When Packy the elephant was delivered at the Oregon Zoo in 1962, he made news around the world: the first elephant born in the Western Hemisphere in 44 years! After living to be the oldest Asian male elephant in North America, his death was mourned deeply.

I had the honor of writing and officiating a memorial service for Packy, attended on a rain-soaked Saturday morning by 500 and viewed, via live-stream and since, by more than 73,000. (Scroll down for a video link and the printed memorial program.)

While Packy's pachyderm family filled the neighboring yard, Packy was honored with a Rose Ceremony led by the Royal Rosarians to Beethoven funeral music performed by the trombone section of the Oregon Symphony. Longtime TV news personality Tracy Barry and the Zoo's elephant curator Bob Lee - Packy's lead caregiver for 17 years - brought tears to many cheeks as they eulogized their old friend. Thomas Lauderdale, of the internationally acclaimed ensemble Pink Martini, performed an original new composition for Packy and led a rousing musical finalé of the folk classic Green, Green. 

After everyone joined voices in a customized Litany of Remembrance (see program, below), I closed with the poem We Give Thanks for the Animals, shared with me by Seattle Celebrant Danna Schmidt. The Rosarians formed one final honor guard for Packy, then participants of all ages had a piece of cake in his memory (Packy loved his cake!) and told their own stories.

As The Oregonian reported: "even in death, Packy continued teaching lessons." One dad who brought his two young daughters "saw it as a gentle way to introduce his young ones to the idea of mortality. 'It was a rare opportunity to introduce them to the concept of death in this kind of setting,' he said. 'It was a very tasteful ceremony.'"

Excerpts from my memorial remarks:

We’re joined today in our tears and our tributes by tens of thousands around the region and across the world who have been sharing their favorite Packy stories on-line. 
 
Everyone has a story about Packy. The older among us remember his birth, like Joyce Ritter who was in the 5th grade and called the first elephant born in the Western Hemisphere in 44 years, “the biggest news ever”. She says, “When you were a kid growing up in Eastern Oregon, you dreamed about the day you could go to Portland to visit Packy.”
 
For nearly 55 years Packy inspired millions of children and adults to learn about elephant and animal conservation – a critical mission, with as few as 40,000 Asian elephants remaining in their rapidly vanishing native range. And it’s not just we, his adoring public, who learned from Packy. Conservation scientists attribute much of what we now know about elephant care to Packy. The list of discoveries is as long as his trunk, including breakthroughs that are helping to reduce human-elephant conflict in Asia.
 
With songs, books, Rose Parade floats, and even a beer named after him, Packy has been synonymous with Portland for more than half a century. And so it was only fitting that the Royal Rosarians, the official greeters and ambassadors of goodwill for the City of Portland, claimed Packy as one of their own, knighting him on his 50th birthday as Sir Knight Packy.

The English poet John Donne called the elephant, “Nature's great masterpiece… the only harmless great thing.” As we begin our memorial program, let’s imagine ourselves watching Packy at play, release ourselves from the concerns of the world outside Elephant Lands, and focus our gratitude on the well-lived life of this beloved pachyderm.

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This is the fourth ceremony I've been privileged to create with the caring stewards at the Oregon Zoo. See also Elephants Never Forget (the dedication of their new habitat), Honoring Cultural Survival (the rededication of two historic totem poles), and A Place of Honor (the reinterment of remains of residents of the old county poor farm).

Endings don't seem to be waiting for December 31st this year. After a 12-month cycle that saw the deaths of three in my inner circle, Amber and I traveled to Tucson this month to close a 13-year chapter in our lives.

It actually started back in 1999 when, on the uncertain brink of Y2K, we decided to sublet our houses and travel the country in a 1973 motor home we named Betty. Our originally-planned six months turned out to be not long enough. With summer gigs in Michigan and long-distance contract work, we managed to live in Betty for 18 months, until my father's brain cancer diagnosis called us back to the Pacific Northwest.

We spent the winter of that magical sojourn on some women's land just west of Tucson's Saguaro National Park. The Sonoran Desert was endlessly fascinating to us, with its idiosyncratically animated cactus shapes and all manner of bird and animal life: quail, coyote, rabbit, dove, owl, lizard, javelina.

After my Dad died and we resumed "life as normal" back in Portland, the desert continued to call our names. We returned on vacation and noticed many houses featured casitas out back. We contacted a realtor and not too much later, we'd sold Amber's condo in Portland and bought a three-bedroom house in Tucson with a separately-fenced, one-bedroom off the alley that became our beloved retreat for the next 13 years.

Not exactly a "vacation home" - no pool, no view. But the sky was nearly always blue. The plant and bird and animal life, abundant. The rental income from the main house pretty much paid for itself. Every time we visited, we enjoyed old favorite places. Every time we visited we discovered something new. ​We joined, most years, with over 100,000 others in the remarkable All Souls Procession, first memorializing my father with a personal altar, later processing in Marcy's nightgowns five months after her death.

But in this time in which we all must learn the ending of things, it was time to let go of the responsibility of owning property 1,500 miles away. We sold the place easily and booked a flight to go down to clear out our humble but cherished casita.  

​While I knew it would be sad to say goodbye to our sweet little place, I didn't expect to have so many endings wrapped into this one. ​

"Never lament casually," said the late, great Leonard Cohen. "And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”

And so in this week since the election of Donald Trump, I have said very little. I have not joined the nightly disruptions to life-as-usual in Portland - lampooned as "white riots" by Dave Chapelle on Saturday Night Live. 

I'm taking some time to consider the focus and the form of my lament... considering: What happened such that Donald Trump seemed like a good idea to the people who voted for him? Is his election a betrayal of all that landed on these shores to become America, or its fulfillment?

I'm immensely grateful to have had the chance to attend, for three years now, the Orphan Wisdom School, where Stephen Jenkinson troubles us with such questions, including the biggest of all: How do we love a dying culture?

Two days before the election Stephen visited Portland unexpectedly, speaking for an afternoon to nearly 90 people assembled with less than a week's notice. He spoke in and of "the syntax of sorrow, the grammar of the gone, the manner of mortal mystery." Unwilling to collude with "the mania for fixing things that is everywhere," he made the case for increasing our emaciated appetite for "real heartbreak and the tutelage that comes from it."

His plea: To swivel our chair alongside the young people, to try to see what they see. "It's not the world you were born to. That's not coming back. In their eyes is the end of most of what you believe." Be willing to learn the end of all you hold dear, he asked. That's the act of love I'm asking of you.

The night after the election Amber and I took my 9 year-old niece Josie to a neighborhood vigil for loving kindness. Several hundred gathered outside the high school holding candles. Voices of sorrow were witnessed by flames held high. "This Little Light of Mine" was sung, with impromptu verse after verse upholding all that is at risk. The angry face of grief marched by the thousands just a few miles away, shutting down two interstate highways. This gathering we joined sought to elevate kindness.

I recited a poem on "the rhythm of kindness" posted on Election Day by a friend. And when it came time to speak my own mind, I voiced my gratitude for the Water Protectors at Standing Rock, that we would have them in our midst at this time, insisting on a bigger story. 

While I will find other words and actions, one week now after the Election, I stand by what I wrote that first night: Beneath the storm clouds of catastrophe that have gathered over this idea called America since our founding, there is goodness, and beauty, and love, and kinship - and that's what I'm determined to amplify in every way I can.

Don't call us protesters, say the young people​ standing against corporate extraction practices on the Missouri River in North Dakota. We are Protectors.

Unlike the secular political demonstrations I've participated in over the last 30 years, their call is spiritual. Their way of gathering to protect the earth and the water, ceremonial.

"Everybody standing here today is here because someone in your family, one of your ancestors, prayed that you would be here," we were told at a large solidarity event outside the US Army Corps of Engineers today in Portland.

While the Protectors' stance in North Dakota is slowly beginning to attract public attention, it is far from the only front in defense of what was once considered by all peoples, an animate world, a world in which we are all related, human and non-human, seen and unseen.

And it is only the most visible form of prayer for water. In honor of all those whose see their prayers as necessary for the well-being of the world, I'm sharing a recent article from the Washington Post about a 13-day ritual in which dozens of women and girls walk the entire length of the Potomac: "They will speak to the water, sing to the water, and pray for the water."  

"The walkers recite the phrase I will do it for the water in Ojibwe as they hand the water to one another," the article reports.

