Territories, Rhythms and Atmospheres
After 10 years of officiating wedding ceremonies, I have gotten pretty comfortable standing in thresholds, comfortable being betwixt and between, comfortable with liminality. I’m not just comfortable in thresholds, I actually really love them… I love the mezuzahs that bless them, the deities that safeguard them, the poets that draw alongside their Mystery, and the herbs, plants, flowers, trees and resins that grow on and around them.
“A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.” -John O’Donohue
It has taken me a long time to understand the Medicine I carry, to integrate my own threshold experiences, and to build real faith in the terrain... to honor and embrace transitions, “to listen to lostness like a sacred calling into presence,” and to court (and recognize) Grace.
Spending 3 months in the Peruvian Amazon volunteering at an Ayahuasca healing center and contending with some seriously wayward curanderos, losing my brother and sitting a traditional 7-day shiva with my family in NY, going on pilgrimage with Aama Bombo (a Buddhi Maya Lama grandmother shaman in the Nepali Tamang tradition,) participating in a transformational two week ceremony in the Sweet Medicine Sundance/Twisted Hair lineage, officiating sudden death funerals, regularly sitting in tipi with wise women elders, marking my body with talisman-tattoos, traveling to Tepotzlan, Mexico for a mysterious initiation ceremony, co-leading a pilgrimage on the Camino of Santiago with an injured ankle and a participant who was ritually carrying her paraplegic partner, facilitating an all night healing/croning ritual for a 75 year old woman who’d been violently neglected and abused, and participating in a Daime “Santa Missa” ceremony after the violent murder of my 8 year old neighbor - on the same day as my first wedding ceremony...
I’ve received so many teachings and had so many experiences about how to bring beauty and devotion to places of confusion, uncertainty and despair, how to make medicine out of poison, how to cultivate emptiness and compassion, and how to pray. It is from this place that I re-open my 1:1 work with clients after an eight year hiatus.
Click here for details about who I work with or to schedule a complementary 15 minute consultation to explore working together.
“Few things are more productively humiliating than an earnestly uttered prayer. To stand in the stink of our somebodyness and let words of devotion turn us over like rotting compost—ah, now that’s praying.” -Hunter Reynolds
