Budding Reflection
by Lena Moon
Image of two hands with palms open, the hands on the right has intricate palm and fingers adorned with fresh Henna, the other hand, held by the hands of the Henna artist, creating the same design on the other hand, fingers and palm adorned with fresh henna, against a wooden table.
The women sat in a circle around my sister while her hands and feet were decorated with henna. A traditional pact between plant and woman thousands of years old. An ancient rite laden with practical purpose from our indigenous marriage rituals in South West Asia North Africa (SWANA). In older times when the woman was solely responsible for all house-hold labor the cherished earth-red stains in swirls and blossoms adorning the woman’s hand assured her a full honey-moon. A full month of sweetness as a treasured bride given time to rest and acclimate, to savor the love freshly sanctioned in holy witness of family and friends. A full month of no work, no hands in dish water, no scrubbing or laundering, until the stains were gone. The vividness and durability of the stain proof that she was not being made to work.
My sister Shadia’s celebration was not a wedding but a “budding” instead, her name for the modern unique ceremony of love she and her partner Jon created for themselves after 11 years of partnership. Creating their ceremony they had reached into the roots of our indigenous traditions and merged the ancient with modern. A holy union made of re-membering as well as birthing anew.
So we sat, women in a circle sharing from our hearts, crying and singing, and adorning our bodies with earth hues the color of our moon tides. Sisters all. Tears and laughter and henna-flowering hands weaving us together to begin the 3 day-long festivities of love celebrated within community.
That night beneath the star-kissed sky, we all gathered. My sister dressed in a purple robe of traditional patterns made in Palestine, her head crowned in lapis lazuli and love lighting her lips in an ever-present smile. We listened as beloveds of the celebrated couple came forward to honor us with their talents of song, or story, or poem. Music and merry. And many hugs. We placed the honored two in the center and pressed radiating circles of our closeness around them, hands on their bodies breathing and sending them all of our love through the touch of our hands. And we wept and we sang out in joy. Our hearts beating in entrained harmony.
On the second day of the festivities, I placed the censor my Jiddo used while he was a priest in the Orthodox Church upon the altar made for my sister’s Budding. The frankincense and myrrh wafting from the hot coals a combined prayer ancient and abiding. Masculine and Feminine, Sky and Earth, Light and Dark, eternally together. Cleansing and purifying. A scent that deepens our capacity to connect to the divine. Two resins so deeply cherished they were offered along with gold to the Christ Child by the wisdom keepers of our old ways, buried deep inside our bones.
Upon that altar of love were items brought by friends who had come from distant lands that spanned the globe, bringing pieces of their own love traditions and ceremonial altars. The altar was placed just south of the hopa arch, placed there to honor Jon’s Jewish ancestry (both Egyptian/Syrian as well as Ashkenazi). This is a union of two mixed SWANA people, whose family religions were both birthed from the devotion of our ancestors, in the common region where our blood runs from. Same lands, same waters, same blood, different faiths, One Love.
Shadia was a queen in her dress of sky-blue silk, hand-embroidered by six Palestinian women living in Jordan. The reds and golds of the thread decorating her shoulders, chest, and hips in tatreez (traditional embroidery) are symbols of plants that my sister chose.
Plantcestors*. Keepers of wisdom. Honored for their generosity.
Their food and medicine. Their myths and magic.
Her ears hung heavy with gold. Her head dressed in silver, bespoke of our queens and priestesses. A tradition steeped in knowing, forgotten, except for the beauty, buried beneath years of colonization and migration. With those silver medallions and delicate chains adorning my sister’s temple, I feel she is carrying that power and that knowing. Even if she has no conscious realization of its meaning, though in truth I think she does know. She is gorgeous, her eyes lined in kohl. Her hands tattooed in henna. Her body draped in living art.
