This week I had the privilege of supporting three young women, adults in their early 30s, each coming to terms with the death of a parent who died too early, too young - in their early 60s.

The most obvious point of connection between their experience and my own is the fact of my father's death in his early 60s. But I realized as one young woman's story became two and then three, that I'm now closer in age to the parents they're mourning than to the place of bereft child. In fact these women I serve with my listening are the age of the child I myself might have had but didn't.

Understanding the passage of time and one's place in the cycle of life is perhaps more confusing when one hasn't raised children.

And so I find myself in my sixth decade wanting to know more about what I am here to do. 

"Who is doing the food making while you've been eating this whole time? Our consumptive way of living is a trespass. Grief is the awakening. Grief is a sign of life stirring towards itself." ~ Stephen Jenkinson

In April I will travel to the remote reaches of the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, Canada, for the first of four residential sessions at the Orphan Wisdom School run by Stephen Jenkinson and Nathalie Roy. 

Best known for the documentary Griefwalker about his rejection of the contemporary "death trade" in which he worked as the director of a major palliative care program, Jenkinson poses radically provocative questions about how we're living our lives and the consequences that has for our deaths.

If you're interested, watch The Meaning of Death, a 5 minute clip, and another short outtake, linked below. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Last fall I wrote about the Sacred Stones created by Ash & Earth. Below, what's happened since...

When I first came across Ash & Earth remembrance stones, I knew immediately that I would commission Holly to create one with my father’s remains. What I didn’t know was how the process would affect me.

From the very start, the process felt magical. Holly Swan, the woman who would give shape to this form of remembrance for my father, shared my same name, the name chosen by my father. As I scooped a small portion of my dad’s ashes to transfer to her, I shed tears from a deep spring I thought had run dry. My body buzzed electric when I passed along the small packet to her later that day, entrusting his remains to an alchemical process that would take me somewhere I couldn’t yet imagine.

It was five days before the 12th anniversary of my father’s death. The number 12 has always bound me to my father, from the day of my birth on December 12th, to the day of my parent’s divorce and my dad’s relocation 6,000 miles away – which took place on my 12th birthday. I had intentionally marked the 10th anniversary of his death but I hadn’t considered the potency of the 12th. When I realized I was in the 12th year since his death, my work with Holly felt even more providential.

Holly kept me apprised throughout the process of the stones’ creation. I had the sense of something important taking place; that electrical buzz in my body of great anticipation. When I received the stones from Holly it was like looking into a bird’s nest to behold a clutch of newly laid eggs, each perfectly beautiful and full of life. 

I showed them to the children in my life, aged 6 and 10. They beheld the stones like sacred artifacts. Like visiting a cemetery, I now had a physical way to share my ancestry with them.

I selected one to keep as my companion, looping a leather cord through the hole at the stone’s center. When I’m dressing in the mornings I consider whether to bring my dad along for the day. Sometimes I sense that I want or need him with me. Other times I’m headed someplace I know he’d want to go.

I knew he would want to go to Bhutan. I wore the stone around my neck like a talisman of safety on the long flights that took me half-way around the world to the great Himalayan mountains. 

There, we were surrounded by remembrances of the dead. I expected the prayer flags, regal groups of 108 white flags stretching toward the blue sky like the long necks of the sacred white crane, on every hilltop and ridge line. I didn’t expect the clusters of miniature conical stupas sheltering in every nook and cranny. They were formed from the ashes of the deceased, just like my stone. I felt a nameless connection not just to my father, but to the ancestors and descendants of this place and all places – to all who were honored, all who mourned and remembered.

I like to think I am making use of my father’s death. He died too young, barely 65 years old. The 18 months of his illness were the best of our relationship. Marked by terrible suffering, certainly, but awash in unconditional love. Now I wander voluntarily in the land of mortality and death, as a funeral celebrant, as companion to a friend with terminal cancer, as an organizer of the taboo-breaking conversational forum, Death Café. I can’t yet fully articulate what I took from my father’s death. But when I hold his stone I feel more deeply connected: to him, to the great mysteries, to all that is timeless and sacred and imbued with holy love. 

You can reach Holly Swan through Ash & Earth.

