Ceremony and the Land: Honoring Our Connection

There is something that happens when we choose a place for a ceremony with intention. A garden that has been tended for years, a hall where generations have gathered before, a room filled with the things and people that have shaped you: something in us recognises it. There's a settling feeling, a sense that the moment is held not just by the people present, but by something much older and much larger than all of us. This is not coincidence, it is memory.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, wrote in Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) that ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. When you stand together and speak a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. Ceremonies, she wrote, transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. In her understanding, the land is not a backdrop to ceremony; it is a participant, a witness, a living presence that receives what we offer and holds it long after the words have been spoken.

This idea, that place is not incidental to ceremony but inseparable from it, is one I return to often in my work. Where a ceremony is held shapes how it feels. A wedding in a place that carries meaning for the couple holds a different weight than one chosen simply for its size. A naming ceremony in the family home roots a child into a story that will outlast all of us. A farewell held somewhere loved gives grief somewhere to go.

Kimmerer also wrote that our elders say ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. That is exactly what ceremony does: it asks us to stop, to be fully present, and to remember what matters. The people beside us, the life we are living, the ground that has held us, in all the ways that land can hold a person. The place you choose is already part of your story. My job is to honour that.