Danna D. Schmidt
Master Life-Cycle Celebrant®
Ordained Wedding Officiant
Funerals/Memorials Specialist
Certified Grief Educator/Tender
ADEC-Certified Thanatologist®
Spring Equinox is upon us, and she brings with her an extra bright nightlight in the form of the super worm moon to help illuminate our way this season. It’s been 19 years since the earth and moon last aligned in such a way on this day.
Nineteen years ago, I was oblivious to the Vernal Equinox and the moon’s movements. I was doing all I could to catch sleep. I was parenting a five-month-old, potty training and chasing a toddler, and fitting my hotel sales work into my schedule where and when I could. If Spring Equinox was a heralding of balance and equilibrium that year as every year, I had not received the memo.
And so here I have a redux. Life couldn’t be more different. I still feel out of whack and misaligned, but for entirely different reasons. No longer do I have kids to chase except via text. No longer do I have to hide in bedroom closets and mimic the motions of air traffic controllers in order to make work phone calls.
A fresh new season is here yet it’s not one that heralds rebirth, renewal, and flowers and butterflies. Not yet.
I will celebrate the warmth of a rare 75-degree temperature day by seeking out the worn pathway of the local labyrinth with its time-honored design that has contemplatives like me meandering inwards to the still point at our core, before returning back out into the world, ideally with a greater sense of reclamation.
And I will also find myself seeking out a nearby creek and its muddy embankment in order to sink my toes into the soft earth. So much of what I seek at this winter/spring threshold, where the last patches of snow only just finally melted, is a kind of rootedness and connection to the earth. I want to mold my feet into this cold wet clay so that I might know stillness and a somatic sense that the resilient ground will hold me. I yearn to feel the messiness of such a foot bath that I might better appreciate the healing elixir of a cleansing food scrub thereafter.
Release. Renew. So much of what I want to let go of I will bequeath to the mud. Sorrow, uncertainty, shame, confusion, inertia. Let these be mud concerns now.
Spring is here which means it’s time for me to shed my shoes, wiggle my toes as worms know to do with their whole shimmering selves, and dare to stand upon the holy ground of a brand-new season in life.
My unofficial almanac for this winter of 23/24, brought to you by the letter L, is that it has been the winter of listening and lamenting (so much lamenting for a world gone utterly mad). It’s been the winter of loosening and lightening. And it’s been the winter of leaning in which was all about… Continue Reading
Here we come to it again. The high, holy midpoint of the year. We are halfway to somewhere or something, and halfway past that other place and time that chronicled 2023’s arrival. And maybe this still point, this Midway Madness, is the posture best assumed for this day. To plant yourself outside, in whatever way… Continue Reading
“Who said death is dead? He’s fully alive, traveling around the world, throwing shadows and soaking in the sun. Visiting the young and old; placing bets and dicing regrets, for the worse or a better off place.” Anthony Liccione This week in my grief educator training workshop, we engaged in an imaginal chat with Death… Continue Reading
The autumn equinox is upon us and ah, yes! As the poet Rilke reminds us in his poem “Autumn Day,” “it is time. The summer was immense.” Maybe not immense enough for those of us who see so little of the sun in the other three seasons, but I enjoyed my days in it, nevertheless.… Continue Reading
Tiny dust-cumulus rise on each side of the rhythmic broom. The worse the news the more I sweep.” excerpted from “Sweeping Equation” by Dory L. Hudspeth I’m not what you would call the world’s cleanest person but there are few moments of contentment I cherish more than sequestering myself away in a small cabin in… Continue Reading
But the discipline of blessings is to taste each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet and the salty, and be glad for what does not hurt. The art is in compressing attention to each little and big blossom of the tree of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit, its savor, its… Continue Reading
We are each other’s immortality. Each of us is a skein of lives stretching forward and backward in time, connecting everyone we have known, everyone they have known, and everyone who will come after us. We carry each other back from the threshold of life and death. Some part of those we loved is gone… Continue Reading
Photo Credit: Phil’s Camino In the late evening hours and under the lamplight of a waxing crescent moon last Sunday evening, a man named Phil Volker walked the final steps of this life’s Camino and crossed the gates into that heavenly Santiago, which he understood to be the end of all this earthly trudging and… Continue Reading
“Bless your heart, Danna. Bless your stupid, delusional, pea brained, Pollyanna heart, Danna. You will never, ever learn, will you?” True story, circa late last night. I’m standing in the greeting card section of Target. I went there looking for floating candles for a memorial ritual I’m constructing this weekend for a family. But I… Continue Reading