Tag: life

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Gifts We Carry

On Christmas Eve, we carry gifts, carefully wrapped, hidden under twinkling lights, each one chosen with thought and love. Some are small, some grand, but all are offered with the hope that they will bring joy. The gifts we carry are not only the ones we set under a tree. Each of us carries other offerings: our hearts, love, and hope.

As a celebrant, I bring those gifts daily. I stand with people at the most sacred thresholds of their lives.

I witness beginnings and endings, holding joy, grief, hope, and rupture. I speak words when others cannot find their own. I bless unions, honour deaths, and mark moments that will be remembered long after the day itself has passed.

But behind the role and ritual, behind the calm and carefully chosen language, there is a most simple human being. Another thinking, feeling, vulnerable person who also needs the gift of love and care.

2025 has been for many of us, a year of severance. It has been a year of letting go, and not always by choice. I saw it in the ceremonies I held and felt it in my own life. People losing – work, partners, relationships; losing possibility, as well as certainty; and people losing the deep belief that true love is real, that love is something we can rely on to see us through. To lose faith in love is not just painful; it is devastating, decimating, disorienting. It breaks our resolve and shakes the entire ground beneath.

There have been moments this year when I wondered whether love was still possible in the way I had once believed in it – not as a means of rescue, not as fantasy, but as something steady and real.

And yet, again and again, the couples I married this year gently challenged that doubt. I watched them stand before one another not promising perfection or salvation, but presence. They chose love with eyes open, aware of each other’s histories, complexities, and unfinished edges. Their vows were not about being rescued, but about walking alongside; not about grand gestures, but about daily devotion. In their steadiness, their laughter, their willingness to be fully seen, they reminded me that love does not need to be loud to be profound. It simply needs to be true.

This year, I was also held by a very different kind of love – the love of my granddaughters.

Their love is innocent and pure, unburdened by history or expectation. It does not ask me to be anything other than present. In their eyes, I am already enough. Their laughter, their small hands reaching for mine, their unguarded trust reminded me of a truth we so easily forget: love, at its essence, is simple. It is not earned. It is given freely. Being with them returned me, again and again, to a place before doubt…before stories of loss and protection took hold. They showed me love as blessing, not transaction.

And then there is the love that brings us all here on earth – the journey to love ourselves.

Self-love is not indulgence or ego; it is responsibility. It is choosing to care for the part of ourselves that feels deeply in a world where hurt can be inflicted so easily, often unintentionally, as others move through their own journeys of pain, fear, and becoming. To love oneself is to learn when to open and when to protect, when to soften and when to stand firm.

Rising above hurt does not mean bypassing it. It means seeing it clearly, tending to it gently, and refusing to let it harden the heart. It means recognising that another’s wounds do not define our worth, and that compassion can coexist with boundaries.

What I am beginning to sense now, as 2026 approaches, is a different invitation to love.

Love, I am learning again and again, is about being seen.

Seen in our grief.

Seen in our contradictions.

Seen in our strength and in our exhaustion.

Seen without needing to be more polished, more healed, more “together.”

2026 is the year to be seen! This is the spirit I feel gathering…

A year of connection…not just between partners or families, but between our inner lives and our outer ones. A reconnection to self, to meaning, to one another. A softening back into relationship.

A year of gratitude…the kind that arises naturally when we survive something difficult and discover that tenderness is still possible. Gratitude for the people who hold us, the rituals that ground us, and the quiet moments that restore us.

A year of creation…new ceremonies, new ways of marking life, new language for love and loss. Creation that flows not from obligation, nor from ritual but from truth.

And a year of richness…richness of feeling, of presence, of spiritual depth. Oh, I hope that there will be material abundance too. But above all, I hope that this year, my life and the lives of those around me will feel inhabited rather than endured.

As I prepare to gift others through weddings, farewells, namings, and renewals in the year ahead, I am also tending to my own heart. I will allow myself to be held. To be rested. To be seen.

