She’s had her eye set on the dagger for years. All our children receive a legitimate dagger at the turning of age 10 and my daughter has watched her older brothers receive theirs with a deep longing. Its a gift that is symbolic of a threshold crossing, a rite of passage that that facilitates the beginning shift from childhood into adolescence and ultimately into adulthood; a departure from the more childish realm of innocence and toys, to the territory of knowledge and the heavy weight of knowing their life force can be one that is destructive or regenerative. The weighty question behind this representative gift is, “Will you be a Life-Giver or a Life-Taker?”

My daughter has also always wanted to participate in my seasonal Rewilding Retreats, so we decided to create a Rewilding Rites-of-Passage Retreat for her at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island. It was a weekend filled with ritual and ceremony, and activities to cultivate and center her intuitive senses of awe and wonder. This natural state of childhood is often the first thing to be abandoned as children come into themselves, and it is a state that I believe can remain intact. Our work as adults is to raise these children into young people who are connected to a sacred and enchanted world. Truly, our future depends on it!

Please enjoy a bit of a peek into the ceremony space of this rites of passage weekend. This is something that I’m feeling inspired to create for other parent/child dyads in the future—and possibly even with virtual resources so parents feel empowered to accompany their child through threshold crossings that preserve the child’s connection to the natural world, and witness their emergence and becoming.

Opening Ceremony

Our arrival to the land began with the Rewilding Seven Directions Prayer, which includes a tribal land acknowledgment. This is a way to call in the unique forms and energy that Sacred Presence takes in the traditional forms of the cardinal directions, elements, seasons, and even our bioregions. We created a nature altar upon which we would place meaningful encounters with wild ones, as well as elements created during our retreat.

A walk through the woods began to ground us into the land, and to begin to practice an animate and enchanted worldview. We read the phenomenal poem, “Lost” by David Wagoner, and invited animal guides to accompany us, and sure enough, we were attended! My daughter, who has sadly never seen a real life frog, perceived 12 of them on our hike! We were both delighted and are learning more about frogs-their species, their habitat, and their sacred symbology as a result. Such a meaningful way to begin our attuning and you can already discern the pattern of noticing, begetting, knowledge, which begets love. This weekend was full of invitations to know more and subsequently love more—to delve into the inherent dignity of the earth body and all the wild ones as well as our own bodies and our wild selves.

Garden Prayer Stick

The great ecotheologian Thomas Berry often would say that “its all a question of story.” What are the stories we tell? How are they functional? Maybe more importantly, how are they dysfunctional? We must take account for the stories we tell our children through our religious and spiritual traditions that cause them to separate from a love affair with our wild and wonderful world. We must change the stories that we tell that inform them that somehow their bodies are bad (sinful) and that the Earth is going to hell in a hand basket (fallen nature). It is critical we tell a new story.

So, we cuddled up and told stories. The myth of Fox-Woman-Dreaming was a soft and quiet call to my daughter’s wild self to never allow someone to exile or be repulsed by her truest nature. We spoke of the harm done by the Judaeo Christian creation story when the woman, Eve, is blamed for all things bad and distorted in human nature because she ate the apple. We shared apples as sacrament under the canopy of an old apple tree within a garden’s gated holdings, reclaiming our sovereignty and right to be back in the garden. We blessed her body and the Earth body speaking to its inherent goodness, and created Garden Prayer Sticks as a way to express this sacred and holy truth.

The Story Staff

In preparation for a forest hike to her sit spot where she would receive her dagger, she made a Story Staff. The Story Staff is simply a stick that is selected to accompany and bear witness to their journey. The stick can be adorned with fiber color bands from which to tie in encounters within nature that spoke to them on their walk; leather (we used faux leather for her hand grip); and other elements.

This activity is a wonderful way to tap into the wisdom of the “songline,” a sacred path within the animist belief system of Indigenous Australians that would guide a person home. In terms of teaching a new story of belonging to herself, the Sacred, and this wild and holy world, the intention with the Story Staff is to elevate the practice of perceiving the wild guides that surround her and remind her always of her belonging—that home and heaven are actually here. This piece is a dynamic one that can continue to accompany children (or adults!) on their journeys and take up more feathers, fronds, or other items that tell her a story of her belonging, a truth that will always lead her home back to her true and wild self.

The Dagger

The “main event” for this weekend long rite-of-passage is the gifting our child with a specially selected dagger. Completely not-child-proof, this becomes a symbol of their own readiness to wield an instrument that will either serve them by creating life, or sever their connection to others if they take it up to kill. Of course, this is all offered in language suitable to the child, but the weightiness of the gift is felt. This isn’t fun and games. This is a real and transformational gift that honors that the child now walks taller and with more options before them. Note on safety: our children have been participants in wilderness awareness schools for years and have received knife-safety training. We covered together the best practices of how to be well with a knife in hand. This is a gift that says, “You are old enough to go beyond the Village gates and out into the Forest to engage your transformation.”

