Sandy Delta park crossroads. Picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2022
For Fall Equinox, I decided to visit the Sandy Delta Park, near Portland. I’ve been there before, but it had been a while and I wanted to honor the spirit of the Columbia, while also doing my ritual for the equinox. However I was prompted to get creative with my approach to doing the ritual and thought I would share what I came up with. I ultimately decided to do a walking ritual, where I called in the sphere and the circle while walking the park.
Normally with a ritual you go to a given space and you do whatever rituals you do to call in sacred space and time. Typically you stay in the specific space, and so in a sense the ritual happens statically, in the space that you have chosen to work in. I was in a huge park and I had a specific shrine I wanted to go to, but I also knew that it would take some time to get there. I decided to take the approach of walking the land and calling in the spirits as I walked the land. I started at the crossroads pictured above, doing a stillness chant.
picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2022
After I did the stillness chant, I called the elemental archangels as well as the archangels for the underworld and cosmos and the plane of manifestation. Then I started walking on a branch of the cross roads and started doing the next layer of the call. I walked in the direction that I wanted to call in and I found this to be a very interesting experience because of how that act of walking in the direction made me even more aware of the direction. Because I was in a park, I would have to wander a little ways, so once I got to the end of a directional chant, I would wait until I could walk in the direction of the next chant, and then do the chant while walking the land.
Picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2022
Along the way I paid close attention to the experiences I had, communing with the land, nature spirits, elementals, but also the spirits I called in and allowing them to guide me along the way to the shrine to the respective places that might speak, provided I was still and available to them. Each space I came to was unique and offered its own message and wisdom. At each place, I would stop and connect and let myself be still, open to whatever message and awareness came my way.
Picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2022
Finally I came to the shrine. At the shrine I did the main ritual I intended to do. Even though I had walked the land and was far from the origin point of my initial call, I didn’t feel disconnected from sacred space and time. If anything I felt like I moved into it more deeply. I connected with the Columbia river and the spirits I chose to work with and felt the presence of the park and the land itself become part of the ritual. Once I finished up my ritual, I walked the land again and gave thanks for the presence and the magical communion that occurred.
I found this to be a novel approach to doing a working with a space and I’ll likely continue to experiment with it for the reason that I can more intimately come to know the land when I walk it and do ritual and invite in all the spaces instead of staying in one place.
