Lustration

I don't know why this word stuck in my head all day, but it did.  I heard it this morning on NPR in a story about Ukraine.  The person interviewed defined lustration this way, "It is bringing something that was hidden or in the dark, in the shadows out into the open." I loved the sound of that.  When I looked it up on Merriam Webster, it had a slightly different ring to it saying that lustration was the act of "ceremonially purifying".  While both make me think of metamorphosis, I like the first definition that does not allude to something sinister or something that has been fouled (in fact the word is most often used to describe regime change in national government).

I feel encouraged by the notion of bringing something into the light.  It seems all I can think about these days is the approaching end to high school for the boys and the mandate to decide what's next, for both of them.  I keep picturing it as a birth canal, of sorts.  All I have been able to focus on is the inherent pain in the struggle to move through the canal.  But I choose now to see the process as moving into the light.  It's almost too much to completely hang my hat on, but what if, just what if what comes next is better?

I have allowed myself small periods of hope over the years, usually in relation to a new treatment for seizures: Tibetan healer, magic fingers, magic diet, magic drug.  But lustration is different than hope.  It is an act, a process, not an emotion.  It may require work and dedication but at the end of the process something new is born into the light.  Yep.  I really like that.