For more on my journey with my father: How I found Forgiveness, the surprising end to his memorial ceremony,  marking the 10-year anniversary of his death, and the belated eulogy I wrote for him.

What's the difference between ritual and routine? That's one of the questions we pondered together in the class on Creative Rituals for a Changing World that I led last fall at the First Unitarian Church.

After exploring our own responses (intention & attention; connection: with self, source, others; vulnerability, leap of faith; structure, practice) we consulted a few others. 

"Rituals are cairns marking the path behind us and ahead of us. Without them we lose our way." ~ Robert Fulghum

Best known for his words about Kindergarten, immortalized on bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets everywhere, Robert Fulghum published a wonderful book nearly 20 years ago titled From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives. Amidst his wonderfully relaxed stories are these nuggets:  

Ritual gives structure and meaning to daily life: Those patterns that we ourselves repeat again and again because they bring structure and meaning to our individual and collective lives. Those things we do for the first time that, in fact, have been done by the human race again and again forever. Behavior that is regularly repeated because it serves a profound purpose. 

Rituals are repeated patterns of meaningful acts. If you are mindful of your actions you will see the ritual patterns. If you see the patterns, you may understand them. If you understand them, you may enrich them. In this way, the habits of a lifetime become sacred.

"Ritual is the journey; the sacred is the destination." ~ Eileen London & Belinda Recio 

In their book Sacred Rituals: Connecting with Spirit, London and Recio describe the role of ritual in embodying our intentions: "By acting out our intentions, we feel them more completely - in body, mind and soul." The Japanese tea ceremony master, they say, "enacts the greatness of little things, in ways that demand complete presence and participation." Tibetan sand paintings, swept away upon completionn "embody an intention to accept impermanence." London and Ricio echo Fulgham when they note, "Ritual binds us to the whole of creation, and it is in this bond that we can encounter the sacred."

I would love to hear about the rituals you employ. Here's a wonderful post by Holly Wren Spaulding about how legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp uses ritual at the beginning of the creative process, "when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way."

Happy Chinese New Year, everybody! 

Every moment contains within it an ending and new beginning - it's no wonder humankind has come up with such a delightful array of ways to mark our cycles. 

Some consider the fall, with its eternal imprint of "back to school," their spiritual new year. For others, January 1 implies a fresh start and the resolve of renewed commitments. Many treat their birthday as that pivot point marking the completion of another trip around the sun. And for the billions of people on the planet who relate to the Chinese lunar calendar, yesterday kicked off a two-week long welcome to the Year of the Yang Wood Horse.

Chinese traditions hold a special place in my chosen family. The father of one of my best friends emigrated from China as a boy. Over the years I enjoyed many a large banquet over which he presided. He seemed to have no greater happiness in life than to see his extended family gathered at large round tables with lazy susan centerpieces delivering dish after heaping dish of delicacies to each guest's waiting soup spoon and chopsticks.

The best of all these feasts were the ones that welcomed his grandchildren into the world. Instead of a baby shower or christening, my friend opted to create a Red Egg & Ginger party to celebrate the births of her daughter and son (my godchildren). We followed tradition, waiting one month after each birth. (In times of high infant mortality, surviving to the one-month mark was cause for celebration; these days, it provides a sensible recuperative interval before entertaining.) Gong Gong (grandpa) flew in to oversee the ordering of the feast and other duties of a proud patriarch. Besides the food and toasts and the red-dyed eggs, symbolizing happiness and the renewal of life, these parties marked the bestowal of each child's Chinese name.

My godchildren's Gong Gong is now in the Spirit World, but he remains at the center of the household's comings and goings, memorialized on the ancestor's shrine in the family dining room. There, alongside a bottle of whiskey, sticks of incense, and red paper envelopes from auspicious occasions, the children place drawings and miniature bees wax sculptures that connect them to their Chinese ancestry.

Bonus Features!
Read what my favorite Western astrologer, Emily Trinkhaus, has to say about the transition from Snake to Horse. Here's an article Emily recommends on the specific meaning of the Yang Wood Horse. 

And below, my niece Josie embraces the coming of the Year of the Horse with her first riding lesson.