This is a moment. See? And between now and the day that you die, what you have is moments. Hopefully many of them.
But nonetheless, that's all you've got. So then the question is, how to really appreciate them? And how to celebrate them? So I am a celebrant.
Most people when I say that just go why is she just told us that she doesn't have sex with people? I'm not a celibate. Just want to get that clear now because honestly that's the reaction I always get.
I marry people. I bury people, I name people, I make up ceremonies for people who want other kinds of celebrations too. This is me at the office. This is what I wear to the office.
me marrying a couple called Neil and Dahlia under a 500 year old tree in a forest this summer. Now Neil and Dahlia wanted to create a different kind of wedding ceremony so what they did was we appropriated a Sikh ritual called the Milni and we got every member of each of their families to make a little commitment of love to each other. So the granny and the granny and the dad and the dad all the way down through the generation. the teeny tiny little really small nieces and nephews exchanged a ribbon.
And then they tied those ribbons to a tree, which was planted in that forest as part of their wedding. This is another kind of day at the office for me. This is a group of families who have come together to learn how to play from their children, who are about to be in charge for the rest of the afternoon.
Taking the families into the forest, making up stories, building dens, destroying them, mucking about, reminding the parents how to play. For the last ten years, I've been creating different kinds of experiences. that connect people to their creativity, to each other, to their heart, and to the possibility of wonder.
I've done that for tiny people, huge people, individuals, all sorts, but it's always experiences that are created. I learned how to do this professionally and in all sorts of other ways, but also from my mum. This is my mum, Maria, and her life and her death, both. combined to teach me not only how to celebrate but how important ritual can be.
Mum was basically the best celebrator of life that I have ever met. She had a unique gift of totally thoroughly appreciating the moment and it wasn't just the big stuff it wasn't just the Christmases and the birthdays although they were a big deal as my sister will attest the Easter bunny. very important friend of the family, but it was also the tiny little thing. So it was things like, I remember once when she cleaned the floor, she'd just read us Pippi Longstocking, she strapped scrubbing brushes to her feet and she skated around our kitchen.
And then to buff the floor, she got me to lie on a rug and yanked me the entire length of the house until the floor shone. She also gave me my first celebrant gig, actually. I took...
part in her wedding to my stepdad Pete, took over from the priest and led the congregation in song. They got it wrong. I was quite bossy.
I stopped them. I'm sorry. Let's start again.
I'm a bit nicer to the crowd these days, but she did give me my first celebrant gig. She was brilliant at celebrating and I wonder if that might have been in part because her childhood was spent as a refugee until the age of six. Her parents fled the Russians invading Estonia.
And for the first six years of her life, they lived in displaced persons camps in Germany. And this is a picture of her, poster child, raising money from the Swedish charities. Eventually, that's where they settled.
And I don't know if that's why she was so good at celebrating, but I love this picture of her because this is what her greatest gift to me was, this ability to stop. and notice and be present to the beauty in front of us. She died when I was 18. This is a photo of her when she was about that age, she was 18. And she was living in France at the time and I was in my gap year between school and university.
And I went down to visit her to spend my 18th birthday with her. And we were about to go out to dinner and she fainted and she fell and she went into cardiac arrest. And I didn't know what to do. because I didn't know how to call an ambulance in a foreign country.
So I ran outside and I flagged down a car and I stopped the driver and I asked him to please go and get help and then there was this young family walking down the street and I ran over to the woman and I asked her to help me and went back inside and managed to get hold of my sister who is in America and my dad who is in England and then the paramedics were there and then the doctor came and there was an undertaker with him and I was just so confused. and traumatized and I remember as this whole chaos was going on I remember my heart shutting down I remember it very clearly it was like ice covered over and I stopped feeling and I stopped crying and I stopped panicking I just went numb and then they told me that she was dead and I stayed numb For probably the next few years, this is me on the day of her funeral. With her bear, Bengtson, she bought herself a bear, because she didn't have one when she was little. He was buried with her that day.
And this is me in her hat, in a dress that she had bought for me. Very sad, but with a brave face on. Two weeks after her funeral, when the whole gathering of friends and family had all gone away again, I was... alone in the flat where we had lived and where she had died and I was very low.
But there was this market on a Saturday and there was this one goat's cheese seller, this little old lady who would come in from the mountains only once a month with this particularly delicious goat's cheese. And I remember lying in bed that morning going, I don't want to get up ever really, but there's the goat's cheese. So I got up. and I put on my mother's black straw hat and I put on the dress that she had bought me for my birthday not long before, which I'd worn to her funeral, and I went to the market and I bought myself a huge bunch of white flowers and I bought myself the goat's cheese.
And I came home and I made myself a delicious lunch and I thought, in this moment, for the first time, I'm embodying my mum. And I still buy myself flowers. And I still buy myself delicious goat's cheese, and I still go to farmers'markets, and I still embrace her ability to celebrate the mundane. This is a ceremony which I created for those families who are playing in the forest.
