The quiet knowing that arrives before the reasons do. The gut feeling you talked yourself out of, and later wished you hadn’t. The sense that something essential is missing from a full, capable, busy life, and no one left to ask what it is.

There is an old Russian folktale about this.

In Vasilisa the Beautiful, a dying mother presses a small doll into her daughter’s hands. Feed her, she says, and she will guide you. Keep her hidden. Tell no one she exists. When the girl is sent alone into the dark forest, to the house of the most feared witch, Baba Yaga, it is the doll, secretly fed and quietly consulted, that keeps her alive.

The doll is the inheritance: the intuition, the lineage, the knowing passed from grandmother to mother to daughter.

Somewhere along the way, most of us stopped feeding her. We got busy. We were told to be practical, to stop being silly, to trust everyone’s judgement but our own. Some of us were never handed her at all, sometimes with devastating consequences.

The Lost Doll is the story of what happens when she is lost: when a culture stops feeding her, forgets she was ever there, and wakes to the ache of her absence. It is told in twenty-three verses, carried by paintings and clay sculptures: a reign, a suppression, a forgetting and a reckoning.

It begins here: