Doing ritual with children
An interview with Brooke Arnold-Rochette on birthday and seasonal rituals
I thought that creating meaningful seasonal and holiday rituals with my child would come easily to me, but it hasn’t. My experience designing ceremonies has been almost entirely for adults and experienced spirit workers. My daughter is involved in my ritual practice at times (helping to prepare offerings or joining in as I sing to the ancestors, etc.), but creating memorable rituals for her and the whole family is something that I’m learning. As an animist with settler ancestry, I mourn the cultural loss of rites of passage and nature based ritual. Brooke Arnold-Rochette is the person I call at least a few times a year to ask, “What do you do to mark this season, holiday, or transition with your kids?” Her suggestions always inspire me and help me find ways to bring the magic of ritual to my little one. Brooke is a nature-based ritualist, life cycle celebrant, and a grief ritual facilitator who is deep into the Animas Valley Wild Mind Training.
Rayann: So let's start at the beginning…what is your working definition of ritual?
Brooke: Ritual to me is an enactment and embodied gesture, infused with feeling and heart, that is guided by an intention to connect with a greater vastness or source of wisdom.
Honoring is often at the core of ritual when I’m crafting rituals for the younger years: learning to honor the webs that sustain us and to express our gratitude in an embodied way.
For example, if we are celebrating seasons, we can have the intention of connecting to the cycles of the seasons and to all the magic around the time of the year we are in. Ritual can also be a way to deeply honor our little ones’ passages and growth, as they evolve through the different phases of their development and reach their milestone birthdays.
R: Ok, when you talk about a tree or a plant to your kids, do you talk about it as a person? Or as an it or a thing?
B: Definitely not as an it. Definitely as a living being. Every kind of natural element, even a rock, I speak of as a being with them, so they develop a sense of participating in an animate world. That's always been with them and is still present with them today. For example, the ocean is a presence. When we visit the beach, it has become a small ritual that when they find “treasures” they want to take home, they sit with these treasures (shell, stone, stick, etc.) and ask the ocean and the beach if they can bring it home with them… if the ocean is willing to give it to them. My son just automatically does this now. He sits there and holds his stone and asks the ocean if she’s willing to share the stone with him. He listens in his heart for an answer.
R: Does he ever get no as an answer?
B: He does.
R: How do you think it has shaped your kids having a ritualist mother and doing nature-based ritual throughout their lives?
B: I think it gives them a sense of reverence for being in a world where everything is alive. On the way to school, we would stop in a beautiful nature spot a few times a week and bring tea. We would make it a little ritual to offer some of our tea to Earth, take in the beauty of the natural world, listen to the sounds, smell the fragrances of morning, and put our hands on the ground to greet Earth - noticing what’s here and now, and just taking time. Now as we go to the top of the rock, they spontaneously put their hands on the ground and drop into greeting the Earth. In this sense, ritual develops their capacity to pause and listen, and to connect with the earth.
And now that they're bigger and we've done it for multiple years, I see how they do it each themselves in their own ways. Each child takes off and connects with the mountain and the rock and then comes back. They both have their own embodiment of greeting that's very different, shaped by their different personalities. I'm glad that they're making it their own. They’re developing their capacity for coming into connection.
R: It sounds like there's never been resistance to ritual. You never forced them.
B: If I do sense resistance, I just totally don't insist. So that's been more like a treat, this moss rock connection thing.
B: One thing to remember is that ritual is powerful because it speaks a language that touches our heart, our souls, and our emotions. Ritual speaks to us through the senses, imagery, symbols, sound, music, movement, poetry, story. It doesn’t just explain, it enacts. It creates a lived experience that tells our psyche that something is happening.
So here we go back to what is ritual: it starts with clarifying an intention, and finding a gesture to enact and embody our intention. For example, our intention might be to celebrate the winter solstice. What songs, symbols, imagery, poems, stories can we call upon to bring this intention to life? I love to gather things that we find in the natural world that really speak to this season: rocks, pinecones, holly berries, fir boughs… We might add symbols to the table that represent the longest night, like stars and moon, a dark table cloth representing the night sky. These symbols are not just representations. Laid out on an altar they become living portals of experience that we interact with. We may light a candle to open the altar and share a blessing and a favorite winter song, creating an opportunity to pause the hustle-bustle of everyday life, to gift our attention to what’s taking place at this special time of the year.
A different intention might be to notice what our children are going through as they’re growing up and celebrate the important passages: weaning, starting preschool, loosing their first tooth, birthdays… My daughter’s fifth year birthday was an important one.
R: What did you do? How did you celebrate?
B: We talked about the nest and learning to spread her wings to explore the garden. She had just started preschool, which we’d done a celebration for, making her a special bracelet with various strands representing some of the capacities she was going to call upon as she stepped out of the house and went to preschool on her own: courage, curiosity, the love that was always holding her, and the home that was always awaiting her return.
For her birthday, I’d sewn for her a cape which included symbols of a whole lot of things that she cared about and that felt personally meaningful to her. On the day of her birthday, we invited her to feel what she wanted to do to mark this transition of stepping out of the nest to explore more boldly. She decided to cut her hair! She'd never cut her hair before, so that was a big embodied change for her, from super long hair to a short bob. We also took her to the Butchart Gardens for the first time for the light show at night - enacting the explorer in the garden metaphor. This was stretching the boundaries of when she would normally be tucking into bed, making something super special that symbolized how she was growing into new capacities and meeting magic there. It was amazing, this lived experience of exploring into the night garden. She spoke about that birthday for so long.
R: Do you craft a new ritual every year for your kid’s birthdays? Or do you use the same one?
