On walking through fire

[featherynscale]

Since rougewench commented about it:

I have walked through fire. This story is not nearly as impressive as the previous statement makes it sound, but I have, and it's a good story.

At a gathering several years ago, the ending ritual had to do with claiming personal sovereignty and sort of crowning yourself sovereign of yourself. Everyone had made crowns, shiny things built of wire and covered in foil stars. In the ritual, after much drumming and dancing, we were led single file down to a place by the lake which is a fire circle when the boy scouts use this camp and is a ritual site when we use it. In the dirt around the fire pit, they had traced out a giant Tree of Life in cornmeal, with all the spheres marked out with candle luminaria. But at the heart, at Tiphareth, there was no candle - instead there was a fire, burning at the heart of the tree. Each person began in Malkuth and walked the Tree up to Kether, where they could claim their crown, affirm their sovereignty. One by one, we walked the tree, and people began to move through Tiphareth, either by walking straight up the Middle Pillar or by taking the lightning path - they moved through the fire as if it were not there, or paused in the center of the fire, some speaking, some in silence. I was near the end of the line, and when my turn came, I tried to convince myself to choose either mercy or severity to walk, but that just didn't seem to be an option at the time, so I took the lightning path as well. When I got to Tiphareth, I hesitated, but I knew that people had been through the fire already and there had been no casualties, so I stepped in, through the flames. At this point, I discovered that there was a roofing tile, or some sort of heat-resistant tile in the center of the fire, that I could stand on, ringed by flames. I took a breath, relieved, and kept walking. The set-up was perfect - I couldn't see that there was a "safe space" in the fire until I had already chosen to move through it.
Now it periodically amuses me to be able to say "I'm not frightened of this - I've walked through fire." In fact, I had to be able to say this in order to complete the ritual - having decided to go through Tiphareth meant that I also had to move through Da'ath, which was fairly terrifying for another reason altogether - but by that time, I'd already been through fire, and was not going to be balked by the abyss.

There is a moral to this story: choose one or more:
a) If you want to do a thing enough, the universe will frequently arrange itself so that you can; or
b) There's a trick to everything, the thing you have to do is find the trick - after that, it's easy.

Comments

[rougewench.livejournal.com]

Very cool story.


D.