Last week my husband brought home wildflowers. One, a rose verbena, the jagged corm of leaves topped with a circular crown of purple flowers, the other a blue bonnet, a tall, graceful flower with many tiny blue blossoms, throated like a snap dragon in miniature, tipped in bright white. Both are flattened and dried now, but the bluebonnet carries the delicate hint of its living self, though not as vividly as when it was fresh, the memory lingers around it. His first gift to me back in 1997 was a handful of bright, vivid red-orange Indian paintbrushes, blue bonnets, purple verbena, saffron yellow field thistles, and white 'prickly' poppies in a thin glass vase.

At market today, I saw freshly harvested pear branches for sale in the florist, resinous green buds peeking free of the sapling branches, a few early blossoms open and utter white...something I could smell beyond the pungent Easter lilies, the long rows of bright Gerber daisies, and the lapping violet tongues of the harvested irises. It was very elegant, those long branches, but at once I found myself wishing to see the pear tree, rather than some small part of it that would eventually wither and be thrown away. So many things in modern life are that way, a pleasure for a time, then brushed aside for fresher objects...pear branches...possessions...cars...spouses....

I am reminded of Tevye in 'Fiddler on the Roof', as he cries out for the last time, "Tradition!" That last, vain attempt to keep things as they are...to beg and plead for things to remain in a form that better behooves him. Perhaps it behooves me to see things of lasting value and beauty and the rest of the world does not agree? Things must change, men and women change, the world changes, and I have, in the past, utterly despised those who shun change...but now, as I grow older, I wonder, 'at what point has change destroyed what we are?' At what point does change make us lose that sense of ourselves?

-and on a completely unrelated note...

A young friend of mine is asking about concepts surrounding Initiation...and in slowly working him through the discussion surrounding Catharsis/Initiation, I find myself remembering my own, and remembering how they effected me. Surprising that so many auspicious things arrive at the same time, including an excellent article I found by seraphimsigrist+Seraphim regarding the Inner Darkness of Saint Isaac.

This concept has been called many things in many metaphors. Aside from 'the dark night of the soul', I have heard it called 'crossing the abyss' in Thelemic circles, 'the journey' in context of the (very wonderful) novel Heart of Darkness, and in these parallels, I keep finding myself returning to that one primary concept: Initiation/Catharsis.

In terms of my own paradigm, the 'crossing of the abyss', that is to say, the very real, very dangerous struggle with one's own demons, be they imagined or quite tangible, is a form of Initiation, a Catharsis that every person, be they a magician, priest, or not, must undergo in order to understand the human condition more fully. Some disciplines stress it more than others, oftentimes these 'crossings', these fights with 'inner darkness', like Marlow's journey into the Congo after Kurtz, are not looked upon in a productive light...all too often I see practitioners and aesthetics brushing off the experience, and I wonder to myself 'in what religious/pseudo-religious discipline is Initiation NOT an integral part?'

Just as often, I see practitioners claim to have undergone Initiation...and yet they are without scars...without change...which leads me to believe that they haven't done it right. This could be in part because of the -way- that so many aesthetic traditions are being taught now, the way that esoteric 'knowledge' is being passed about with no real regard to the processes being explained. There are many people in this world who claim to have sought out spirituality in hundreds of ways and then reported feeling empty...is it that these people deny the existence of something greater than themselves, or could it be that there has been no stress on what exactly is taking place?