Because even those who guide others through rites of passage are always, quietly, moving through one of their own.

On this Christmas Eve, as you carry your gifts and watch the faces of those you love, may you also pause to honour the invisible treasures you carry – the courage, compassion, and love that make life sacred.

Merry Christmas!

Julie

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Finding Meaning in Loss: Lessons from a Funeral Celebrant

In a world obsessed with credentials, nobody ever asks me where I trained to write or speak. They just want to know if I can help them say goodbye.

My name is Julie. I used to be so proud of the letters after my name – I worked hard for them and I used to be employed because of them…

For most of my life, I was in education. Targets, exam results, league tables – those were supposed to be my measures of success. Achievement defined in numbers, not in kindness. Progress meant moving up a grade, not moving through love or change or loss and grief.

Now, part of my role is as a funeral celebrant. And I’ve learned that the most important lessons don’t come from classrooms – they come through love or change or loss and grief; from the solitary moments, when expressing thoughts and crafting words are all that’s left.

Nobody interviews me as such these days and no-one ever asks me where I trained to speak, or what qualifications I hold. They don’t care whether I can quote philosophy or recite poetry from memory. They just want to know if I can help them tell the story of someone they loved. If I can stand beside them, steady and sure, when the world feels like it’s come undone.

It’s a strange kind of privilege – to meet and care for people on what is often the hardest day of their lives. To listen as they stumble through memories, laughter, regret, pride. To shape those fragments into something that feels true.

Not perfect. Just true.

I’ve watched families arrive in silence and leave with a small smile because, somehow, in forty minutes or so of words and music, we have found an honest way to honour a whole life.

I’ve seen strangers turn to one another and say, “That was so them.” And for a heartbeat, grief softens. Nobody puts that in a data table. There’s no graph for comfort. No metric for meaning. But if there were, I think it would look like this: a daughter’s nod as her father’s favourite song plays. A friend’s tears turning into laughter at a well-told story. A look – the kind that says, Yes. You got it right.

We live in a world obsessed with credentials, certificates, and success stories. But when loss arrives – and it always does – it’s not prestige that holds us together. It’s presence. It’s gentleness. It’s the willingness to sit in the silence and not look away.

I sometimes think back to my teaching days. How so many of my colleagues told young people that failure was the opposite of achievement. How we rarely spoke of how much we learn through losing – a game, a chance, a person. But loss is a teacher too. Maybe the most profound one of all.

So here’s what I’ve come to believe:

It doesn’t matter if you have letters that follow your name. It matters that, when someone’s world falls apart, you have the courage to show up. To listen. To speak words that bring light into the darkness, even for a moment.

And if a young person ever tells you they want to do something “small” – to care, to comfort, to help others through difficult times – tell them that it’s not small at all. It is everything!

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Hanna Green

Hanna Green’s life was one that began and ended in perfect symmetry. Sixteen years in completion… and although it was a life brief in years, it was vast in love; immense in learning, in meaning, and in light.

How do you begin to honour such a rare, radiant soul on this, the seventeenth anniversary of her birth and the first of her death?

Perhaps, like many things too big for words, we can look to nature. Mother Earth speaks not with explanations but with metaphors. With her constant reminders. With her cycles and rhythms. Among Hanna’s great loves were watching night skies filled with stars, growing sunflowers, and loving delicate, endangered turtles. So, I’ll turn to them for their help…

One of the most powerful illustrations of both beginnings and endings is a supernova; that’s the word that describes the final, most brilliant act of a dying star. Stars are born when hydrogen atoms fuse in the cold of space, lighting up the darkness for billions of years. But when that process ends, when the star can no longer hold itself together, it explodes in a radiant burst of energy. In death, it outshines entire galaxies. And as it does so, it sends its building blocks of other beings and entities across the universe. These become planets. Oceans. Trees. People. They become you and me. So when a life ends – even when it’s far, far too soon for us to contemplate with any understanding – it does not vanish. The light continues. The elements remain, reshaped. Their love lives on in new forms, just like the stardust we’re made of.

