INITIATION

INITIATION 

 This virus is a terrifying teacher that comes dressed in witch-like crown

Colorful and crazy, other-worldly sage, a name of wild renown.

She stalks around today’s classroom with an intensity mistaken for rage.

She is that instructor who offers complex questions, overwhelming expectations, 

aggravating, and inconceivable boundaries on the very first day of school.

And she’s also the Muse you can never run from,

because there’s a curious mystery to her fierce rule.

 

If you were fortunate to meet her in adolescence, 

you will recall how addled your brain became,

to be pressed down and shaken in her school of love and pain.

Consistent as clockwork, that indomitable receptacle of sass, 

If you fell asleep or resisted, she failed your sorry ass.

You hated her with passion like all teen-agers do,

you shoved back at every opportunity,

grandstanding star of your self-sufficient show,

tapping every cell of your cocky self-righteousness.

Like soaking rain her daily wisdom, her faithful assuredness,

it took time but you learned eventually, to resist her less and less. 

 

Today it is clear our humanity whirls around in still adolescent ways, 

confused and struggling students in our locked-down global class.

Our perceived freedoms lost, incensed and pressed beyond reason, 

Fearing daily as we watch bodies perish in this nightmarish season.

But let’s recall when that formative period ended and graduation came,

how we moved on with hidden treasure and with surprising aim. 

Beings-more-connected. 

Souls more in tune.

 

Curious too - is she not the teacher you remember - that gifted dowager from hell?

The one who opened intuitive portals, mentoring living memory in every authentic, receptive cell.

Remember how we called on her years later – as reference, a connection with the past. 

Remember how when we shared our memories she laughed about her terrifying class.

“Yes, you surely needed to wake-up,” she offered tenderly through aging tears.

“You were children that needed a grown-up, to help you yearn for a destiny still unclear.

My class, an experiential laboratory, a heated petri-dish for manifesting hidden fears.

Yes, I offered you a soulful initiation, if you could receive it honestly.

It is almost impossible to be a captive in a fiery-furnace place, 

but today can you see the barren school hallway of Earth’s future 

still wide open, to blow will and wild desire into a true and steady pace.”

 

“Consider yourself now a giver of that hard-earned wisdom,” she still whispers in my ear.

Circle back and you might become the teacher in the shifting winds of this pestilent year.”

 

Carol Kortsch

2020

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Carol Kortsch