Birthday as Ritualized Passage into Remembrence

“The grief and sense of loss we attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.”

— Francis Weller, CCP grief tending training

I never heard a tree fall, never saw it release its roots and fall to the ground.

I celebrated my birthday with my partner, Rūta, on the lush banks of Lake Schermützel — a name that likely dates back to the time the Slavs settled here, derived from their word for the buckthorn. We stayed at Haus Erlengrund, a beautiful oasis featuring a renovated Swiss chalet and four cabins, all crafted by hand, yet each with a distinct character and unique details. It promised to be a different birthday, ritualistic and deep, heavy with joy and grief. Exactly how I wanted it to be. A few days before, I told Rūta I needed time to let go and to grieve, and make offerings to the forest, before celebrating the new life of spring.

The 15th of May turned into one of the moodiest and windiest days it had been for a while. Northern wind cut cold like sea ice. Most of spring had been sunny and dry — March and April were the driest ever recorded in Germany. Even in autumn and winter, rain had been scarce. The trees budded less generously, and many poplars had fallen since the last time we visited Erlengrund.

It was early morning when we woke, the weather still gentle. Rūta guided me outside and cleansed me with sage. She offered me freshly brewed tea, and gifted a tiny handmade booklet, decorated with aquarelle illustrations and the most beautiful wishes written into it.“You must remember your fire of the soul and why it chose to enter this body”, read one of the pages. “Time is a spiral”, read another. A leaf darted downward and landed before my feet.

“THE TIME WE PLANT THE SEEDS IS NOT THE TIME WE REAP THE FRUITS”

“TIME IS A SPIRAL”

After the morning ritual, we fell back asleep, snoozing in the warm bed with the waking sun on our faces. We left the large antique window open. One of the black cats from the fraternal trio Yves, Saint, and Laurent — I can’t quite remember which one, sneaked in and nested between the folds of the thick down duvet.

“The soul doesn’t know distance, only entanglement.”

As the day progressed, clouds swept before the sun, the temperature plummeted, and a strong, cold wind kicked in. Yet, I was determined to wander into the forest. The path took us uphill and then through a mixed forest of pine, oak, poplar, and beech. We have been coming here for several years now, and every visit is both a tacit enchantment and a sobering confrontation with a fast-changing climate. We waded through fallen trees, victims of prolonged drought, and building materials for beavers’ grand architectural ambitions.

Rūta urged me to pick up natural finds along the path, offerings for a tree I had yet to find or be found by, and for the land that welcomed us. The energy was different; dense, intense, electrified. Pines screeched as they stirred and their trunks rubbed against each other. Ever since that morning, I felt the weight of a heavy heart and a lurking numbness. I had been holding on to grief for a while. Grief for the sorrows of the world, for the offenses against life and aliveness, for the pain of children and their parents in Gaza, the powerlessness of wanting to do more but not being able to. A few weeks earlier, my teacher Francis Weller reminded me that the soul doesn’t know distance, only entanglement.

Perhaps it’s our predisposition as sensitive people to know the soul’s entanglement as truth in our bodies. Our nervous systems are deeply attuned to the lives of others; our senses aware of subtle shifts and changes, registering absences of lifeforms in places where once there was only presence.

We humans are part of a larger multi-species sensorium, in which everything perceives everything else through constant engagement with sense organs. It is through sensuous perception that the world reveals itself to and through us, and important information becomes knowable. This information helps us navigate decisions that concern the health and evolution of our places and community. The quality of our responses as place-participants enriches the sensorium, and supports our places in becoming more resilient, alive, and sensorily abundant. To be enmeshed in a sensorium also means that we carry both joy and grief that isn’t just “ours” in the individual sense, but the world’s. We dwell in forests of feeling.

Rūta brought a slice of cake and helped me gather pine bark, a pine cone, a hornbeam twig, and an oak branch as offerings for the land. When we made it to the border of the lake, I found a giant moss-covered hornbeam. Standing beneath this tree made me feel held and contained. The perfect place for the ritual. Close to its base, the trunk split into two large branches to form a V-shaped crotch, creating an altar-like platform between them. One by one, I placed the offerings, while Rūta burned sage as she circled the hornbeam, asking for protection.

I addressed the spirit of the land. I shared my wishes for the forest, spoke to how change affects them, how they too carry loss, root in the midst of it, feel the transitions in their seeds and leaves. I invoked my ancestors in my mother's tongue. I wept in solitude and brought an offering of water I gathered from the lake a few meters away. All elements were present.

