How We Came to be Life-Cycle Celebrants

By Frank Wall, Certified Life-Cycle Celebrant (SoulfulNatureCeremonies.com)*

It was 2021. After 9 years of living with Rachel and 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 supposed, were so complicated, so expensive, so… not us?

Perhaps the most intimidating piece for me is that Rachel had at once years before said that, ”if I was ever going to propose to her, it better be done very romantically, I’m not going to say yes to anything lackluster and uninspired”. How on earth could I pop the question 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 and very remote 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 marry me? - Frank” (Yes, in my excitement, the extra “r” went unnoticed and why on earth did I need to sign my name? Was there a chance she would mistake this message as coming from someone else on the beach that day?). Promising not to give away the surprise, they ran off to bring their mom over to the spot while I sat there in anticipation of her reaction...

Our Wedding Alter

We set the date for August 2022 (Yay! she accepted!). Life continued as usual until about the end of March 2022 when it finally occurred to us, “Hey! We should probably make some decisions around the wedding day”. Suddenly there were a whole lot of decisions to be made. Naturally Rachel, as a creative non-conformist, does not like to do things the way everyone else does. She wanted a wedding in nature that did not follow expectations, and I totally agreed.

Then there was the question of “how do we find someone to officiate?” That’s when a quick google search brought us to a small network of local “Life Cycle Celebrants”. The first few 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. But by happy chance, we received an email from a local celebrant, Wendy, who had heard about our plans through the celebrant grape vine. She was available on our date and would love to meet us.

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! With our celebrant’s encouragement and gentle suggestions, we were able to do things uniquely our way. 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. Our guests were laughing, applauding and occasionally wiping a tear from their eye. So many of our friends 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!” was a refrain we heard many times that day. 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, that 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 of moving from childhood to adolescence, becoming a parent, commemorating any major change in our life, getting married, or honoring the death of a loved one?

Celebrants, we discovered, were a thing, but not widely known about.

One year after our wedding, 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.

Another year later, after graduation and certification and ordination, 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.

Many thanks to Ace Hicks Photography for her photos from our wedding!

Soulful Nature Ceremonies is a husband and wife team of Life Cycle Celebrants who are recent graduates of the courses now offered at NTI. Rachel has a passion for nature based ceremonies and altars with a particular interest in officiating weddings in wild places. She is also a fine artist of classic west coast landscape paintings. Frank is a funerals celebrant who loves serving his community and connecting with people and nature through his photography, in men's circles and in creating ceremonies for all of life's major transitions.

*This article first appeared on the Soulful Nature Ceremonies website, here.  

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