Summer Solstice

The 2nd Annual Women’s Summer Solstice Gathering has now come and gone. It was a wondrous 2 days of ceremony, taking time out from our daily lives to offer back to the Earth. In our usual ways, we are in the process of taking materials, resources, energy for our own use, and so to take conscious time out to give of ourselves is a key element of living in balance. We worked ceremonially with the energies of the personal and transpersonal, as they related to each of the elements: air, fire, water, earth and how these elements in turn related to their further correspondences of Father Sky, Grandfather Sun, Grandmother Moon and Mother Earth. Our ceremonial activities included dance, breath, fire building, fire smudging, prayers, water lustrations, flower essence creating and more. As a group, we really came together beautifully, and in offering, we received much of our own healing in return. If anyone is interested in finding out more, please contact me at crathwell2@yahoo.com and I would be happy to put you on our mailing list for the Gathering.

Happy Summer Solstice!

Happy Summer Solstice! As part of a Council of Women, I co-organized the First Annual Women’s Summer Solstice Gathering, held this year near Low, Quebec. A whole day preparing for and then offering a Healing Ceremony to the Earth and the Web of Life. The Ceremony was originally taught to our Ceremonialist for the day, my teacher Kathleen Leeson, by Brooke Medicine Eagle, a Native American Elder.
12 of us gathered for the day, to touch the Earth with love. We began with some introductions and then chose ballots which split us into one of four groups, one for each of the elements and its corresponding direction: East/Air, South/Fire, West/Water, North/Earth. We then danced a Dance of the Sacred Feminine, a dance I had a dream about 8 months earlier, and one that I brought into form with my Sacred Circle Dance teacher, Linnea Rowlatt.
After bringing our energy together in such a way, we began our group work of getting to know more about the element and direction we were working with on this day. I led the group of the Element of Earth and the Direction of the North. Our group was working with the correspondences of winter, the elder age, feminine energies, groundedness, the physical and the spiritual. I then led a Healing Ceremony with the Earth for the group. Following that, we met to learn the group songs and to choose our group’s way of entering the collective healing dance of the evening’s collective Healing Ceremony.
That evening, on the longest night of the year, as the sun was drawing down in the West, all of the groups came together, offering gifts and expressions of each direction and element, and together we amassed healing energy and offered it to the Earth. We danced and feasted and laughed and most importantly offered healing in service to the Earth – what a glorious day!