[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.17.3″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.17.3″ _module_preset=”default” custom_padding=”11px|||||” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.17.3″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.17.3″ _module_preset=”default” inline_fonts=”Lora” global_colors_info=”{}”]<\/p>\n
Sometimes the kind of ritual you need is not the one you were planning.<\/span><\/p>\n The ritual in question has been on the horizon for a while.\u00a0 Even when my friends\u2019 and my daughters were young, I mused on how we might honor their transition into womanhood.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At first it felt like a question that was only about them: our precious daughters, for whom our love is well-deep and wide as the sea.\u00a0 Our incredible children, whom we yearn to hold with steadfast guidance for as long as they\u2019re willing to be seen with us.<\/span><\/p>\n Remember that stage where you beg your parents to drop you off a block away from school so that nobody will know they’re related to you? Now that our children are 11, 12, 13, that time may not be far away!<\/span><\/p>\n With their adolescence on the horizon, I’m feeling so much. Here we are, meeting our respective initiatory thresholds in parallel \u2014 my mama friends and I entering menopause, our girls nearing puberty. We stand at the precipice together, grown women and girls all wondering what this next stage will bring. And my mama friends and I, wondering how it will change us \u2014 by which we mean, the relationship between our daughters and us.<\/span><\/p>\n Truth is, while my heart swells to think of my own daughter’s somewhere-on-the-horizon transition into puberty, this is not a simple joy. Like all initiatory moments, this portal is both a birthing and a dying.<\/span><\/p>\n I love my daughter’s childhood.<\/span><\/p>\n I think back on our last transition, as she passed out of early childhood \u2014 how I loved and savored that time.<\/span><\/p>\n There were so many things to love. All the ways wonder touched our lives. Funny things she’d say \u2014 “nothing is more powerful than my unicorn. My unicorn’s cans of power are as big as the WORLD!”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Things we did together \u2014 mudpies adorned with flower petals, left as treehouse offerings for the sprites, who now and then sent a missive in return. The slower pace of days, architecting part time work to spend as much time as possible with my children. Savoring, amidst the daily juggling act of keeping all of the balls in the air, so many precious moments of connection.<\/span><\/p>\n Dearest of all – always knowing my children were close by.\u00a0 Whether as babes, riding in the sling or the baby carrier. Snuggling next to me for a story.\u00a0 Or chopping vegetable beside me for dinner.<\/span><\/p>\n Early childhood was, for us, a time made by hand.\u00a0 I loved how motherhood gave me the space to center homey pursuits like quilting, sewing, drawing in colored pencil, those arts nearly forgotten or at any rate cast aside in our mass produced culture.\u00a0 Playing instruments together.\u00a0 Crocheting.\u00a0 A Waldorf doll I made her.\u00a0 Motherhood made these activities sacred again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I’ll always remember the delight of red skins curling from the spiraling apple peeler, cranked by her little fingers. Drawing her a winged kitty to hang over her bed. Slow mornings in the park, our toes in the grass.\u00a0 Bending low to share her delight in feather, nest and stone.<\/span><\/p>\n The days are long but the years are short, they say. Nothing could be truer, writes this 50 year old matriarch, looking back.<\/span><\/p>\n The days are short, but precious as gold.<\/span><\/p>\n Then, like leprechaun\u2019s gold, they are gone.<\/span><\/p>\n She was three, then four, then five. For a long time, I was part of the magic \u2014 a central magic-maker, even, a warm sun around which she twirled. When she turned seven, her orbit got wider, arcing towards an emergent sky of her own magical making.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Then she was nine, and the magic unfolded in new ways, now wholly her weaving in concert with creativity, abounding always around her, all around. Wondrous, perfect, magic as she dove deep into the world of the new myth makers – writers like Tui Sutherland.\u00a0 Erin Hunter.\u00a0 Now their wondrous stories weave the worlds she swan dives into, opening her eyes onto new vistas of herself with each world she passes through.