Organizer Sharon Day, 65, of St. Paul, Minnesota, is asked "if the walkers’ goal is to raise awareness about water pollution. Sure, awareness is nice, she responds — but that’s a paltry goal. The intent of this walk is to speak to the water’s spirit, not to a human audience.

"'All the while, we’re speaking to that water. We’re telling the water how much we care about her,' Day said. 'We really do support the work of other environmental groups. We believe what’s missing from most of this work is the idea that the water has a spirit, and we as spiritual people need to speak to that spirit.'"

..."She doesn’t view her walks as a form of protest. A child of the ’60s, she protested plenty — against the Vietnam War, in favor of civil rights and feminists and lesbians and American Indians. 'I spent my entire life protesting — until I carried that water,' she said. 'It’s not a protest. It’s a movement toward something with love. You’re doing it because you love these rivers.'"

The article also quotes Beth Brent, who planned to participate for a week and ended up walking for two months. "'It’s a prayer. Something about being in prayer every day, it’s powerful.' ...Brent, too, has worked with water cleanup organizations, and found something in the walking that was missing there. 'They keep it in the realm of science and water monitoring. That’s a very colonizing, Western white male way of engaging with nature,' she said, noting that Ojibwe tradition allows only women to carry the water on these walks, with men in supporting roles."

Day was asked, “Auntie, do you really think this is doing any good?” As the article recounts, "The child doubted that the women’s walk could prevent further degradation of the environment. 'The mining companies, they’re so strong. They have so much money,' the girl said.

"Day responded: 'But the water’s more powerful. The water’s more powerful and that’s who we’re speaking to.'"

Read the full article and get involved with #NODAPL Solidarity.

"The day my second daughter, Marina, was born, was the second happiest day of my life," Tamara Wedin says. "But it was also the second most heartbreaking. She was beautiful and perfect and had the deepest blue eyes you've ever seen...ten perfect little piggy toes...but she was not breathing. She had died two days prior, which we were fortunate enough to watch on ultrasound as her last heartbeat showed on the monitor."

Tamara has channeled her family's agony - grief that came close to taking her down - into a support program for other veterans who've experienced pregnancy loss or the death of an infant.
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One in four pregnancies ends in a loss, according to Tamara, and studies show that for veterans and military families, the risks are even higher. Taps for Babies, now in its second year, is determined to educate others about the very real need for support after a pregnancy loss or infant death, and to make sure veterans are connected to the very best support the community and VA system has to offer. The event, the first of its kind for veterans in the nation, brings together grieving families, non-profit organizations, and VA staff.

At the inaugural Taps for Babies program last year at the Portland VA Hospital, I witnessed two of the most moving sights of my life. The first was the playing of taps for the "babies lost too soon" to military families. A uniformed honor guard, accompanied by the mournful notes of a bugle, slowly and ceremoniously folded a flag and placed it on an empty chair in the front of the auditorium. Those dignified moments were a time outside of regular time, in which the pregnancy and birth traumas experienced by veterans and their families received long-overdue acknowledgement.

Just as moving as the silence that filled the space around the bugle notes were the words we heard from an unexpected speaker. Among the children present on this family-focused day were Tamara's infant son and her older daughter Kiri, who had served as unofficial ambassador to those of us setting up exhibit tables, offering to help organize our displays.

When all the grown-up speakers had finished their remarks and the VA chaplain prepared to close the program, four year-old Kiri approached for the microphone. She told us about her sister Marina, about her death and the ways in which her family keeps her memory a part of their lives. She offered the simple lessons from their experience as a gift of support to others.    

Tamara tells me, "Kiri has already asked me if she is speaking this time. She asks me almost daily how she can help the mommies who've lost their babies. She always wants me to pass on the most profound things."

Tamara welcomes inquiries about the October 28 event in Portland, Oregon and how to get a Taps for Babies program started in your community. Currently working with the Orlando Veteran's Administration on starting a program, Tamara quotes the saying, "There is no expiration on my oath of enlistment." She says, "This program is ultimately about looking out for each other and leaving no one behind." Email: [email protected]

While Amber and I are in some ways astonished that we've now been together 20 years, it also feels like the most ordinary thing in the world. Our relationship is our safe harbor, the cozy cove from which we venture forth each day to ride the choppy seas of these troubled times.

