Go to Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
Much of what we can do with initiation consists of bringing the inner experience outward, establishing it in consciousness, so that we can begin to live in and from the new awareness. That can often mean we find ourselves expressing it through light, sound, color, form, in painting, drawing, photography, dance, music, writing, embroidery, etc. — some way to bring that inside stuff into this realm of touch and smell and contact and physical sensation. The correlation doesn’t need to be, won’t be, exact. Doesn’t matter. It’s a bridge to somewhere over the rainbow, where the sidewalk ends, where the path disappears into a pool of still water. Pick(le) your metaphor.
Believing, as the (transformed) saying goes, is seeing. We see it through, we manifest it, because we’ve seen it before, maybe via an inner sense that doesn’t always feel like sight but may come as some other way of knowing. Do we need to be told “what to look for and when” as the cartoon suggests? Only if we’re focused on proof rather than transformation. Only if we’re trying to see somebody else’s vision. Ours, however, is ours — it doesn’t require tricks. (True, it may sneak up on us, or we may be the ones doing the sneaking.) Others may well “believe” it when they see it in our lives, when they have something they can contact that reassures them we’re still grounded here. Even if — or especially when — we’re not, anymore. Or not like we were, exclusively. We’re not freaks (at least usually not obvious ones). But the life that flows through us when we complete the circuit and connect to both poles comes across to everyone. Each person is charged at least a little, whenever any one of us is. The democracy of spirit. The changes come, and with a measure of luck and grace and good weather, we survive this life again, and enough of our loved ones are still with us to carry on.
If it’s a difficult initiation — unwanted or unsought — we may resist the awareness. The divorce, the scary diagnosis, the death of a friend, the chronic pain. But even if it’s the events and timing of the outward initiation that seem to be the launch-pad, the dividing line between our old and new selves, almost always, in my experience, sign-posts and markers of the inner preparation and change have shown up beforehand. We just may not recognize them till later, if at all. Scant consolation when your life falls apart all around. And even less welcome are the well-meaning Others in your life who may let slip that they “saw that one coming a mile away.” (But could we listen, could we hear the warning? Nope. Absolutely not. Don’t want to, don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear it!) Sometimes deafness is protection, the only shield we have at the moment. Compassion for ourselves, for others in that moment, and after.
One of the reasons I maintain this blog is the opportunity it gives me to test and measure some part of my inner worlds against this outer one. After all, this is the world I live in with a physical body, and if I want to use here what I’ve experienced elsewhere and inwardly, it needs to be adapted to the dynamics of this world. This physical life is one pole of the circuit that is our existence. The other pole lies in our inner worlds, but that’s no reason either to discount it or to grant it a superiority over everything else that it doesn’t deserve. Who has explored “everything life has to offer”? I’ve been around for several decades, and I still feel like a rank beginner, like I’m only just starting to do more than scratch the surface. And yet at the same time as doors open, a strange-familiar welcome lies on the other side, like I’m returning to something I’ve always known but haven’t yet walked. Now (first time? second time?) I’m setting foot there.
In the first branch of the Mabinogion, Pwyll prince of Dyfed encounters Arawn, Lord of the Otherworld, and the exchanges that develop between the two realms profit both of them. It’s a circuit both literal and figurative, as most things are: accessible to the metaphorical part of our minds, but also to our inner senses, if not our physical ones. And sometimes the division falls away and no longer separates the worlds. In the Western Tradition, Samhain or Hallowe’en celebrates just such a thinning of the veil. The Otherworld enters this one, or we journey there in dream or vision, and we become walkers in both worlds. Sometimes this world can then go transparent, and we see both worlds simultaneously, that old double vision that dissolves time and distance and the game of mortality. Then the veil falls again, easy concourse between the worlds slips away, and we resume to our regularly scheduled lives. Except not quite. We’ve changed.
As the old U.S. Emergency Broadcast System (now the EAS) used to say, more or less, “Had this been an actual emergency, you would have received instructions about what to do next,” except that instructions are already hard-wired in our hearts. Listen without listening, and all we get is static. The station has nothing more to say to us. No instructions. It seems like no one’s at the controls. No directions. If we can’t easily access them any longer, out of neglect or fear or ignorance, sometimes there’s a gap between learning about the “emergency” and “receiving instructions ” — a gap of hours, months, years, lives even. Where to go, what to do, how to go on, all become unknowable, impossible, lost to us. And so the ferment works in us, till we’re driven to find out, to quest for wisdom, to cry for vision. And what we ask for, we receive — eventually — as the Great Triad records: Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and it will open to you. Eventually. Patience, old teacher, maybe the earliest and longest lesson of all. Another face of that strange love that sometimes seems (dare we admit it?) built into things, that will not ever let us go.
Go to Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
Updated 15 March 2013
/|\ /|\ /|\
Images: mystical dancer initiation; proof; b&w figures
A Druid Way 
