Dear breath, dear purple, dear place or path, 

When we all held the orange ribbon together there was a song in our hands. 

Someone said : to tie a knot in a piece of ribbon that is not yours alone, 

is to say your name without opening your mouth. 

The pomegranates bled slowly and left a purple mark sweet and soft. 

The flowers held their breath until the ice melted.

Earlier this month Maliea Croy and I offered the Celestial Well. This one night ceremony honored the astrology of 2023 and the ways in which it touched and influenced the lives of those of us who gathered. Stories were shared in a circle but the rituals were mostly done in silence, built with space for the specificity of the people around the table. 

Maggie and I talked after about the gift of a ceremony for a non traditional occasion. The liberation that can be touched and tasted when we make room to honor all the life that is lived between and beyond traditional occasions.  

My thirties has been a decade with a fair amount of marriage and babying. Many people around me have chosen partners or to have children and with those choices come celebration and the comfort of tradition to usher them along and across these thresholds. And yet so many other choices are being made…

The choice not to have children. The choice to walk away from a career or toward one. The choice to be polyamorous. The choice to dedicate your life to a specific place or path. The choice to stay sober after being sober for 1 month or 10 years. The choice to care for your dying parent or another person in need. 

These are occasions for honoring. For beauty. For community. For ceremony. In honoring that which exists beyond tradition we honor the parts of us that exist beyond the traditional roles we so often are handed. 

So often the most profound ceremonies are the ones that allow a person to be seen in a way that they don’t feel they have been witnessed by others or the world. 

May ceremonies offer us the opportunity to be witnessed for who we are, the choices we are making within and outside of recognizable traditions.