12/01/2025
💝🌲🦉
Being Ceremony
Friday, November 28, 2025
It is like this.
You awake before dawn,
hearing yourself called into the night.
Owl calls softly
from a distant hill,
and overhead it is still crowded
with dancing lights.
You walk,
following a different compass,
toward and past sounds
that might have frightened you
at the start of the night.
You are the arrow.
The needle swings around.
Owl moves closer as you walk,
passing to you to carry, the secret
that he has flown with through the night.
As your feet move, you find yourself singing
the trees’ song back to them.
In the east, you and Venus
wait for the sun,
while across the sky Orion
herds the last of his flock
beyond the horizon.
Long ago you gave up trying to understand
and “why” disappeared from your vocabulary,
to be replaced
with “yes”.
Your offering pouch
would mysteriously fall empty,
leaving you only
with the fluid of your body
and your breath.
Unencumbered so,
you became the offering
that never fell empty,
that never ran dry.
You step into the golden light
setting golden grass aflame,
and notice that you have been
wandering so long
that lichen streams from your body.
You might be another oak
as you sit and wait,
you might take root
set seed.
You don’t know
what will be asked of you next,
and are untroubled by that.
The word holy
sings to you on the rising breeze
and you weep.
Your tears fall as offerings
that cannot be undone.
—Peter Fonken