When I was ready, I invited Rūta to come back, and together we sat down by the trunk.

I never heard a tree fall, not until that day.

A few dozen meters from where we sat, we heard a loud crack, followed by a bang and twigs breaking. Another casualty of the raging wind.

Rūta offered me to draw a card from the Sooth oracle deck. As my hand hovered over the cards laid out on the forest floor, I heard the sudden call of a bird flying off in panic. I swiftly pulled a card in the direction of the sound. I drew her Lady Mother of the Bones in the Floor: The old woman who dwells at the edge of the forest, between this world and that, who reminds you of those who came before you, how their buried bones support the living, and how the death of one makes life for another in endless spirals of decay and birth. The last two paragraphs of the text read:

“Come here, to grieve what it is you have lost, Our Lady of the Bones in the Floor says to you. Come here, to speak with the ones who are no longer with you, the ones who love you without condition.

Come here, to let them tell of you of this love, and of all the seeds they are holding in the darkest parts of the ground. Come here, to be reminded how to love the ones yet living, the life that is yours, the ones that are here.”

Ritual can feel countercultural precisely because our culture is so forgetful of its roots and ancestral practices, oriented towards keeping our hearts tender and emotions fluid. There isn’t one way to do a ritual in the same way that there isn’t one way to grieve. Ritual is contextual, and what is appropriate depends on the context you are in. The land will tell you.

I learned that while we are all apprentices of sorrow, ritual is a language our souls already comprehend. We know how to do it because we have been for hundreds of thousands of years. To quote Francis Weller:

“Ritual is a form of direct knowing, something indigenous to the psyche. It has evolved with us, taking knowing into the bone, into our very marrow.”

Evidence of ancient burial caves like Qafzeh Cave suggests that homo sapiens have been burying their dead for at least 100,000 years, their bodies carefully arranged in fetal positions. Alongside their bones, archaeologists found shells and ochre-stained stone tools, suggesting the practice of ritual. I recall the text from the oracle deck, about our Lady of the Bones in the Floor:

“Grandfathers are buried here with fine arrowheads, with hunting knives, with beloved dogs, with copper bracelets, with favourite bowls, with lily flowers, with summer plum stones. Grandmothers are buried here with pollen on their eyelids, with honey on their lips, with saffron-dyed robes, with fish scales, with goose feathers, with vessels round as hips, with distaffs made of silver.”

By allowing my tears to flow and my body to remember its inner rhythm, I return home to the territory of the soul. I gain confidence in my ability to increasingly hold more challenging conversations and healing containers for others. And this is how I believe we slowly rebuild our community metabolism and learn to be in relationship with loss, life, and each other more intimately. During my grief-tending training, Francis Weller shared how grievers walk up to the altar whenever they feel ready. When they have shed all their tears and are ready to return from the altar, the grievers are welcomed back into the village, and they are thanked. Thanked, because the release of their grief isn’t just a service to themselves, it’s a gift to the entire village.

By the end of the ritual, the trees were swaying erratically, their branches lashing the air. We thanked the place and returned to our cabin. While the grief didn’t disappear, I felt lighter. We still did the birthday thing: we danced and had fun and ate delicious hazelnut-strawberry cake Rūta baked. But that day I remembered something our ancestors must have always known: birthdays aren’t just celebrations for myself, they are occasions to give thanks to the world that gifted me life — the beings that were sacrified, the forces that collided and conspired in unimaginable ways to bring me to life and sustain me and my relatives, year after year, until this very moment. It feels good to have family and friends around on your birthday, to feel cared for. Yet to feel how care and companionship extend far beyond your close human community to encompass place, species, and ancestors allows for a much deeper connection and wider sense of gratitude.

Thank you, Rūta, healer-artist-lover-of-life, fairy of the misty forest. The grace with which you tend to the unseen and the emotional life is enliveningly infectious.

Thank you, Bernhard, for inviting us, and for dreaming this place alive, expanding people’s vision of the life that is possible.

Thank you, hornbeam, for providing rooted protection, a weeping place.

Thank you, lake, purifier of bodies and spirits, container of life, reminder of emotional fluency and inner reflection.

Thank you, Buckow, Märkische Schweiz, glacial landscape, reminding us of deep time and true nature, home to countless lifeforms.

May you remain cared for and alive.