Training does not begin with a ritual.
No circle scratched into the dirt. No symbols carved into stone. No spoken vows that pretend certainty exists where it doesn’t. I have learned the hard way that rituals are often just control dressed up as reverence.
We meet the thin place the way you meet a difficult truth. Quietly. Awake. Without pretending you’re in charge.
The morning is cool and ordinary, which feels deliberate somehow, like the world itself is refusing to dramatize what we’re about to do. I wake before dawn, the cabin still and dim, the air carrying that faint pre-sunrise chill that seeps into your bones if you let it. I shower quickly, not because I need to but because the heat steadies me. I brush my teeth at the sink, spit, rinse, stare at my reflection a second longer tha
