Friday, February 2, 2018

Ancestor Day

November, 20th
Every year at Wren's Nest we choose a day to honor our ancestors. Those people, places, and things that came before us and helped to shape our family and culture. We had so many wonderful offerings from near and far that were close to our hearts. It was lovely to see a bigger picture of one another, to learn a little piece of each of our backgrounds helped to strengthen our Wren's Nest culture. 
 Everyone was eager to share a little something of their ancestors! A special necklace, an old photo, a lucky coin and perhaps the more surprising was Sully's Matryoshka doll or Russian Nesting Dolls. We all shrieked with delight as they got tinier and tinier! 
Katie wrote down all of our ancestor offerings of pieces of birch bark for a later surprise. 
 After sharing and baking blueberry muffins for our celebration, we set off for the Ephemeral Woods-a magical place perfect for our party. 

We crawled, slid, and rolled our way there...




 While these woods really put on their magic show in the springtime, we love them for their openness, big balancing log, and forts. 
 We gathered mouse and rat tails and kindling for our fire. Then played pirates while it got going... 





 Once the fire was really going, we gathered round and took turns offering our pieces of birch bark to the fire, while saying thank you to our ancestors. 

 Then we celebrated with some blueberry muffins around the fire :) Made with love by all of our helping hands. 


 Definitely time for some lunch and a nice rest....
 And while we ate and rested...something amazing happened! 
 We left out our precipitation cup not expecting much but we got just about 2 inches of snow in an hour! Needless to say we were not upset by this...




 We ended our snowy romp with a visit to the labyrinth by the river. Labyrinths can represent wholeness, the journey to our centers and back again. I find them very calming but also stimulating, sometimes you think you are close but you are still quite far. 

 It was especially cool to walk it with the layer of fresh snow on the ground. 
See you next time!