What is a Life-Cycle Celebrant? 

Life-Cycle Celebrants® are graduates of the Celebrant Foundation & Institute. Life-Cycle Celebrants are richly schooled in all facets of ritual and ceremony, world and faith traditions, and ceremonial writing, ceremonies that reflect the needs and beliefs of the people they are honoring. As professionals, Certified Life-Cycle Celebrants® abide by a code of ethics, and a nondiscrimination policy.

A growing number of people are not connected to a specific religion and many are not religious at all. Life Cycle Celebrants provide an alternative way for people to honor the transitions in their lives in an expressive way. For interfaith and multicultural couples, Celebrants provide a way for couples to blend their family traditions and faiths through customized ceremony.

About me

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 memorable. I am able to offer meaningful alternatives to traditional religious ceremonies. I bring to these opportunities my love of language, my experience with the transforming role of the arts in ceremony and ritual, 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 desires, their imagination, and their creativity.

I have lived my life as a daughter, granddaughter, niece, sister, aunt, wife, mother and friend. 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 stars by their position in the skies. I love people’s speaking voices; children’s picture books; rain, snow, sleet and hail; kindness; and my cell phone.

My adult working life has been with 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, cyber space, 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 a Kingston-based, certified Life-Cycle Celebrant®, trained through the Celebrant Foundation and Institute (insert link), and licensed to perform weddings in Ontario.