With things changing all around us in, as one woman put it, “the blink of an eye” I re-read Karen’s words about challenging cultural legacies, looking on again at what I feel about some of the values I’ve learned ~ and am still learning ~ from many sources. The importance of ceremonies and why I think so are what I want to share.
The idea of living all of life as a ceremony means, I keep being taught, to live consciously, with intention, of paying attention, to consciously choose our responses instead of reacting to whatever life presents us. Ceremonies throughout our lives help us do that, help us be conscious, help us listen to Creator’s guidance, as we seek to consider and choose our actions, our words. It has taken me years to learn that all of life is nothing but choice. To not live consciously is in itself, a choice.
Ceremonies should be there to help us mark milestones, to remind us of who, or where we are, of what we want to be. They can help us ~ they can help others ~ to heal. I write my kinswoman that in our culture we too often do not have appropriate ceremonies and those we do have are often not conscious ~ graduation ceremonies from high school and college are too often poor substitutes for a conscious passage to adulthood. We need meaningful rites and celebrations done with intention and attention! An anonymous Native woman was quoted as saying:[1] “. . . Some people have no ceremony anymore. To have no ceremony is to fail to remember just where human beings are in the creation.”
A friend and powerful Native trainer from Canada, Bea Shawanda, so often talked about ceremony and ritual. “There are important reasons for all the old traditional ceremonies!” she would emphasize. They’re important to keep us grounded, to understand who we are, to lead healthy, balanced lives. But,” she’d continue, “The old ways may not fit the way we live today. We must understand the concept and find new ways, rituals which fulfill the reasons the old ones were so important.”
When Kunta Kinte in Alex Halley’s Roots presented his daughter in the night to all the spirits/ancestors in the sky he was conscious of exactly what he was doing. How do we have that kind of ceremony with our children in our culture?
I think about the “what’s” and “how’s,” the “whys” we’re not taught about life in our culture, a lack which often cause us to go stumbling blindly into and through much unnecessary bewilderment and pain. We too often have not had much to use as signposts to support us in our life’s transitions and challenges. It causes me to wonder how different life might be if that support, to recognize those signposts, were to be in place from childhood on ~ if it were to be a normal thing to talk of such things as the sadness my kinswoman felt when she realized she were no longer the “young girl in the flatbed truck” ~ a simple ceremony like the note she wrote me with my response recognizing and honoring her life passage or, perhaps, a gathering of women or a time with an elder woman. Whatever it is, as long as it is seen as ceremony ~ to acknowledge the new phase of life we are in, for us to accept it and for our family or friends to support us in life’s trials or to welcome us into this new place we have come to, to bless the person we have become.
Many tribes in North American had welcoming ceremonies for the new-born. The Original People of this continent lived lives filled with conscious ceremony. One which touched me deeply was a welcoming ceremony in Canada. It was powerful ~ sacred but filled with gentle laughter at the antics of older brother. Each of us held and made a prayer for the new little one. The presider spoke of how, in their traditional beliefs, they see a baby as having one foot in this world and one foot still in the spirit world and so, if they are not made to feel good, to feel welcome in this world they return to the spirit world. He also said “crib death” was unheard of when these ceremonies were the norm.
Two days later we celebrated his two-year-old cousin’s Naming ceremony in which he received his name but also sets of grandparents, aunties and uncles, not blood relatives, but, like Christian godparents, people to help and support him throughout his life.
What rich supports for life!
Because of that our family instituted our “welcome to the world” parties for our new borns. That’s also why when granddaughter Sierra was tiny her mother, Diana, Vicky Wares and I hiked up to the medicine wheel[2] for Vicki to give Sierra her name.
Variation of another culture’s ceremonies ~ done in the right spirit. Again, I come back to living with intention ~ of living with attention.