That's not to say we take it for granted - we speak of our gratitude for each other, to each other, every day. But when it came to commemorating the day, in this year of big upheavals, we didn't feel the need to make a big splash.

Instead we spent the evening of our actual anniversary at a bird watching class at the Audubon Society. We played hooky for a day earlier this week to visit friends from our MichFest family as they passed through Astoria on the cruise ship they were working. And then we gathered members of our many communities for a low-key happy hour at a local restaurant.

How blessed are we? My godchildren and niece and nephew who set out our photo albums and greeted our guests. College friends who knew me as a 17 year-old. Amber's "tennis wives". Her father's best friend of more than 50 years. My cousin and brother. Former coworkers. Clients. Good people I've met through my Death Café work. Members of our Thanksgiving and 4th of July family. Social justice colleagues. A MichFest sister. Fellow Orphan Wisdom School scholars. The partner of my roommate from 20 years ago who witnessed the very first steps of this new relationship. Such a treat to see those many strands of our lives woven together for a few hours of celebration.

It brought us back to that very first time we asked for our relationship to be witnessed and blessed by our community, when we were five years in - on a day that ended up eleven days after 9/11 and eleven days before my father's death. We needed to be together as a community then, more than ever. Our low-key coming together last night was a reminder of how much we need each other, still.

For every person able to come by to wish us well there were so many more at too great a distance or otherwise occupied with families or their own good works. To know so many good people, to be connected even if only occasionally, is evidence enough of the benevolence in the universe that we feel well buoyed to sail another day.

More on how we got here:
I Now Pronounce You: Our third and final wedding.
My Big (Null & Void) Gay Wedding: Our White Salmon and Lucky Lab ceremonies.
Yes, I'll Marry You: A whirlwind tour through my 26 years of activism for LGBT equality.

I've been invited to attend a ceremony at which we are expected to dress as though we came from somewhere.

To wear clothing with a story. Not from the mall. Or the internet. Or a sweatshop. From the hands of a people whose handwork keeps them tethered to those who came before them. 

Stephen Jenkinson has defined craft as "where everything you know can appear in the world."

I make virtually nothing with my hands. The calligraphy skills I began to develop in college have atrophied as I've typed on tinier and tinier keypads. I was too impatient and distracted as a kid to learn the sewing, gardening, and home repair skills of my mother. She, before me, was shamed by wearing the clothes hand-sewn by her immigrant mother, especially when she arrived at an elite college where her classmates referred to their outfits by name (I think I'll wear my Christian Dior tonight).

I spent some time bewildered by this question of what to wear, bereaved by my own disassociation with the handwork of my ancestors. My mother wondered if some shreds remained in our family of a traditional Waldensian costume - the clothes worn for centuries by the Pre-Reformation Protestant sect of Italians from whom we descend. I wrote last year about my attempts to follow a trail of bread crumbs back to some connection with the people and the place left behind when my grandparents immigrated to America on the eve of WWII.

No such remnants surfaced but an internet search brought me to a bilingual blog on Waldensian culture that mentioned a seamstress located on a tiny square in a Northern Italian town, a square named in memory of my grandfather's brother, Willy Jervis, executed by the retreating Nazis for his work in the resistance. I found an Italian cousin willing to seek out this craftswoman to obtain a hand-made shawl for me.

The needlework is exquisite, you can scarcely tell the front from the back. I recognize the flowers from our two weeks in those high mountain valleys last May. The fringe is hand-knotted - how many hours of work?

This project of what to wear led me to a local designer and dressmaker here in Portland for something befitting the shawl. It led me to the depths of my linen closet for the tablecloths and napkins hand-embroidered by my great and great-great grandmothers, to study their craft and imagine what my own hands might make. And it inspired another of my American cousins to search out a Waldensian shawl for his teenaged daughter, that she might know something more of the story of our people.

This week I participated in two ceremonies to celebrate new spaces, each a home for innovative organizational endeavors. 

I wasn't able to attend the building dedication ceremony for the Wayfinding Academy, a new college opening next week in Portland's St. Johns neighborhood - but their plan captured my imagination and inspired me to support the celebration with a donation.
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After renovating an old YMCA building, the Wayfinding Academy issued an invitation to the community: "Help us make our house a home." 

