Today, in honor of the solar eclipse, Miel Rose guides us in the basics of crafting a queer femme ritual. She says,
Ritual appeals to/communicates with the deeper parts of ourselves through symbolic action. So the key is to find the symbolic action that feels intuitively right for you.
One technique I like to use is to do some automatic writing and this is my suggestion: set a timer for 5 mins (or whatever length seems appealing). Write continually for this time whatever pops into your head. The first topic could be: what themes are up for me right now? What have I been thinking about? Are there recurring themes in my dreams? What has been most present in my mind, or what has been nagging at the edges that I’ve been ignoring?
The second topic could be: what do eclipses mean to me? What are my associations, memories? When I hear the word ‘eclipse’ what do I think of?
After this, read your writing out loud (getting in an openly curious and intuitive state of mind). If you are doing this with another person(s), look for overlap between the pieces and share what you think relates in the other’s pieces. Alone or together, see if there are already easily accessible imagery/symbolism that jumps out at you. If not, look at the themes and open yourself up to see what imagery comes to mind.
Examples– someone feels burdened so they fill a bag full of rocks to symbolize their burdens, naming them and carrying them around until it feels right to empty the bag and let the burdens go.
Someone feels called to work with water, but doesn’t have access to a body of water near by, so they fill a clear glass bowl with tap water and do their ritual around that.
Someone wants to do ritual to preserve some of the high energy of the harvest season to carry with them into the dormant winter time. The first thing that pops into their head is a pantry full of canned goods, so they turn canning into an intentional ritual of kitchen magic.
If you get stumped, or don’t have the time or inclination to craft your own right now, a really simple format is writing down either your intentions for what you want to manifest/what you are committing to/what you would like divine help with in the coming months OR what your ready to shed and let go of. Write them on pieces of paper and burn them, sending the intentions out into the universe. You can also do both of these in the same ritual, burning what your letting go of and then what you’re calling in. When you’re doing this with someone else it’s really nice to do it out loud and witness each other.
Every Monday, I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.
The Total Femme 