Procession

The drumming starts on the wide front porch of the lodge at the retreat centre. The heat’s abated since earlier in the week. It’s warm but not oppressive as the couple, heads crowned in leaves, lead off down the steps into a wide circuit around the compound’s central green. We gather up more men as we process around it and then head up the hill. Trees overhang the path, and the steep slope to our left is covered in ferns.

I look ahead and behind me at forty or fifty of us on our way to the handfasting. We’re here for the two men who’ve invited us to celebrate with them, on the last afternoon of a week-long northern California gathering. But the gift they’re giving us all is inestimable.

Celebrating with them, we’re also taking part in something that almost none of us, for a good chunk of our lives, could have imagined might ever be possible.

Somehow, we all made it.

In creating this ceremony for themselves, these two open-hearted souls have offered us all a living experience of a world where we’re fully at home. I look over my shoulder here not to make sure it’s safe, but to take in the sight of comrades behind me streaming up the hill.

We reach a circle of laurel branches and vine leaves in the shadow of a live oak. Mulitcolored fabrics hang from the branches. A line of prayer flags flutters. Behind it stands the officiant, wearing stag antlers and holding a staff. With it he casts a circle around us  all. Four others take their places  bearing the gifts of the cardinal directions.

One by one, he lays six cords across the grooms’ clasped hands, each a different colour, each representing an aspect of the bond they share and the pledges they make to one another. A bell rings to mark every pronouncement.

 

It’s a wedding, after all, so some of us cry. In joy for these two men, but some of the tears also fall in joy for us all.