There’s so much beyond our current comprehension about someone being born and dying on the same date. And yet, when you think about it, this cycle is everywhere…in the perfect symmetries of Gaia. The sun returns to the same place in the sky, tracing a perfect circle…a full revolution. Although this symmetry can feel both piercing and profound, there’s a completeness to it, even in the midst of tragedy.

And in that painful symmetry, nature speaks again. A sunflower, for example, turns its face toward the sun each day, tracking its light across the sky. Sunflowers symbolise adoration, loyalty, and the persistence of hope, even in the darkest of times. They remind us that grief is not an end to love, but another form of it. Even when our hearts are broken open, they too still turn instinctively toward the light. I see all of Hanna’s family doing that now. Perhaps that’s why sunflowers are so comforting in grief. Their golden faces look like miniature suns, radiant and resolute, even as summer fades. They bloom, they bow, they return again.

And then, there are the turtles. So small. So slow. So easily overlooked. And yet, they are ancient symbols of endurance, protection, and quiet resilience. Turtles carry their homes on their backs…a reminder that we all carry what is most precious with us. Something vulnerable, yes, but also strong enough to weather life’s storms. They emerge from their shells in their own time, in their own way. They know how to retreat, how to rest, how to begin again.

In grief, we often feel exposed and raw, as if we’ve lost our shell. But the turtle reminds us that healing does not need to be fast or loud.
It can be slow. It can be gentle. It can be deliberate. It can happen beneath the surface, as we learn again to move forward with care, with memory, with meaning. Hanna saw the magic in turtles. She loved them not just for their vulnerability, but for their quiet strength and maybe she saw something of herself in them. Delicate and determined; beautiful and rare.

So how do we remember someone who left this earth on the same day they arrived in it?

We remember them the way nature remembers – not just with fixed monuments – but with living, breathing symbols:
We plant sunflowers. Watch them grow tall and proud, even in rough soil. We gaze at the stars and whisper their name to the vastness. We honour their day not just in mourning, but in movement …through a walk along the sands, a swim in the sea, a dance beneath the moon. We light a candle, not just to grieve their absence but to acknowledge their continued presence in the way they changed us.

But, most importantly, we live. We become the stardust that shapes new worlds. We carry their memory not as a heavy burden, but as a spark that lights our own becoming.

The story of a life that begins and ends on the same date is not just a circle…
It’s a spiral.
Grief, love, memory…all of these things move us forward, never back, even as we return again and again to a particular day.

In time, this date might hurt a little less. It might even become a day of connection, of planting, of lighting, of remembering. It might become a day of sunflowers. A day of stargazing. A day for turtle-watching, or simply for sitting so still with anything that is precious to us.

Let the sunflowers bloom.
Let the stars remind you.
Let the light – Hanna’s and yours – keep flickering. Because what she loved most still surrounds us:
The stars: vast, bright, eternal.
The sunflowers: strong, loyal, reaching.
And the turtles: slow, gentle, enduring.

She is in all of them.
And in us.
And she will never fade.

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Emotional Choices for Wedding Music …Celebrating Love

Photo by Ismael Sánchez: https://www.pexels.com/photo/reflection-of-woman-s-eye-on-broken-mirror-2282000/

Popular music is full of powerful messages about love – not just romantic love, but the kind that helps us see ourselves more clearly and kindly. From lyrics that promise, “You make me feel like I’m enough” to ballads that speak of being seen and accepted, there’s a recurring theme: that the love of another can reflect back to us the beauty we often overlook in ourselves.

