INITIATIONS

Turning the Hardest "Before and After" Moments into Creative Fire

“…if your daily life seems too bleak, don’t blame it – blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its wealth.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I stood at the top of a stairwell, wondering if my rubbery 10-year-old legs would hold me as I walked down. The stairs seemed endless and dark. I had just had an encounter with an adult male that I did not understand. It was so overwhelming that my memory recorder went offline for a while.

I was sick, terrified, gripping the rail, navigating each step toward the bathroom at the foot of the stairs. Where I could lock the door. Where I could feel safe. Until my mother could come.

What kinds of initiations into spiritual and psychological depth have you experienced? Illness? The death of a loved one? Injury? Discrimination? Rejection? Assault? Abuse? Neglect? And—harder still—what initiations have you, knowingly or unknowingly, caused for others?

My childhood experience initiated a descent into anxiety, a rabbit hole of secret shame and bewilderment. I lost my exuberant, confident, outgoing self. I turned to books for solace and inspiration: The Diary of Anne Frank. The Agony and the Ecstasy, a biographical novel about Michelangelo. Clara, about Clara Barton, a backward child who went on to found the Red Cross. I could not read enough stories of people who found meaning and purpose despite shattering life experiences.

My latest book, Elegies to a Dark Goddess—releasing September 7, 2025, and now available on Amazon for pre-order, began as a writing assignment: to create my own version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, a searing, mystical meditation on life’s existential questions. In my Elegies Literary Salon on Sunday, September 7th, we will sit with these kinds of initiations together, tracing the threads between the pain we’ve endured and the creative fire it leaves in our hands.