‘Ritual is the way you carry the presence of the sacred.’ Christina Baldwin

Using ritual to honor the passing of the seasons is one of the best ways to align our personal energies with the larger reality around us.Sometimes the thought of creating a ritual can feel intimidating… it can seem that we have to have ‘all the things’ and ‘all the words’ just right if we want a ritual ‘to work.’Nothing could be further from the truth. A ritual should be personal- it should be effortless and natural to create…. It should bring joy and communion, not stress and performance anxiety.I know all of this, yet I still always yearn to ‘go big’ with my sacred offerings… and typically a week or so before a new season begins, will find me envisioning a Hallmark-esque version of how I want to welcome the new season in.Sometimes I do manage to pull off the Hallmark version… but more often than not, life happens, time runs out, the family scatters… and I am left alone doing what I can with what I have…And the wisdom that I am left with every single time this happens, is that the Universe doesn’t judge… If intention has been put into place, the Universe does not discern between a perfectly pressed fall leaf that has been placed on my altar with care, or a few prayerful words hastily scrawled on a scrap of paper torn from a legal pad.Last night was the Fall Equinox, and earlier in the week I had hoped to pull off the full family Hallmark version of a seasonal ritual, but instead had to settle for a real-world version. I took a bath (more because I needed one, than wanted one) and lit a candle. After a few deep breaths and a moment of focused intention, on one side of a small slip of paper I wrote something I wanted to release and leave behind, and on the other side I wrote something I wanted to welcome and bring forward. I held the scrap of paper to the candle flame and dropped it into my burning bowl and watched it curl and disappear into the flames.That was it.My body was in and out of the bath in just a few minutes…. And in this same short time period, my soul had moved from the remnants of Summer, into the new energy of Fall.If you missed doing a ritual on the actual Equinox, it’s not too late- the collective energy of the new season is still present….  and though Hallmark versions are nice, bare bones work just as well.

‘Ritual is the way you carry the presence of the sacred.’ Christina Baldwin