Photo by Rajan Rathnavalu: “These are offering bowls, a practice from the Buddhist tradition that I’ve studied under.”
Green Exodus meets Season of Creation
Seven of us met on Monday, June 14, as part of a planning circle for the Season of Creation (Sept. 1 – Oct. 11). There were introductions and “ecotroductions,” a new word for me meaning an introduction where you reference your embeddedness in the land and in your community. It became clear in our conversation that we wanted to begin our journey together with a ceremony/ritual/ liturgy. This blog offers some thoughts about why that is important.
If you would like to be part of the Planning Circle, please contact Sarah at arthurssarah2020@gmail.com.
Why start with ceremony?
Because ceremony is a way of saying “yes” to an invitation from the Universe.
Ceremony is a way of signalling that an endeavour is not powered exclusively by human will and human design.
We are nesting our actions and reactions within the space and love and spirit of Earth and Heaven.
Ceremony is a commitment to openness to what is more than us, other than us: openness beyond what we know. It is a commitment, also, to what is surprisingly emerging within us.
Ceremony is an expression of our desire to be in sync with the life force within this miracle we know as our pinprick lives in this pinprick moment of the Cosmos.
It is a letting go of agendas, prescriptions and plans.
It is holding what emerges with loose gentle hands, like holding the reins of a horse – not tight, but feeling what the horse knows through what happens in the strips of leather between your fingers or the energy of the body beneath you.
It is a commitment to listening, to paying attention to now, to not being so filled with plans that all we can see is whether reality is colouring within the lines we have drawn.
Ceremony is an act of surrender, letting go, stepping away from the centre.
It is saying, “Yes.”
It is saying we will be as open and as present and as agreeable as we can be to what is emerging in this moment.
We will join it and not resist it.
Ceremony is a commitment to community, because ceremony happens powerfully in the midst of two or more.
There is in ceremony,
as it happens in community:
a conjunction of spaces,
a shared emptiness,
a shared Kenosis
and then a shared filling and joy.
Ceremony is saying:
we cannot know alone,
we cannot act alone,
we cannot love alone.
Ceremony is saying: we are doing this together.
We have an unlegislated, freely given commitment to each other, a conscious coming together.
We will honour this coming together and allow it to have its own life, its own fruit.
And when the time comes, we will welcome that fruit with thanksgiving.