B: There are some ritual elements that stay the same that the kids love repeating. We have a birthday box for each child, and in their birthday box there are special things from the first years of their life that we saved and the photo album of their birth and first year of life. The book “On The Day You Were Born” is in there.
The grandparents come and we all look at the box together and unpack it. And it's like all these significant moments in their first five, five to seven years of life are in this box. There is also a bunting that I made the first year that we always take out and a candle that they received at their baby blessing. We light that candle once a year on their birthday and sing to them happy birthday. So there's like all these little things that we do each year and then I usually craft some ritual that's appropriate for their age and what they're going through.
R: Tell us how you do it.
B: I start by trying to feel out what they're going through in the weeks before their birthday, reflecting on their past year: what capacities have they grown into, what were some major challenges that they overcame, what were some significant things they learned.
One year my daughter had gone through two different schools and had been pretty challenged. For that birthday we really thought about what capacities she'd had to develop to build resilience through those challenges.
We represented each capacity with a little rock. We created a ritual where we had them all circled around her. We invited her godmother and grandparents and they all witnessed her. For each rock we would story her resilience, and she would pick it up and add it into a little basket that she was carrying - literally taking-in this part of herself that she’d grown into. And then she had this little basket with all these rocks of resilience that she'd built up.
Another example is when my son moved out of the nest phase and into the garden phase of childhood. My husband took him out for his birthday with another friend of his and they did this big hike. My son got to learn how to use a knife and build a fire up at the top of the hill… all these things that he really wanted to do where he felt like he was a big guy out in the garden!
R: As you are talking about these rituals, it sounds like you are creating the experience of the child being really seen by their elders and community, which is rare in our culture. Do you think that is the experience that your kids had?
B: I think so. I really think so. I also want to write them a card where my husband and I look back on their year, and where we name all the things that we saw them grow into that year. Then they can have all these cards that they gather of how they've been seen by their parents over the years.
R: I'm hearing this theme of using ritual to reflect their strength, their development, and their growth back to them to build more resilience.
B: Yes, it's like an affirmation and an honoring.
R: You know I struggle with the big holidays like Halloween, Easter, and Christmas. The overculture celebrations and massive consumerism around these times don’t make sense to me. I want to offer something else to my child, but I am not in a community that has intact alternate celebrations like Waldorf schools, religious or pagan communities. How do you navigate these cultural holidays?
B: Yes, I also struggle with the holiday celebrations that have been taken over by the overculture and tainted by consumerism, as do many parents, I’m sure. As a family, we definitely celebrate these holidays, but we try to re-story them and make them our own. In each of these celebrations, I link it back to what is happening in the natural world, as our connection with the living web of life is key to our family’s spirituality. So, we celebrate the Winter Solstice as well as Christmas, the spring Equinox as well as Easter, and Samhain as well as Halloween, for example We try to slow these celebrations down and bring it back to meaningful time spent together - preparing the home, preparing special food, and crafting rituals.
We have boxes for each seasonal celebration that we pull out of the attic and unpack together. The kids absolutely love opening up these boxes and decorating the house. We make food that speaks to the celebration. We have a book box with stories about the season or holiday, and we’ll read the stories together as a family. We create an altar table that they can interact with and decorate. And we create rituals that feel resonant with what we want to experience through that holiday.
For example, at winter Solstice, we spend a whole day and night without any artificial lights to celebrate the longest night of the year. It is also the time of the year where the seasonal wheel is said to stop, so we go everywhere by foot and don’t use either the car nor our bikes to get around. This slows us right down and shapes our day to one of paying attention to darkness, to stillness. For Samhain, we make an ancestor altar and invite the grandparents to share stories about our lineage and our ancestors. We go out that evening into the cemetery to light candles and sing, honoring those that came before us.
It comes down to intention again - what is it that we want to experience? Then finding ways to embody and express this intention, finding ways to emotionally connect to the deeper meaning of the holiday.
October workshop
Check out this gorgeous sun shower on a lake at the W̱MÍYEŦEN Nature Sanctuary where Brooke and I will be offering our next dive into writing and ritual October 5-6, 2024. Registration opens later this month.
Appreciating
1. End the Phone Based Childhood Now by Jonathan Haidt. This article is long, but worth it. It fired up the parents in my community to work together on solutions.
2. A great song for spring:
3. There are basic and core trainings coming up with Right Use of Power. They are nuanced, deeply kind courses and I love them.
4. This quote from Chesaray:
“We are movement. The more we awaken as movement,
the more we know God in form.”
5. Elle Longpre’s April 21 workshop on Rejection in writing: Come write, think, and talk about yearning, repudiation, fugitivity, volcanoes, and prophecy. Revel in the guided prompt. No prep required on your part; discussion encouraged but not madatory
Xo
Rayann is a spirit-worker, artist, and medium. She offers mentoring and healing sessions with compassion, kindness, and integrity. Her work serves those who need help with initiatory experiences, entanglements, loss, and reconnection to their own souls, ancestors, purpose, or place. She co-facilitates workshops on ritual and writing, assists clients who are recovering from spiritual abuse through ritual healing, and practices improvisational dance and quilting on Lekwungen territory in Victoria, BC.
Love this conversation. Thank you for sharing🤍 I feel it all as a Mama and am grateful for Brooke's suggestions and simple approach. Gratitude for you both.
This, sister, all of this. Thank you, and Brooke, for opening up your conversation and sharing your insights, challenges, and thoughts with us! As an animist Aunty who lives far from her kin, I too have found it challenging to refocus the celebrations towards intention and meaning, though as my nieces grow, it is easier to connect with them in these ways from afar.
Gorgeous, pithy, delightful food for thought and action here! x