Rather than repeating the tired old model of having VIPs cut a ribbon over the threshold, and offering naming rights to only the highest donors, Wayfinding set out to "fill our building with the names of supporters. That way, our students will be reminded every day that there is a community of hundreds of people who believed that they are worth supporting, that this community made the Wayfinding experience possible for them. We want to envelop them with community."

Their donation program offers "rooms and doorways and appliances and toilets (yes, those too)" for donors to claim and name - I funded a light switch! At the dedication celebration, donors signified their commitment by cutting ribbons throughout the building.  As they prepare to welcome their first class of students, they're still a few thousand dollars short of their fundraising goal. Check out this great opportunity to support a community-based model of learning.

The second space-warming ceremony, one I led for a friend's new workspace, was more intimate. Their social change mission requires both an external orientation - to the conditions they seek to change, to the constraints and partnerships of the communities they serve and engage - and an internal focus on their creative process and their life as a team.

As the team stood facing outwards, I asked them to identify a core condition in the external world that affected their work. Turning back to each other, they wrote these words on rocks I'd brought - from racism and poverty to naysayers and devices that distract. Then I asked them to assemble the rocks into two cairns. These cairns can function as a touchstone, a way to keep themselves always oriented to the external context for their work.

Then, turning inward, I passed around a bag of ceramic hearts made by the 18h Avenue Peace House's cottage industry Grief Watch. I invited the team to bring to mind a quality or condition they wanted to foster within their new work space. Each person named a quality they were committed to embodying as they passed their heart to the person next to them. We closed with a round of rose water lemonade toasts and a poem offered in tribute to their work.

​How do we make meaning out of the big milestones in our personal and community life? That's the question at the heart of a new community discussion I'm leading in partnership with Oregon Humanities.

The premise: For the many people who do not have strong ties to religious or other cultural traditions, major life events such as birth, aging, relationship changes, illness, death, and community crises are increasingly marked by no ritual at all.

Last week I had the opportunity to pilot the conversation with 18 generous colleagues, clients, and friends. It left me filled with gratitude and inspiration, tinged with the sorrow that comes every time we recognize all that's missing in our modern urban lives.

As folks arrived, I invited them to select an item from a box stuffed with flotsam and jetsam that's washed up in my life - something that reminded them of a ritual or tradition from their family or cultural heritage.

We opened with a round of largely wordless opportunities to reflect and communicate how milestones were marked in our lives, standing in response to questions such as:

• Whose entrance into the world or family was marked with any kind of family or community ritual, such as baptism or a naming or adoption ceremony?
• Who was raised as a child, routinely going to funerals?
• Who has felt the need for a ritual or ceremony in response to a community event, where none was available?  

In pairs and in the larger group, we discussed whether we related to rituals as "cairns marking the path behind us and ahead of us," as described by Robert Fulghum, who believes, "Without them we lose our way.” (From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives)' Does ritual function, in our lives, as it does for Eileen London & Belinda Recio, who write, "Ritual is the journey; the sacred is the destination. Ritual binds us to the whole of creation, and it is in this bond that we can encounter the sacred.” (Sacred Rituals: Connecting with Spirit)

From these musings, we began to share the impact of life events that have passed unobserved and creative new ways that we might mark these milestones.

Stories like those participants told - stories of longing, connection, courage, and creativity - renew my spirit. I left filled with appreciation for what happens when we converse about real stuff... the ideas we generate from each other, the insights and possibilities we might not come to on our own... the tangible experience of being part of something greater than ourselves.

Click here for more information on bringing the conversation Ritual & Ceremony in Modern Life to your organization or community setting.

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Oregon Humanities' Conversation Project brings Oregonians together to talk—across differences, beliefs, and backgrounds—about important issues and ideas. Local nonprofits, community groups, or businesses apply to host a Conversation Project program on a topic relevant to their community. An Oregon Humanities facilitator - like yours truly - comes to that community to lead the conversation.

Please help spread the word to potential conversation hosts about this fantastic opportunity to foster meaningful conversation on topics from race, immigration, and international trade, to questions such as: What makes life meaningful? What does it means to be an Oregonian? How do we feel about the future?

Check out the wonderful offerings in this year's catalogue. Having met many of the other facilitators, I'd love to attend them all!