This was a reunion for them. This is where they all lit candles from each other's candles and took a moment to look into each other's eyes. You see, the thing about a ritual is it's a container around a moment.
So imagine you take a frame... in an art gallery with a painting inside it. You've seen paintings in art galleries and you know you're supposed to give them your consideration.
The frame tells you so. The contents are art, right? If you take that frame and put it into your imagination instead and make it invisible and make it amorphous and make it fit around a particular time and a particular space and then fill it with light and with colour and maybe with... sounds and maybe with tastes, with words, with thoughts, with intentions and close it. Give it a beginning and an end.
You've just created a ritual. You've made an artwork out of a moment. There are so many in the world that are so fascinating to learn from.
This is Sabon Fusome. Sabon Fusome is the keeper of the ritual of the Dagara tribe in West Africa. And she told me that they see ritual as being to the soul, as food and water is to the body.
It's what nourishes us deeply. She also told me that their funerals are an entire reenactment of the life of the person who has died, right? Her granny's funeral... She said she went, look, her granny's funeral, there's this little old lady playing her granny, gets up, starts wrestling the men. And Sir Bonfus said she didn't know what was going on.
She turned in her neighbour and she said, what are we seeing? She said, didn't you know about your granny? He's like, know what about granny? Your granny, when she was young, was the best wrestler in the whole village.
She beat all the women and she moved on to the men. So imagine that, imagine your funeral being the moments and the stories of your life. Imagine what they might be.
There are so many other containers like that funeral to learn from. This is me in Bali, being blessed by a fountain which promises long life, health, happiness and abiding love. As you can see, clearly a success in the moment afterwards. But sometimes there are rituals we can draw on in other cultures and sometimes we just need to make up our own because life demands it. Last year...
I was asked to create a ceremony for a little boy, age two. His dad had died very suddenly, and the mum, on Father's Day, wanted to have a ceremony to bring in seven godfathers to come and be the male role models for this little boy as he was growing up. So she bought him a slide, set it up in a park, a circle of trees, and each of the seven men came and took the little boy by his hand and helped him climb the steps.
And then as he came down the slide, made their vow, whatever it was. One promised that he would come and play with him every other weekend. Another said, when you're 16, I'll take you out for a drink and I'll take you to your first football match.
Didn't matter what the vows were. The ceremony was what gave the role models space to give him their love and their time. This is mum and me when I was brand new.
Babies, another brilliant reason for celebrating and for rituals. One of my very best friends is about to have a baby girl and she didn't want a baby shower because baby showers are about stuff. She wanted to have something that was acknowledging the transition that we were all holding her through. So we made up something. We made a nest in her living room, we put duvets on the floor, loads of cushions.
lit candles, one for me, one for her, one for the friend who was there with us, and one for the baby girl. And then we talked about love and motherhood, and we read poems. She wanted to have role models for this little girl as she was growing up that were really bold and audacious, so she made this slide of a female racing driver, a punk rocker, a war correspondent, a poet.
And we celebrated the amazing women that are in the world who can be possible for this little girl as she comes into her life. And then we had lots of cake. This is a photograph of an 11-year-old Chinese boy who has just died of a brain tumour.
His organs have been donated to so many people, giving them life, that the doctors in this picture... are overwhelmed with the emotion of what's just happened and they're honouring him with a spontaneous ritual of the legacy of his death into the potential for life. I've been asked by Moorfields Eye Hospital to create a ceremony where the families of the people who have died and whose eyes, whose corneas specifically, have been donated get to meet...
the people who can now see as a result. Just imagine that. There's never before been a precedent for this because there's never been a critical mass of people who can see as a result of the deaths of others. It's a completely 21st century ritual.
It's multicultural, it's interfaith, but it's an ancient human need to honour life and love and death. You can create rituals in all sorts of ways. You can take lanterns and send them up. I'm going to be doing a naming ceremony in a couple of weeks where all the family write down on pieces of paper their wishes for the little girl who's going to be named. And we're going to send them up into the sky.
You can make a container for beginnings, for endings, for grief on a planetary scale, for joy, for new projects, for a home, for a heartbreak, for a depression. for an illness, for a moment. It was Mum's birthday, two weeks ago. She would have been 73. This is one of her very best friends, Jacqueline. Jacqueline took me out for lunch and bought me, Mum, us, a happy birthday helium balloon.
So we then climbed up Primrose Hill, which is this high hill in North London, overlooks the whole city. And we said our happy birthdays and we told her our love and then we let the balloon go. That little black speck in the centre is the balloon and it's... Flying off over the city and as I watched it dance over the buildings and glint in the sunlight, I thought that looks just like mum.
So if her gift to me in terms of appreciating these moments and her gift of her death to me in terms of learning about the rituals that I needed to thaw that ice around my heart can be given to you. That would be my wish. These are the moments of our lives.
Celebrate them. Thank you.