Earth Rituals - Future and Expansion (Follow-up from our Community Call)

Public Earth Rituals
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Hello everyone,

We had a really inspiring and productive call last night about the order-wide summer solstice ritual. Thanks to all who could join! A few key things emerged from the call last night that I want to share with everyone:

1. Experiences: We had about 175 participants based on our map (which included not only many solitaries but also groves, groups, and one larger festival). Those on the call shared their experiences, which were meaningful, powerful and profound. Some noted that they felt like the tree or other aspects of nature were helping radiate the blessing, thus, it was very potent and they were able to see it “light up” the surrounding land. Others could feel the “amplification” of the ritual with so many different people doing it. AODA members often chose places that were in need of healing–urban streams, land that is regenerating, land ravaged by fire, etc. People seemed drawn to where healing needed to happen the most.

2. Feedback/Revisions: We also got some good feedback about what needed to be tweaked for the rituals (including a full script, more clear instructions for timing, adaptation, and adding other elements based on personal path, etc). If you have any feedback on the ritual (what went well, what you maybe had questions about or were confused about) please feel free to post here and/or reach out to me directly.

3. Towards the Future: A Full Year of Rituals. As a group, we decided that we wanted 4 order-wide rituals, not 2. The two we have we are keeping (land = summer, water= winter). But we decided to add two more to cover everything on planet:

  1. The sky (air, climate, weather) at the Spring Equinox)
  2. The land at the Summer Solstice
  3. The hearth (humans/community/home) at the Fall Equinox). This gives us a nice balance and is more comprehensive.
  4. The sea/waters at the winter solstice

Towards developing our Fall Equinox Order-Wide Ritual, I am putting together a team to design and test the ritual. If you are interested in being part of this, please reach out to me directly. In the Winter, I will also be putting out a call to develop the air/spring equinox ritual, so there are two opportunities to help design and test it.

4. Towards the future: Spreading our rituals further. The group was also excited at the possibility of “open-sourcing” our set of rituals. Once we’ve done a full ritual year of these order-wide rituals, we would like to invite other nature-based spiritual communities or individuals to adapt them to their own tradition using our themes and see if we can get more groups involved. We decided we’d like to test the model for ourselves first, and then we can figure out how to invite others in (and adapt the ritual/themes to their own traditions) next year.

I am extremely excited to see how successful our first ritual was, how many participated, and the meaningful experiences that they were able to have. Think about the power and potency of our land healing ceremony when 175 people from all over North America and beyond all participated–we created a blessing network, and that blessing will continue to support our lands. Thanks for reading my long post, and looking forward to seeing what the future brings!

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Finally have a moment to add some input here! I’m sorry I couldn’t make the Zoom meeting, because what I discuss here may have been discussed there, but here goes.

One of my challenges as far as timing, and this is probably just a decision I need to make about my own practice, is that I am so used to doing the GCC Solstice and Equinox rituals that I always try to find ways to incorporate new elements (like the tree blessing) into those rituals. This works for the most part. I opened the grove, with the altar set up for the GCC ritual. After the opening I went out to the tree and did the ritual around the tree, then returned to the altar and completed the regular GCC Summer Solstice ritual. This makes for a long, and a bit awkward as far as continuity, ritual. I’m thinking it may be better for me to either do the GCC rituals and the land healing rituals on different days, or to wean myself off the GCC rituals and replace them with the land healing rituals.

In the future I will experiment with this, but I wondered if anyone else had similar struggles.

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Hi Kathleen,
Yes, we did talk about that a bit and people wanted some more guidance in that matter–e.g. which rituals to do, when, so I think that’s on our agenda to discuss further :).

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I did the GCC solstice ritual and the order-wide ritual on different days because my schedule permitted it. It would have been more difficult to try to fit both rituals into the same day.