purging ...

i think i got what she meant by purging ... it's only when we've experienced all the pain and take it out of our system that we can change ... that we are somehow cleansed by the experience and going through some kind of "refiner's fire".

i was talking to a friend today and we got on the topic of pain ... because we were talking about Hope for the Flowers and relating the parts of the book that we liked. she said that it was when pain became necessary for change.

i wrote a piece on pain in my blog before about pain being a catalyst of change ...

http://thewandererstales.blogspot.com/2006/12/pain-catalyst-of-change.html