I hear some of the most beautiful lyrics and emotional melodies at the weddings I conduct…From John Legend’s “Love your curves and all your edges / All your perfect imperfections” to Jame Morrison’s “You make me smile like the sun / Fall out of bed / Sing like a bird / Dizzy in my head”
They resonate with the idea that love isn’t just about connection; it’s a mirror, gently revealing the parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten or never dared to admire.

It’s this deeply human idea, that we sometimes need others to help us see beyond our self-doubt, that inspired the poem Self-Perception, Self-Deception. It’s a reflection on how we can become trapped in a one-sided view of who we are, and how liberating it can be when someone else’s love opens a window to a fuller, kinder perspective.

Self-perception…self-deception

I walk alone through shadowed wood, my thoughts like a quiet tide,
Believing I am carved in stone: one truth, one face, one side.

“I am the weak,” I told the trees, “my footsteps slow and small,”
And every leaf that brushed my cheek seemed to endorse it all…

I wear my flaws like heavy chains, a tale I know so well,
I fed the fire of my self-doubt each time I tripped and fell.

But came a voice, both kind and strange, that echoed through the pine,
“You see yourself through cloudy glass but that’s your view, not mine.”

A mirror made of other eyes was held before my eyes,
And in its light I saw anew…a self I had not surmised.

“You’re brave,” said one, “though you can’t see that the storms you walk are wide.”
“You’re kind,” said two, “in quiet ways that slip beneath your pride.”

“You’re more,” said three, “than shame and doubt, more than you daily rehearse
Your story isn’t just one single-thread, and nor are you wholly cursed.”

And suddenly the chains grew thin, like mist beneath the sun,
The truths I’d claimed were not the whole – they were merely part of one.

For every fault, a strength was there, in balance, and not in disguise,
And I? I’m neither monster nor saint, but a human, who’s full and who’s wise.

So now I walk with softer step, no longer self-confined,
My eyes still mine, but richer now with other views combined.

Let no one write their tale alone, nor wear one mask for too long
The self we know is but a verse in another’s fuller song.

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Love in Motion: A Mother’s Rite of Passage

I’ve navigated a good few rites of passage in my life – marriage, motherhood, the sweetest transition into becoming a grandmother, and so many more quiet thresholds in between. But nothing has felt quite like this moment: standing at the threshold of another letting go, not of a child, but of a man – my son – who is approaching his 40th year on this planet and who has just gone through something I experienced many times – a grueling Oftsed inspection.

He’s tall and steady now, in senior leadership in a big secondary school, a father himself, with two daughters of his own. On the day of his unannounced inspection, I watched how he rushed in, after 12 hours at work, to cuddle his girls before bedtime.

I watch him nuzzle their necks, hold their hands, guide them, make mistakes, learn, and love in his own way. I feel an overwhelming sense of pride. And at the same time, a quiet ache.

I’ll never forget the moment I watched him marry. As the mother of the groom, it’s a peculiar and profound role…so different from the fairy-tale spotlight so often placed on the father of the bride. We aren’t typically the ones walking anyone down the aisle, or making grand speeches. We’re often quietly watching from the edge, holding a hundred memories in our hearts while our sons take a step we’ve known was coming but still feels like another tiny goodbye. It’s a moment of silent surrender, handing over the centre of his world to another, while blessing the union with love and restraint. The pride is deep but so is the ache. And yet, this too is part of the great letting go. This too, is love in motion.

Because here’s the truth no one prepares us for: motherhood is the long, slow practice of preparing the one you cannot live without, to live without you.

This isn’t a clean break. It’s not a dramatic severing of ties. It’s a subtle, complex, deeply emotional shift and one that unfolds in moments so ordinary they can almost pass unnoticed: a text replied to hours later, a celebration planned without you, a quiet gap where your voice used to be central. No longer being the first person they turn to, but one of many they might update. The shift from “What do you think, Mum?” to “I thought you’d like to know what I chose.”

And while I’ve known for ever that this is what love demands…this loving and letting go…nothing truly equips a mother to emotionally detach from the very being who taught her the depth of unconditional love.

