Getting Started-- Seek With Your Heart (part 2)

Once I made the decision to say "yes" to the Orishas, at least to open my mind to see what this whole other world was about, I started to read, and I started to search for someone who might guide me.  I got readings from time to time from various babalawos or santeros.  Always it was in the Afro-Cuban Santeria tradition, and I just naturally assumed that that would be the way that I would go.  I didn't really even know that there were other roads, initially.  Some of them also had Spiritist leanings, but again, I couldn't distinguish because I didn't know enough yet. I attended whatever activities I could, gatherings, feasts, bembes.  I even served at some initiations by doing the hard work of plucking feathers of various fowl that had been sacrificed so that they could then be prepared by the cook for the feast later.  Instinctively I felt that this path of service was a correct choice for me, and the fact that I was a city girl and that this was quite new and hard for me mattered not at all.  I found that there were many who would be happy to take me on as their "ahijada", or goddaughter; and I desperately wanted to start that journey; but every time I would get close to committing, something in my heart would tell me NO, that I had not found the right ile or house for me yet.

One thing I knew for sure that made me different from the majority:  I did not want to merely belong to a house or ile, piling on initiations and elekes like going around a game board, just following prescribed steps.-- I knew that I had real capabilities, and that these needed careful development and guidance that could only come with a true apprenticeship, the old fashioned kind that would take years and someone really knowledgeable and willing to teach me.  In those early days it was harder for me, of course, to discern who was knowledgeable and who was not; how could I when I knew so little myself?  But it became clear that many were invested in keeping their ahijados ignorant and therefore dependent.  They did not want to teach them much, or anything.  That way, whatever your needs, you could never know or do for yourself, but had to always go running to your Padrino or Madrina or the Babalawo, who could tell you whatever they liked, then tell you that you had a problem that only they could resolve, and then charge you whatever they liked for it.  I felt that some were sincere and were simply behaving in the manner in which they had been brought up, but I also encountered some serious hypocrisy, and I even remember one poor woman, very dear, who offered freely to help me all that she could (although it was more in a Spiritist capacity) but who had herself actually lost her home because of expenses charged her by godparents.  I just knew that that could not be right!

I was torn.   More and more, I felt the orishas calling to me.  I also suffered from simple human vanity.  I gazed longingly at the piles of elekes around the necks of others, and felt the barreness of my own neck.  And, too, I wanted to belong.  I wanted, or thought I wanted, what others had; and yet every time I came close to joining another house, my heart would always tell me "no" once again, no, not this house. I was sorely tempted, and dissappointed, but I felt compelled to heed the warnings of my own heart; and I know now, with absolute certainty, that that was the right thing to do, and one of my first steps into real initiation.  I was being tested, and taught:  and the lesson, as well as the test, was one of the primary qualities of iwa pele (roughly translated as "good character"):  that being suuru, or, PATIENCE.