or not the word stands in my name. So in the end I said yes. I applied formally to take the name Divine, and I have carried it ever since.
My name now holds three movements. Ann-Peggy was given to me by my parents. Hjerte I took myself, when I chose to stay alive and turn toward my own heart. Divine I received, as an invitation and a gift from God.
When I look at what the words mean, I can feel how they belong together. Ann comes from the Hebrew Hannah and means grace or favour, a gentle and open energy of blessing. Peggy is a loving form of Margaret, from the Greek word for pearl, and a pearl is the beauty that forms slowly in the dark, around the very thing that has hurt it, until something precious lies hidden in the deep. Hjerte is love and compassion and the courage to live from the centre of my own truth, the bridge between body and soul. And Divine points to the source, to the holy, to the knowing that I am part of something far greater than myself. Read together, my name says something like this: the grace-filled pearl who lives from the heart, in contact with the Divine.
I do not experience my name as a label. It is the story of my life written in four words, and it is a frequency I carry every time someone speaks it.
This is why I want to speak about how we name our children. Every child arrives carrying a gift and an intention, and very often carrying the weight of their ancestors too. When we take the time to attune to that child, during pregnancy and in the first quiet days, we can begin to sense what this soul has come to bring and what it may come to heal. A name chosen from that place becomes a purpose spoken aloud every single day, a direction the child hears from everyone who loves them, a small piece of creation carried on earth in sound.
A name can be given, it can be chosen, and it can be received. Mine has been all three. And I believe that when we name with intention, we are already beginning to remember who our children truly are.