“Roots Down, Branches Up, Cell Phones Off!”
I participated in a wonderful initiation ceremony this past weekend. The initiate was pretty much an ideal candidate: grounded, intuitive, smart, grounded, talented, serious, expressive, funny, and grounded. Even though there were only two initiators involved, which means we were doing a lot of work, both of us felt good afterwards — not drained, not hyper, but energized and satisfied. Having participated in quite a few initiations in my time, I know how very rare it is to end up feeling that way afterwards.
It is now nine years after my own Feri initiation, and I finally feel comfortable running that energy full-tilt. It has taken that long for many of us to sift through all we were given and find our own way to use and transmit Feri energy to others. This time I edited and partially rewrote some of the better-known liturgy associated with the rite, so that for once the kinesthetic sense of what I was doing jibed with the words I was speaking.
Lumping an intense ritual in the midst of great upheaval in my life was not easy. I am a relentless multi-tasker usually, with a music label, a writing career, a family and a day job to juggle, but this past week the number of details added to my already full plate was just insane. Getting to and from the initiation alone involved a total of seven hours of driving, and it was only 90 minutes away. So it occurred to me that I may have to add something to my late friend Raven Moonshadow’s brilliant grounding liturgy.
Many of us in Reclaiming use Raven’s grounding (“Roots down, branches up!”) because it’s, well, succinct. After a certain number of years, you simply don’t need to lead a long involved visualization of entering the center of the earth and beaming out to the heavens to ground yourself. You just do it, and get present. So Raven’s signature grounding has been used liberally and with great relief over many years of ritual.
This time, though, I spoke it as, “Roots down, branches up, cell phones off!” The ubiquitous cell phone is a good stand-in metaphor for all our devices and to-do lists that keep pulling our attention away on the horizontal plane. It’s not so much that my frenetic pace had stopped me from being rooted in the earth or open to the sky, but it was scattering my energy to the four winds, not allowing me to think of only one thing at a time. In any ritual but especially in an initiation, you have to give your full attention to what is occurring in the circle in that moment. You can’t have divided attention and wonder if you forgot to call someone back. So that was my little brainstorm for the weekend, it was very helpful for us in that beautiful initiation ceremony, and maybe it can help others out there, too.
November 10th, 2005 at 8:39 am
I am VERY happy that it went well. *happy smile*