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.

Loving the Land As It Is

California has always been hot and dry, but not this dry. There have always been fires, but not this many, not this big.

When I look at the land I feel parched. I feel an aversion to this field where my bees reside. I don’t want to be in it. There are too many stickers and burrs. I love this field in the winter and spring when it turns soft and green. In my mind, there’s a voice that thinks the soft green field is “right”, and the dry parched field is “wrong”.

Intellectually, I am aware that nothing in nature can be be broken down to such binary statements, but there is also an animal body in me, sniffing the air, and feeling the cracked earth beneath my shoes.
“Move away from it”, says the animal. Find shelter, water, shade. “You don’t know how to feel safe here.”

Psychology tells us to love the wounded parts of ourselves. Can we do the same with this earth? What does it feel like to extend love toward the brittle, dry field? How do we do this authentically, without falling into the trappings of “love and light” spiritual bypass. Can you love the rattlesnake while listening to its warning?

I am in love with this green earth, but often when imagining my love for nature I picture rich valleys, vernal springs, shaded woodlands. I don’t live near any of those environments. I live in dry dry dry California. How do we let ourselves love exactly where we are? It’s almost as hard as learning to love exactly WHO you are, scars and all.

What if, even knowing the imbalance this dry field represents, I gave it an offering of my love. Not a prayer to be different or verdant or “fixed”. To love it for everything it is in this time of profound environmental turbulence.

This is where to work is. Not just forest bathing trips, and meditations by a crystal spring, but a raw, uncomfortable commitment to place. Like a long marriage, with its pitfalls and its grace, can we choose again and again to love the land, even in our animal grief for what it’s become?