Throughout our lives we have moments of transition when we move from one life stage to another, often compelled to mark this time by doing something different from the routines of our lives, such as going on a silent retreat and disengaging from social contact, or going on a pilgrimage to a sacred place like the Camino de Santiago, by climbing a mountain peak, enacting a vision fast, or designing a significant ceremony that names the threshold we are crossing over.

When we acknowledge these times in our lives consciously, we understand that something we have been immersed in for a span of time is passing and something else that we have intimations of or are longing for is glimmering on the horizon.

It is a dying and rebirth that we are attending, with a ceremony, a pilgrimage, or a retreat from the daily world. When we allow these little deaths to occur throughout our lives, we are self-composting, and each time the soil/soul of our lives is enriched.

John Keats wrote a magnificent line in a letter to his siblings, saying ‘the world is a vale of Soul making’, meaning that there are everywhere opportunities to make deep meaning of our lives.

We do this when we enact ceremonies of confirmation, of severance, of invocation, of commitment, of gratitude.

In so doing we are often ‘met’ by the holy world of nature with something that is a signpost on the larger journey of our soul’s path, or a moment of synchronicity knocks us out of our socks because it is so darn undeniable.

This is a quote is from my incredible teacher Annie Bloom who I have had the good fortune to apprentice with since 2016.