How we came to be Life Cycle Celebrants, By Frank.
At our home in Cowichan Station on Vancouver Island.
It was 2021, after 9 years of living with Rachel, bringing two more beautiful children into the world, creating a home and raising chickens, goats, sheep, ducks and cats together, I had a radical thought: “What about marriage?” It’s not like we hadn’t tossed the idea around before, but always with some resistance. Both of us were in the “previously married” club, each with adult children from those marriages. Weddings, we postulated, were so complicated, so expensive, so… not us? The most intimidating piece for me, perhaps, is that Rachel had once said that if I was ever going to propose to her, I’d “better do it in the most romantic way possible.” How on earth could I propose to her now and be sure that her standards would be met (lol)? What if, after 9 years and two kids, she said “no”?
That summer we were camping on the west coast of Vancouver Island and took a day trip to our most favorite beach in the whole world. While Rachel was busy collecting seashells and photos for her future art projects, the kids and I took-off to a hidden section of the sand. The kids, aged 7 and 3, giggled uncontrollably as they watched me write in the sand the words “Rachel, will you marrry me?” (Yes, in my excitement, the extra “r” went unnoticed). Promising not to give away the surprise, they ran off to bring Rachel over to the spot, while I sat there in anticipation of her reaction...
We set the date for August 1st, 2022 (Yay! she accepted!). Life continued as usual until about the end of April 2022 when it occurred to us, “Hey! We should probably make some decisions around the wedding day”. Did we want a quiet elopement or a full-on ceremony? Where would we do it? Don’t we need to find someone to officiate? That’s when a quick google search brought us to a network of local “Life Cycle Celebrants”. The first one or two we reached out to were already booked for that date – we had left it rather last minute - and we started wondering if we had left it too late and should maybe put it off for later in the year. Then, we received an email from a local Celebrant, Wendy, who had heard about our plans through the Celebrant network. She was available on our date and would love to meet us for a no obligation consultation. We did meet her; we were delighted with what she was able to offer and the wedding ceremony we co-created with her was simply the best! We were able to do things our way, with our celebrant’s encouragement and gentle suggestions. From her insightful interview of us she crafted our love story and shared it with our guests in such a joyous and wildly entertaining way. So many of our guests came up to us afterwords and said it was the most fun wedding ceremony they had ever been to. “You guys should do this for a living!” And that was our introduction to the world of “Celebrancy”!
Our wedding at our home in Cowichan Station, Vancouver Island
It wasn’t’ long after, we found ourselves sharing about how we were both drawn to the idea of doing Celebrant work ourselves. Not just weddings, we saw within the greater community a need for more ceremony options throughout our lives, for all of the stages we go through from birth to our final farewell. Especially for people, like us, with no strong ties to religious institutions no familiar cultural practices to fall back on; who do we turn to if we want to mark the threshold from childhood to adolescence, becoming a parent, commemorating any major change in our life or honouring the death of a loved one? Celebrants, we discovered, were a thing, but not widely known about. Before long, we were in communication with “The Celebrant Foundation and Institute” (now known as Natural Transitions Institute) and began our courses to become Certified as Life-Cycle Celebrants™. Rachel focused her studies on marriage and I on end-of-Life Ceremonies, the two most common ceremonies people search for. Through word of mouth, we began creating and officiating ceremonies within our community. Now, with the birth of this website, we are ready to serve anyone who feels called to reach out for any kind of celebration, see if we’re a good fit to best serve their vision and make the magic happen.
Our wedding alter
