The Ceremony of our Lives

In February, I had the tremendously rich experience of teaching Apis Sophia Exstasis in my home state, after 3 years of teaching the same body of work in France.  Under a constant deluge of wet weather, a group of us gathered in the Mendocino oak savannah to experience what I now regard as six days of ceremony.  It was utter magic.

Shortly after, I taught my first online dream incubation course, centered around an all night dream healing ceremony.  Inspired by the dream healing temples of Ancient Greece, the program focused on ritual preparation, working with spirit guides, and eventually a night of liminal dreaming and vision seeking to support individual healing and transformation.

Having such profound ceremonies two months in a row, I started to think about how essential ritual and ceremony are to our lives.  When I look back on some of the ceremonies of my life, there is often a strong feeling of before and after.  Meaning, the ceremony became a marker point for some form of change, small or massive, in my life.  Usually that change began internally, but often there were real life ripple affects that I could have never dreamed of or predicted.

Ceremony changes us.  It weaves us into the creative fabric of the living earth.  It gives us a change to be of service, and to also surrender to the magic of the unknown.  I'm tired of the word manifestation.  I want rites of passage.  I want all night vigils.  I want dancing around the fire, and gazing into the wombic void.

Ceremony changes us.  It weaves us into the creative fabric of the living earth.  It gives us a change to be of service, and to also surrender to the magic of the unknown.  I'm tired of the word manifestation.  I want rites of passage.  I want all night vigils.  I want dancing around the fire, and gazing into the wombic void.

To get to those larger moments of ceremonial change, we also need moments of dare I say, mundane ritual.  Why mundane?  Because when we make ritual part of our every day life, it become the magic woven into the mundane.  When we leave butter out for the wee folk, or cut our hair on the new moon.  When we light a candle at breakfast, or leave a small plate for the ancestors, we are making the ritual magic ordinary.  

Yes, I love a grand, powerful, life altering ceremony, but it's in the daily ritual, or folkcraft, that we actually start to feel the magic of the more-than-human world, the magic of the mystery, permeate our being.

So I ask you, what are the small rituals you can create to keep to tied to the magic?  And when you don't have access to a week long retreat steeped in wombic oracular magic, what are the small ceremonies you can create for yourself?  Where can you set time aside to honor something, to prepare, to welcome, to end, to transform, to acknowledge, to heal.

As we come to the seasonal shift of the equinox, what small ceremony can you weave into your life?  Is it perhaps a ceremony to welcome the bee swarms back to the land?  Or a lunar eclipse ceremony to let go of what might still weigh on you from your winter's work?  Or perhaps a ceremony to bring life and abundance to the lands that grow your local produce?

Whatever it is, know that in the act of ceremony and ritual, you are not alone.  You are being witnessed by a myriad of beings who see the kindred spirit you are, and know you as part of the web of life.

Why I don't like the phrase "find your purpose."

“Find your purpose” is a phrase I’ve never been too fond of.

It’s used to market to people’s pain points.  I would know.  I spent most of my early adulthood feeling like a an unmoored misfit, trying to make it in a music career, but feeling like (gasp) music wasn’t quite enough.  Don’t get me wrong, I breathe music.  I adored it as still do.  But, I didn’t know how to reconcile my love of music and performing, with the feelings of “what am I supposed to do with my life?”

Bees changed that of course, but that’s another story.  Now, almost a decade into this bee-centric career, I get asked a lot, why bees.

Let me tell you: bees are not my purpose.  Bees are the vehicle that powers my soul’s drive.

I’ve worked with marketing teams before, and they always ask me to “find your ideal client’s pain point.”  They want to know the “results” working with me will drive.  They get really excited if they can throw in the mouth-watering hook “find your purpose.”

But what if looking for purpose isn’t the point?  There are many direction I could have gone with my life.  It could have been music.  Or folklore.  Or therapy.  Or travel agent.  It needed up being bees, for now.  But it’s not just bees is it?  It’s bees, folklore, travel, dreams, women’s wisdom, shamanism, animism, eco-literacy, mythology, and spiritual ecology.

What if, it’s not so much a question of finding your purpose, but rather, asking what drive you.  What propels you forward in this one wild life?

It a way it’s the same question, but rather than finding a catch phrase or a job, you’re asking yourself what moves you to act, create, live.

For me, it’s a love of the animate earth.  Beyond that, it’s a drive to help people fall in love with the Earth.  You could fall in love through gardening, hiking, clouds, rocks, bats, phosphorescent seas.  You name it.  It was bees for me, but the bees are the vehicle, not the purpose.

What drives me is a belief.  The belief that if we fall in love with the earth (any aspect of it), we are more likely to develop a relationship with it.  And in developing a relationship with it, we learn to listen to it.  In learning to hear the non-human world, to love it, to relate to it, we naturally want to support it.  Whether that support looks like climate action or helping kids identify weird cool bugs, it doesn’t matter.  What matters, is that you have more love in your life, and that love is reciprocal.   

I believe that the only way we turn the tide on this massive ship of the Anthropocene is through falling in love to the point of relating, and from that point, finding different ways of being with the earth.

What about you?  What drives you?  What calls your soul onward?  Forget a catchy, well-defined purpose.  What does your soul ache for?