After gifting the dagger, our daughter was invited to select a sit-spot, a place in which she would be present to herself, the dagger, and the more-than-human world for a couple hours. Ensuring she was set up well with water, snacks, warm layers, and an emergency whistle, I went a safe-distance away (within earshot but out of sight—for both of us). She wasn’t afraid, an emotional state that surprised both of us! I was witnessing such empowerment and a rapidly forming sense of self—incredible! I left her to Wren, Crow, Deer, and Frog after tearfully and joyfully singing The Lost Words Blessing song over her, a lovely and earthy-imaged song that captures the arc of a sacred journey.

When I returned to her some time later, she was in a state of complete calm. She wasn’t aware of how much time had past and showed me things about her dagger that she had explored with absolute confidence. Again, the strength of this symbol is not lost on me. In so many ways, she was showing me aspects of herself that she had never explored before, the gift of her own confidence being evidently clear.

Moon Time Crowning

The girl becomes a maiden. Little Red Riding Hood goes into the Forest wearing the cape of innocence and, in the best told tellings of the tale, comes out of the woods wearing the pelt of a wolf. This time in the wilds with my daughter was a time to ritualize the coming-of-age time that is nearer than farther. In a soft space created by cabins, blankets, candles, rose tea, I washed her feet and and hands in rose oil and gave her a pedicure and manicure. The color pink was intentionally chosen to hold the echoes of the Pink Tent ceremonies that are created by elder women to honor the first menses of a young woman. It was a set apart time to speak together about the mysteries of love, and her power to to co-create and sustain life. Well versed in the phases of the moon and all her monthly names, we speak of menstruation in moon-time terms. She understands that her body too will wax and wane as it prepares to cradle life in her hips. We spoke positively of her sexual power and to see it as gift to self and gift to other—again the theme of the dagger came through: will you use this energy to bring life or to take it? As adults we are aware of how too often the sexual self walks the fine line of a dagger’s point and can easily fall to either side—regenerativity or destruction.

She walked the labyrinth as an outer representation of this inner journey. Walking in she carried her Story Staff and a stone to place at the center as a gift for the life she has been given. I met her at the center and anointed her with more rose oil and crowned her with this moon-time crown created by my amazing friend and proprietor of HexHouse Crowns. She walked back out of the labyrinth holding her crowned head high and a candle in one hand, walking with care to honor both the crown and the lit flame.

Reconnecting our body’s rhythms to the rhythms already existing in the natural world is a powerful part of rewilding. This is a conscious way we begin to weave our lives back into the whole, re-membering our bodies to the cycles that thrum throughout all of creation. By connecting the girl’s body to the moon not only makes sense to her storied imagination, it elevates her body’s rhythms to the cosmos. Her body’s capabilities are no longer seen with shame, but with starry-eyes. She and the moon move together!

Closing Ceremony

We close ceremony-time with gratitude and by releasing all of the energies that we have called in. We offered our gratitude to the land that held us so well by co-creating a nature mandala and offering liturgy to the land.

The mandala, which is ancient Sanskrit for “circle,” is a symbolic circular design that portrays balance, symmetry, and wholeness. Mandalas are found in almost every culture, and can serve as a sacred reminder of the path we seek to walk. I see nature mandalas as a continuing practice of learning the land—connecting to the plant and tree life that make up my homescape, learning from them of the medicine and food they offer, leaning into their seasonal stories, remembering our interrelatedness and meant-for-ness. Its a time when we can consciously offer gratitude to the wild world for accompanying and witnessing our journey to a deeper sense of our belonging.

This is a practice of forming what theologian Steven Bouma-Prediger calls an ecological perception of place. To offer this way of seeing to our children is to gift them with a lens and way of being that will contribute to their flourishing selves and a future for our Sacred Earth that is flourishing as well.

A Nod to the Important Details

Please don’t read this retreat as a perfect rite. I’m certain I didn’t do certain things well, or forgot about other elements entirely. My drum was damp and cold so wouldn’t work. Rain drops kept falling on the candle at the labyrinth’s center. I got us lost on our first afternoon’s hike. I stepped accidentally on one too many slugs much to my daughter’s disappointment. We did read almost half of Harry Potter’s Sorcerers Stone, ate chocolate and smoked gouda cheese, and gave in to cuddles whenever the fancy struck, which for my daughter is near all the time. In its imperfection, this time was near perfect for us, and my sense is that with your own intention and imagination, you too could create a meaningful rite as well.

Waymarkers Journal