🌿 A Gift for the River – A Water Ceremony to Honour the Medway 📅 Saturday, 26th July | 🕡 1 PM – 3 PM | 📍Rochester Castle Gardens
This is part of Friends of the River Medway's pilgrimage - From Source to Sea (19th to 27th July) - and the River Medway Celebration(26th July), a full day of activities designed to honour the River.
You are warmly invited to join us as we gather to celebrate and give thanks to the Waters of The River Medway and the entire World, in the creation of a glorious Golden Seed Offering which together we will fill with our energies and vision for the care, protection, guardianship and Rights of the Waters. Once created, we will gift our Offering to the Waters of The Medway as did the ancestors in ancient times past.
This is a gentle, beautiful and transformative community event to which all are welcome.
The Despacho
We will together, using objects from nature and with specific significance, create a beautiful offering (called a Despacho) that is imbued with our heartfelt wishes for the health of the River Medway. By making this offering we align with an indigenous Wisdom Tradition that has given back in this way for countless generations. This traditional offering allows us to align more deeply with the healing and nourishing nectars of Nature.
The Golden Wealdland Seed
In ancient times, the Brythonic people of these islands and beyond, placed offerings of seeds, precious stones ,and metals into clay votives and placed them at sacred sites including waterways. To them, the natural springs, lakes and rivers were Sacred – the bringers of life.
Made from Wealdland Clay, the material beneath our very feet and the very same that the ancestors placed their own offering within, we will place, a great open symbolic golden seed of potential, within the centre of the Despacho.
Attendees will then be gifted with small pieces of clay and invited to craft their own seed form and then be guided in how to imbue their unique seed with their hopes and visions and prayers for the River Medway and the waters of the Earth.
These seeds will then be placed into the Great Golden Seed and sealed, as an offering within an offering.
We will then as a group continue to ‘feed’ the Seed and the Despacho with energies of love, appreciation, giving and joy.
When filled to the brim, there will be a Blessing of the Offering and then it will be carried down to the Waters and gifted to them.
