Having traveled through small villages in my homeland, strong memories still sharpen my memory today: a woodcutter! Yes! I grew up as a lumberjack.
After the trees were felled, I carried the heavy logs on my back and sold them, for amounts proportional to their diameters.
My thoughts traveled with them. Would they serve as pillars, furniture, or would they become fuel to cook food and benefit families as the fire consumed them?
I grew up and the experience led me to a new profession. Thus, I gave a new start to the youth phase of my life. Driven to fight for survival, I became a blacksmith by profession.
The idea of having a sword, the object that attracted me since my first years of life, became an even stronger desire, given the possibility of being able to forge it.
For me, in addition to its beauty, richness and straight lines, the sword was also a symbol of healing power. I fell in love. And how or when could I use it? As a king, a hero, a winner or even an everyday fighter for life, like me?
Fate, time and the path that I drew for myself made me delay the making of my, so original, so dreamed, sword, since I opted for married life, with small children to raise.
These were difficult and painful years.
I started to make knives and small objects to sell in the market. Many questions and answers passed through me. It was fascinating to see the fire transform the iron into the pieces that I most wanted. At the forge, they took shape.
A flash, like a vibrant sound, nudged my being from time to time. And the memories returned to my mind and I reviewed the process of forging my handcrafted pieces and the unfinished sword that, forged with hot iron, took on the desired shape with light knocks and an impact tool – a small hammer. I was delighted to see the metal heated to the point of red-orange shine as part of the forging process.
I became a professional blacksmith and started to create decorative objects, sculptures, cast iron gates, chandeliers, lamps, exotic headboards, tools, kitchen utensils. To manipulate them was to manipulate myself.
Why did this metal transformation appeal to me? Why did it cause me great joy to see that red-orange fire transform metal and give unusual shapes to objects that I never seemed to have seen?
I realized that my own life was the only possibility I had to make my dreams come true. The family became adults and I decided to restart my life. My life as a wanderer.
I matured with the stumbling blocks of life.
I became a lover of antiques. I started to appreciate exquisite pieces of nobler materials. Gold vases, crystal flower boxes, silver sundials, bronze hair curlers.
I was enchanted by this wisdom that infiltrated within me as life went on.
With the arrival of maturity, a new portal opened for me when I first visited a library of old, rare books.
The abundant and colorful spines brought great interest. It was like pausing the sight between one book and another.
I was in no hurry.
I started to admire them from the outside. They were big, heavy, and colorful!
I became more intimate and dove deeply in-between its pages.
– How many illuminations!
Bibles seemed particularly interesting for their superb volumes, abundant illustration and even expressions of suffering.
My journey had a new beginning. From experience, at this stage I understood that within me was an universal knowledge. Where did this impulse come from? This restlessness?
That was how I started my life as a “free wisdom” researcher.
Many editions have come to me. How many pearls! But one book stood out among all: Tabula Smaragdina or Emerald Tablet, a text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a key book that influenced Western alchemy. In it I found many fragments of all the wisdom that was engraved in me. The idea of transforming metals into gold, I believe, is directly linked to a change in my consciousness. I was born like stone, but little by little, cut with fire, I search for eternal life. Triangles, squares and retorts: this is my profile today.
Initiation is, therefore, by no means a simple learning process. It is, at the same time, an inner struggle, a struggle between the new man in gestation and formation in the radiant light of Gnosis, divine knowledge, and the old astral and mental cloak. It tries to prevent the vital center of gravity from being moved out of its control area.
Casanueva, Francisco. “Iniciação, Iluminação e Libertação” [Initiation, lighting, and liberation], Chapiter 1, Fundación Rosacruz, Spain, 2nd edition, 2016).
– Oh light, how did you manage to touch my soul?