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And now with the upcoming transition into adolescence,another door is close-opening, (for it\u2019s always both open and a close). Of course, this mama wants nothing more than to honor this upcoming passage \u2014 to honor her, and all of our daughters at this threshold of change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I think of menarche ceremonies throughout the ages, how differently and how devotedly cultures across time have marked this moment in a life. I think, with awe and tenderness, of mothers stretching back through the centuries \u2014 ancestors upon ancestors who have, like me, wanting to send our daughters into the next stage with more than technical instructions, but rather in a way that honors the true significance and sanctity of this time.<\/span><\/p>\n With menarche opens the possibility that a womb-bearing person will one day bear life. (Recognizing, too, that not all who carry this possibility will choose children, and not all who wish for children will have that fortune.) For those who will, this is both a sacred possibility and a powerful responsibility. How do we honor that?<\/span><\/p>\n So I think on it, and I dream.<\/span><\/p>\n Maybe you\u2019ve dreamed on it too.\u00a0 Just wildly imagining, mind bursting with an effluviance of multisensory images of possible midnight moon rites \u2014 stepping naked together into a jungle bath afloat with gardenia petals, sharing heart to heart with your daughter a few nuggets gleaned in your own journey into womanhood. Ceremonial garments, flowy and splendid. A circle of women \u2014 mothers, grandmothers, beloved aunties \u2014 each whispering in turn their hard won wisdom. Flower crowns woven. Tarot cards pulled. An incantation chanted beneath the moon. Song and dance, even \u2014 a circle of grandmothers singing you home, bodies dancing in formation, weaving you back into remembrance of the sacred continuum that holds you both and holds it all.<\/span><\/p>\n Scenes so vivid, you can see them in your mind’s eye.<\/span><\/p>\n The only thing is, if your daughter is anything like mine \u2014 modern, self-possessed, her own person, through and through \u2014 you may come to realize, as I have, that your daughter may well have no interest in participating in the ritual you imagined for her.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps your daughter is, like mine, sensitive.\u00a0 Thoughtful.\u00a0 And utterly disinterested in being the center of attention.<\/span><\/p>\n You’ve raised her well. A spirited, sovereign human, unconstrained by patriarchy or tradition. The irony is, she may not be bound by your traditions either.<\/span><\/p>\n And so, fellow Earth mamas, here we are. Have you come to the same place I have?<\/span><\/p>\n Because here\u2019s where all of the led me.\u00a0 Amidst the many petaled moon strewn effervescence of my imaginings I realized the ritual I dreamed for my daughter maybe has little to do with her than it does to do with\u2026 well\u2026 me.<\/span><\/p>\n This dream for me arises from a wish to nurture our connection, hers and mine.\u00a0 To nurture her connection to the human continuum, and myself and all of the ancestors as well.\u00a0 To weave us back into that sacred circle as though we never left.<\/span><\/p>\n But if your daughter is lie mine, she is already connected in ways that are deeply, profoundly meaningful, spiritually abloom with imagination. Today she is a dragon. Yesterday she was a medicine cat. Tomorrow, who knows what she will be. Free and wondrous, creatively gifted.<\/span><\/p>\n And if the ritual I imagined is not for her, not for her friends?\u00a0 If they would rather mark this intensely personal moment for them in another way\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n What does it mean?<\/span><\/p>\n What if the connection I was seeking was something more to do with me?<\/span><\/p>\n With that thought, a new image arises. Me, my ear pressed to the Earth, listening for Earth’s heartbeat, matching my own life to Earth’s rhythm.<\/span><\/p>\n On the outside, my search appears measured. Thoughtful. Culturally researched, rooted in years spent uncovering my own spirituality \u2014 a thread winding from my earliest days as a songwriter, through years as a scholar, to now, as a circle keeper, leading my therapeutic singing group,<\/span> Mothersong Chorus<\/b><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n But on the inside, there’s another current \u2014 a song of keenest intensity, chanted with nightingale, hummed with bee. This is me, knees wet in surf, scooping up sand to build the temple. Setting out lanterns in a spiral. Strewing my breadcrumbs for the daughters to follow. Pulling back the ivy from the garden gate, seeking that entry that leads back into the heart of things.