Jon waited in front of the hopa arch atop the hill, while the village of folks that had come together, paraded my sister up the hill in a mini zaffe, an old tradition in SWANA lands when the bride is paraded from her childhood village to the village of her husband. We sang and drummed and played and danced our way up the hill with Shadia in the lead, our mother and myself flanking her sides. We sang Bint El-Shalabiya, Fairuz’ famous song about love. At the top, our uncle began to play the bagpipes as Shadia moved forward to meet Jon beneath the arch.
The unparalleled Adrienne Maree Brown stood with the lovers and officiated their ritual of love. A beautiful ceremony of community commitments pledged to by all, replaced the marriage vows. All together we publicly committed to practices of joy and resilience while dedicating our lives to our work in the world of movement-building. Next with soil and water in elemental reverent ritual we planted a bed of flowers together to remind the lovers of the community holding their love with them. With their feet they broke the glass beneath the arch together, a symbol of how sometimes in life we are broken, but like broken glass, we can be melted down to form something new and beautiful again.
We made our way down to the reception, the brass art of our people adorning the space, functionally gorgeous, vibrant metal etched in ancient patterns. We feasted on traditional foods of lamb, rice, chicken, fish, eggplant, and salad. The flavors a culinary key to a secret of our people.
Love made manifest in sustenance.
An exquisite understanding of balance, of bold and subtle combinations achieving harmony and wonder.
Food is medicine.
When I eat our traditional dishes I can taste the earth and sea of our homelands. I can sense the heat of our sun and the replenishment of our rainfall, the cool dewy glow of the moon as it coaxes life from the earth.
I can feel the millennia of love shared between people and place. The way our people love the land and water and the way they love us back. How the depth of that love revealed to us the divine and gave rise to our pantheons and practices, that in ways invisible to our unknowing eyes are still alive inside things we do and don’t even know are legacies of culture. Ways of being and doing that if we ask in earnest, can be pieced back together in the fabric of our consciousness.
The food was a prayer that night. A holy communion we all shared to commemorate two lovers and the legacy that birthed them.
We toasted them as we ate. A rite of spirits. Distillation itself a science born from our lands. The spirit principle of a plant in liquid libation. Ancient covenant. The toasts were beautiful and hilarious.
We laughed and cried and sipped our prayers for their good life and long love. A holy merging of waters in our bodies. Until it was time to dance. To shake those waters, quickening them inside of us.
Shadia’s friends came en mass comprising a full Irish band, complete with dancers. They got everyone on the floor jigging and reeling, dancing together. The lively, light, and merry tunes carrying the brilliant and resilient spirit of our Irish blood. Another lineage of survivors who know how to celebrate, to live life wide open, not only despite, but because of the sorrow.
Image of bride dressed in light blue and groom in shades of blue, being carried on the shoulders of two people, with a blurry background, the couple is smiling and joyous, their arms lifted in dance.
It was pure magic watching so many bodies skipping and twirling, laughing, and dancing their way into each other’s hearts. The spell of love settled soundly over us until we were one breath together, a being of ephemeral but profound beauty. After a long merry while, the Irish dancing gave way to the debke (Arabic community line dancing). We all circled and stepped in time with one another until we caught fire with the rhythm of the circling and our feet were frenzied with joy. This soon gave into the hava nagila and Jon’s jewish roots (both SWANA and European) shone in delighted dancing.
Many times throughout the night, I saw how much our traditions share, originating from the same lands. Branching out into new cultural practices, adopting and shifting some, but at the heart, you could still feel the SWANA beginnings.
Starting the dancing with rounds of community dances, group ritual dances (that were taught and well held), everyone was already on the dance floor when the DJ began. As he segued into Arabic dance music, we kept dancing, now in our own self-expressions, though still connected and dancing with everyone around us.