Letting go isn’t just an act of love – it’s also a process of grief. It’s remembering the baby we held, the little child who needed us daily. It’s missing the rhythm of that caretaking, the identity that came with being at the heart of someone’s world. And now, it’s watching the cycle again, as I witness my daughter-in-law prepare to go back to work after the birth of their second child.

Yes, there is pride. Joy. Relief even, sometimes. But it’s tangled with sadness and nostalgia. A mother’s heart can be both full and empty.

There’s a beautiful transformation in my stage of life: shifting from being the hands-on caregiver to becoming a quiet supporter, an emotional anchor, a presence rather than a guide.

I’ve had to really learn to respect his family’s space, to trust his choices. And that’s no small feat after decades of being a protector and guide. But he doesn’t need that from me. What he needs is for me to see him fully, as the man he has become, and to love him from a place of respectful distance. I am so proud of him.

And my identity? That too is evolving. I’m more than a mother. I’m a nanna, a celebrant, a storyteller, and a witness to life in all its beauty and ache. Letting go has cracked me open…but you know the saying…where there are cracks, the light is coming in.

As a rite of passage celebrant, I speak often of thresholds. We mark births, deaths, marriages, retirements but this, this shift in the mother-child bond as our children become fully themselves, this too deserves ritual and reflection. Our culture doesn’t celebrate a mother’s rite of passage at all!

It is a rite that is so often invisible, but it is sacred. It is one of the deepest initiations of a woman’s life.

So to any mother walking this path with me, I say: you are not alone. You are not weak for grieving. You are not clingy for caring. You are not outdated because your child no longer needs you in the same way. You are simply crossing a threshold. One where your love is no longer shown in holding tight but in letting go with grace.

The poet Rumi said, “Life is a balance between holding on and letting go.”

And if you, like me, are learning this balance in real time, know this: there is a new kind of relationship waiting on the other side. One built on respect, space, and mutual admiration. It’s not the same as it was but it can be just as beautiful.

This, too, is love.

Love in motion!

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Celebrating Sisterhood in the Wedding Industry

The Power of Women Supporting Women: A Celebrant’s Perspective

On this International Women’s Day, I want to take a moment to celebrate the strength, wisdom, and collaboration of women…especially within the wedding celebrant industry. In a world often dominated by conflict, competition, and the pursuit of power, there is something profoundly radical about collaboration, care, and community. The wedding celebrant industry is a shining example of this; where women support women, lifting each other up, and working towards recognition, not just for ourselves but for the profession as a whole. As we strive to be recognised as legal registrars, we do so not through conquest, but through unity.

History has lauded and celebrated the leading men of the world, quite a few of whom have marched into battle, made decisions from ivory towers, and frankly left a mess. Right now the world needs to be different. What if soft skills of empathy, cooperation, intuition, and wisdom were valued as much as strategy and force? The truth is, they should be, and in our industry, they are.

Wedding celebrants have always been more than just facilitators of vows; we are storytellers, guides, and the keepers of love’s most sacred moments. And in this profession, we see firsthand what happens when people work together, with love, rather than against one another. Women in this industry champion one another, share resources, mentor newcomers, and celebrate successes together. We know that recognition and success for one of us means progress for all of us.

But let’s take a moment to acknowledge the men who support this too…the ones who recognise the power of women working together and stand beside us, not threatened by our wisdom but empowered by it. These are the men who know that strong, wise, and capable women were once accused of witchcraft for simply daring to be themselves. They celebrate our collective strength, knowing that a world where women lift each other up is a world where everyone rises.

So, as we push for celebrants to be recognised as legal registrars, let us continue leading with the values that define us: collaboration over competition, wisdom over war, and community over conquest. If the wedding industry has taught us anything, it’s that love is built on partnership and perhaps, just perhaps, a world that embraces these principles could find a little more peace too.

Happy International Women’s Day!