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Ceremony
The whispers that you hear
are about hope, about our pasts and our futures, our connections
with ourselves and with our cultures. Here we celebrate the
Spirit within.
Ceremony is what we make of it. It can honor a specific time in
our life (leaving childhood, our first apartment, a project
brought to completion, a time of year) our ancesters or living
relatives - it is a time of honoring and giving thanks.
In using ceremony to honor daily events, we honor the spiritual
within us. Daily ritual/ceremony might include Blessing and
Thanking the rising and falling Sun, honoring the stages of the
moon or even the seasons of planting, harvest and fallow. It is
our connection with what is *real*. It stops the *busy* in our
lives and connects us with what *really* matters.
How do we place ceremony in our lives? First we need to decide
what or who we want to honor or give thanks for. Then we want to
decide where the ceremony will take place. My suggestion is to
hold it out of doors as much as possible - to connect with Mother
Earth and All Of Our Relations.
Decide what you personally want brought in to represent your joy
- it can be candles, flowers, pottery, photographs, shells,
crystals, music - whatever brings the message of the ceremony
home for you.
Decide what you want to say. You can write the ceremony yourself,
you can ask each person invited to the ceremony to add their
thoughts, you can use ceremony that has already been created (this
will be especially true if the ceremony is of a cultural or
religious nature).
Herbs, scented candles, flowers, good food and drink - all have a
place in ceremony. Let the joy of your ceremony celebrate the joy
of being you.