I care deeply about honouring the major transitions in our lives – births, marriages, and ceremonies at life’s end. As a celebrant, I will work with you to mark turning points in life with ceremonies that are personal, beautiful, and meaningful.
To each ceremony, I bring my love of language, my experience with enriching ceremony and ritual through the arts, and my desire to honour people of all ages as they mark passages through their lives. Having been a teacher all my adult life, I delight in drawing out and supporting people’s imagination and desires.
I love to walk, to swim in lakes, to sew, to create beautiful things, to read, and to sing. I know birds by their calls and songs, wild flowers by their names and habits, trees in the winter by their shape and bark, and I’m beginning to know stars by their position in the skies. I love people’s speaking voices, children’s picture books, and all weathers – rain, snow, sleet and wind.
My working life has focused on children and the arts, as a teacher, as a researcher, and as a professor of education at Queen’s University. I continue to rely on our three daughters and their partners and friends to keep me current in thought, new media, and the arts. I rely on my women’s group – we’ve been meeting monthly for 27 years – to grant me their wisdom and keep me humble, and I rely on my husband to make me laugh every morning before breakfast.
I am an Ottawa/Kingston based, certified Life-Cycle Celebrant®, trained through the Celebrant Foundation and Institute, and licensed to perform weddings in Ontario. Life-Cycle Celebrants are richly schooled in all facets of ritual and ceremony, world and faith traditions, and ceremonial writing. They create and officiate at ceremonies for people of many faiths, for those with no religious affiliation, and all LGBTQ + couples.