The Winding Stair
Not long after I was made an Entered Apprentice, life did what life does and moved the ground out from under me. I relocated to Alamosa — new town, new job, new friends, new everything — and with it came a question I hadn’t planned on facing so soon. What happens to your philosophical journey when the lodge that started it is suddenly hours away and you can no longer commute for your degree work?
**A New Lodge, and Friends I Didn’t Expect
I found a new lodge in Alamosa. I reached out to the Secretary on Facebook Messenger (Masons are by and large a bit older, remember) and I walked in the way most men probably do in that situation — a little unsure, a stranger carrying a half-finished journey that belonged, technically, to a different set of men. I didn’t expect much beyond a place to continue my degree work.
What I found instead were men who would become some of the dearest friends I have to this day. That still catches me off guard when I say it out loud. I hadn’t moved to Alamosa looking for friendship — I’d moved there for work, half-bracing for the isolation that comes with starting over in a place where you know no one and in a mountain town where the community is alright tightly-knit.
Instead, I found a lodge full of men who took me in as if the miles between my old lodge and my new one meant nothing at all. In a very real sense…they didn’t. That’s part of what the fraternity is built to do.
**Passing to the Degree of a Fellowcraft
It was with those men that I was passed to the degree of Fellowcraft. If the first degree was about entering the doorway— about darkness giving way to light, about a man being stripped down to something more honest before being rebuilt— the second degree is about ascent. About what a man does once he’s standing in the light he was already given.
**The Winding Stair
Of everything in that degree, nothing has stayed with me quite like the winding staircase.
It’s presented as a climb — irregular, turning, not a straight or predictable ascent — and I don’t think that’s an accident. A straight staircase would have made an easy metaphor. You work hard…you go up…you arrive. But a winding stair doesn’t let you see where you’re going until you’re already several steps into it. You commit to the climb before you fully understand its shape.
That felt uncomfortably familiar. It’s more or less how I’d describe most of the meaningful decisions I’ve made in my life, that move to Alamosa included.
The stair is tied, too, to ideas of knowledge and learning — the notion that a man ascends not by luck or standing still, but by deliberately seeking out education, broadening what he knows and how he thinks, one rising step at a time. I found that framing quietly powerful. It reframed my own move, a disruption I’d mostly experienced as a whirlwind, as a landing on the stair rather than a detour off of it. New town, new lodge, new brothers, not a break in the climb, but a turn in it.
**What I Took From It
I went into the Fellowcraft degree expecting to learn something about architecture, symbolism, and the usual trappings. I came out instead with a better way of thinking about upheaval. Life doesn’t move in straight lines, and neither, apparently, does a Mason’s ascent toward light.
The winding stair doesn’t promise you’ll be able to see the top from where you’re standing. It just promises that if you keep climbing, one turn leads to the next and, eventually, you may arrive at the Middle Chamber.
That’s been true of Alamosa. It’s been true of the friends I didn’t expect to find there.
And I suspect it’ll keep being true for as long as I keep climbing.
