Initiation

I'm a little late getting this up today, which may seem odd since I have today off, but when I up until now, most of my posts were written before their post-date. “F” could have been for Foresight, but ya'll seemed to enjoy the baby pictures, with a record-breaking 11 comments – thank you all so much!

“I” gives me an excuse to write about something I had a hard time fitting into another context; Initiation. I have a keen interest in the Mystery School traditions, though I belong to none. All of these are marked by degrees of initiation, whereby a candidate studies up to a point, then moves on to the next 'level.' The best illustration has long-outgrown it's mystery; martial arts. As many of you know, a student begins with a white belt, and learns a first how to stand. If someone doesn't know how to be stable, and not easily knocked-down, nothing else matters. You can be precise enough to kick the screws out of someone's glasses, but if you're easily shoved onto your glutinous maximus, you've missed the point. Then you learn your punches & blocks, and graduate to more complex moves. Incidentally, did you know that historically, martial artists weren't awarded colored belts? They just kept the same belt throughout their careers, so an experienced warrior would have a very worn & stained belt. The more seasoned the Master, the blacker the belt. There, you've learned your New Thing for the day, and now you can coast. Your welcome.

This is how I view children. First, Calli had to be Initiated from the womb, and had to promptly learn to breath air. Slightly less urgent was the need to be initiated to bottle feeding, no more free rides through the umbilical cord! The journey is to independence, and their first day on earth, people get rapidly thrust in that direction!

And so it goes to solid foods, walking to cycling to driving (opening up a much larger world to them, as initiation is meant to!), from mom, to Mom & Dad, then Grandma's & Grandpa's, and Aunts & Uncles, then family friends and their children. By degrees, the world opens up to them, and if we, as parents, do our jobs right, she'll be as equipped as possible to face each new level of her time here. So easy to still be idealistic when she' barely 7 months old ;p

As parents, we've been gradually broken-in as well – for weeks, all she did was sleep, eat & poop, but initiations are often trials; we had to get through a lot of sleepless nights to keep our little miracle alive! And initially, she'll pretty much stay where we put her. Now we have to worry about her rolling off the change-table. Soon, we'll have to look from room to room to see where she's wandered off to. Then it'll seem like mere months before she's broken curfew, and we need to comb the streets and call her friend's parents to find her. eep. I think I'll go and make some silly sounds at her, and appreciate that she's still looking at my like I'm the only man in Creation.