Initiation

Endings fascinate me. When did death come? Where did the boy die and the man rise? When did I become initiated?

Ostensibly, it happened on my eighteenth birthday when I legally became a man, and could vote, and have sex, and die for our country. I'd planned an initiation ceremony for that day, but life initiated me in other ways.

Instead of my ritual, I found myself vividly hallucinating that I was a cement block on the run from the CIA. That birthday found me giving my first successful speech, and then falling sick for three days and three nights, to awaken with new life, changed forever.

As transitions go, it was a memorable one, but I'm not convinced that was the moment.

It was smaller - almost insignificant.

________________________________________________________________

I'm sitting on the bus with Nathan, and he's telling me about this game called “Magic the Gathering”.

“I'll give you one of my decks,” he says, “are you a light mage or a dark one?”

In truth, I've dabbled in both. I remember letting the demon take over my body, hands scrabbling against the edges of the square like glass, until it finally gave me back control.

I remember learning the Mudra for sucking energy from things. Showing it to Mama who said she’d felt teeth at her throat before I’d told her what it did - the horror of it.

I remember getting caught stealing knives, toys, jewelry - the shame and humiliation of it. Mama yelling at me to think about the consequences of my actions. How the stealing didn't stop.

I remember my apprenticeship to death. Gifted with a language all of my own, drawing from an empty void that spans eternity and trying to fill it with tiny words to command the Universe and expect it to obey.

Are you a light mage or a dark?

I remember the small blessing that my family does - not demanding but sanctifying. The little edges of light that quietly walk their way into our lives.

I remember sitting and crying upstairs as my Sensei talked to the rest of the Dojo about expelling me. The way the other students wouldn’t meet my eyes. Still capable of tears.

I remember the healing mudra, white light echoing into my body making everything better. It was powerful without hurting. It was magic with a subtler price.

I remember my stairway. The one I helped clear poison hemlock from, the one that's a pathway now. How my efforts echoed out creating an easier pathway for thousands of unsuspecting people.

Are you a light mage or a dark?

I remember the time I drew from both sides at once and my vision shifted--how light and dark made love to each other, until I was reverberating with tension and love.

Both? Aren't I both? Aren't I a strange grey scale, a Rorschach test, an angel with different wing colors, a note held thrumming between them?

But he just wanted to know which deck to give me. He had two. One black. One white. I had to choose.

“Light,” I said, “I'm a Light Mage.”

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a deck and handed it to me. “Welcome to Magic,” he said, but what he really meant was -welcome to adulthood. ________________________________________________________________

It was only later that I learned how to play. Only later, that I learned what my choice had brought me, that light also demands a price for its magic, that my initiation didn't mean I was a man fully formed - it just meant that I’d passed a fork in the road.

I could have sat there shying from a decision, eternally a boy. I could have taken the other path, a different kind of man, but still a man for having made the choice.

After that choice manhood came in small moments: first girlfriend, loss of virginity, fasting in the mountains, going off to college.

I found it again when I made the conscious decision to call my friends women instead of girls. I found it in my newly grown beard, and in my capacity to fix things rather than wait for them to be fixed.

Later, I would find it as I had to accept that I couldn't keep my best friend alive, and consciously sent her off to take her own life. Thankfully, she survived her encounter, but that autumn was an initiation.

Later, I would learn what I look like broken at the bottom of a well. Unable to help anyone but myself. There too I learned the edges of my commitment to Light.

The discoveries go on, but when I look back and wonder when I became a man it's in that one moment.

Are you a light mage or a dark?

The story doesn't end when Adam leaves the garden with the knowledge of good and evil. It begins.