<\/span><\/p>\n The truth is, I dream this not only for the daughters, but for all of us. For the young part of me who blundered into puberty prepared for the physical facts but nothing more. For every menstruating human who has felt confusion, shame, or fear around their body daring to bleed at school, work, church, or in any other setting where such processes are consigned to secrecy.<\/span><\/p>\n The truth is, I want all of us to be honored in this way \u2014 for the miracle of blood, sweat, breathing. I want every human being to know what it feels like to meet our body’s becoming with reverence rather than shame.<\/span><\/p>\n So here’s what I do now. I still dream rituals for my daughter, and offer them. If they feel right to her, we’ll do them together. If they don’t, we’ll dream together about what would feel right instead.\u00a0 Making bracelets, snuggling kittens, pizza and boba, maybe – who knows? (During which maybe I’ll sneak in a few nuggets of motherly wisdom!)<\/span><\/p>\n And separately \u2014 whether or not the intergenerational circle dances ever resonate for her \u2014 I do those things for me. For the parts of myself still hungry for this kind of remembrance. And for the ones who want to join me in this embodied practice of reconnection.<\/span><\/p>\n True, I have yet to lower myself naked into a steaming, jasmine-scented, rose petal laced hot spring.\u00a0 (There\u2019s still time, says a part of me!)<\/span><\/p>\n But I have this: our Tuesday and Wednesday night singing circles.\u00a0 Co-regulating together by candlelight, we dance in formation. Twenty of us. Thirty. Forty, depending on the day.<\/span><\/p>\n Dance, you say? Yes \u2014 dance. Turns out these bodies still know how. They just need a sweet, supportive nudge to remember.<\/span><\/p>\n I find nourishment there. I find joy. My heart swells with the shared nervous system settling that transpires when women and gender expansive folks drop in together to hum, dance, and sing.<\/span><\/p>\n And meanwhile \u2014 those of us with daughters can honor those daughters in their sovereignty.\u00a0 We can love them on their own terms, meeting them as they are, learning from the incredible people they are becoming.\u00a0 And, in so doing, we can return to what for me has always been the very ground of being of parenting – nurturing and supporting authentic connection.<\/span><\/p>\n A wise stand-up comic once said \u2014 (I don’t remember who, sorry!) \u2014 something like: <\/span>you know, don’t you, that when kids turn thirteen they disappear into their rooms and you never see them again?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n It does happen. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.<\/span><\/p>\n One day I tell this to my daughter, half joking.<\/span><\/p>\n “You know, when a lot of kids turn thirteen, they disappear into their rooms and that’s the last you see of them. They’re out. Poof. I realize you’ll be that age soon\u2026 I can’t help but wonder what that will be like.”<\/span><\/p>\n Bright and sensitive, she tracks my attempt at lightness, but reads the wistfulness beneath.<\/span><\/p>\n “Don’t worry, Mama,” she says. “I’m not going to do that.”<\/span><\/p>\n And you know what?<\/span><\/p>\n I believe her.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here’s Mothersong Chorus <\/b><\/a>at our spring concert, singing Wax and Wane<\/a>, <\/strong>a song written by Penny Stone<\/a><\/strong> for a girl’s coming of age ceremony.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_image src=”https:\/\/www.noevenable.com\/singwithnoe\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Circle-Dance-99-kb.jpg” title_text=”Circle Dance 99 kb” url=”https:\/\/youtu.be\/J2Mhwj6hBGA” _builder_version=”4.27.6″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”][\/et_pb_image][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes the kind of ritual you need is not the one you were planning. The ritual in question has been on the horizon for a while.\u00a0 Even when my friends\u2019 and my daughters were young, I mused on how we might honor their transition into womanhood.\u00a0 At first it felt like a question that was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,16,34,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-self-expression","category-spiritual-practice","category-stories-from-the-circle","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t