I don’t know what guided me other than the silent nudge of my ancestors, but I suddenly felt compelled to ask my two cousins to come and drum for us and to ask the DJ to stop playing. The crowd brought two chairs into the center of the dance floor and my cousins began to play their derbekes. The group circled around us and I realized at the same time as my sister, that she and I were alone in the center and so we needed to dance. Our hips swaying, our arms snaking, we moved our indigenous bodies to the sounds of ancestors alive in the beating of our drums.
Our brothers came in too and began to move the masculine energies into the dance. It was beautiful. Our family in the center, dancing, feet on earth, arms in the air, stomping, and swaying, clapping, and dipping. Each gesture ancient, full of something we thought we lost the knowing of, but our bodies intuitively connected to the sound of our drums. Those complex rhythms, no longer boxed in by the western 4/4. We were moving in ancestral embodied imagery.
Hands belonging to someone I could not see reached through the crowd and wrapped a hip scarf around my sister’s waist. The tiny gold coins began to sing as she moved back to dance again. Just then our mother entered the circle from the right holding her own mother’s hand, suddenly realizing her mother was on the dance floor and it was her daughter’s Budding, she said “Mama, dance!”. And Teta looked up at bint bintna (granddaughter) and she raised her arms and began to dance with her hands as my sister came towards her and they moved together.
Two queens, one lineage. A blessing, a passing of the torch.
Shadia took Teta’s hands and Teta began to step and bounce, her feet remembering a spritely kick-step she hadn’t used in decades. The sound of those drums moving in her something old and resilient.
The unmistakable love of one’s roots.
Teta, the root that connects us to our culture. Her tongue still speaks our language. Her cooking a mastery of our culinary genius. Her beauty regal. Her faith unshakeable. Teta who is Lebanon to us.
And she was dancing.
She was giving us the beauty of her movements. She, whose first dances were on the soil who gave life to all of our ancestors for time immemorial. She was smiling and unthinkingly giving her body to the drumming.
That moment will live forever in my heart as the greatest moment of the love-spell we were all weaving. Our elder matriarch. Queen. In many ways, the reason this festivity was even happening. And she danced. And the dance was a gift. And the dance was a prayer. And the dance was an incantation of life and love and celebration in its highest form.
We all continued to dance that night until the music stopped. It was a tapestry of love-made-visible in bodies jiving, bodies twirling, bodies crooning and sliding and rising and flailing. It was ecstasy and Earthly. Wondrous and wild.
We lay down in our beds exhausted and exhilarated, still wet with the funk of being bodies untethered, united in our celebration of love. We dreamed in torrents, unremembered in the calling of dawn.
We came back together in the final feast of our shared time. That breaking of the night’s fast with olives and bread and cheese and vegetables and the undeniable genius and medicine of zaatar, the spice of life. The oil. The herbs. The taste of our trees and soil. We ate and we gave thanks for the time of our lives, a treasure trove of memories, and a love well woven. Held fast in the earth and rising resplendent and wild in the golden winds of our breaths. As we ululated and called our ancients to witness, as the lines of our families unite to open the gates for new life.
* “Plantcestors” is a term coined by Layla Kristy Feghali.
Image of three women all smiling wide, the first being the bride dressed in light blue with shades of red embroidery, held by her sister dressed in a red dress, who is held by their mother, dressed in a golden dress.
Lena Moon is a transformational arts practitioner, an astrologer, as well as a multi-media artist. She has been working with plants, planets and people for over a decade. Her modalities are flower essences, intuitive touch, womb ceremonies, medicine songs, chart readings and guided ancestral journeys. She is a dancer, a poet, a storyteller, singer, a visual artist and a hand-crafted jewelry maker.On her mother's side she is Lebanese, on her father's side she is English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and some other European people that she is still learning about. She grew up in Haudenoshaunee lands, colonial referred to as upstate NY and currently resides in the lands used and lived in by many indigenous tribes including but not limited to the Multnomah, Clackamas, Mollala, Umatilla, Tilamook, Kalapuya, and Chinook (Portland, OR).IG: @lenamoonmagic