Making your own rituals

 I think that rituals are good for you, because they help you to remember things clearly and they cement the emotion of the moment into a memory of place and feeling and what you were actually doing. 

Now for many people the ritual can be in Church or Mosque or Temple and it is organised and a lot like the other ones you have seen or been involved in, which maybe gives you a greater sense of belonging to your family, your group, your society. But I have never felt that I needed any more belonging than being surrounded by the people I love at those moments. So Cro and me generally invented our own rituals.

The photo above is our engagement, or 'handfasting' as we called it, in China in 2007. We were going there on holiday and decided to take a padlock from a Hackney hardware shop and carve our names on it and four characters from our proposed wedding poem, then find a pagoda on a mountain to lock it onto. We finally found one at BeiBeiShan near Chonqqing in the searing heat of the Central Chinese basin, behind the mountains of the Five Gorges. I love it there.

We tied our padlock, said we wanted to stay together for the rest of our lives and then went down into Chongqing to the 'Confluence of the Yangzte' where the mighty Yangtze receives the wildly differently coloured water of a major tributary, the Jialing River. It seemed as symbolic as we could get, so we chucked the padlock keys into the river there. And we promised that our ashes would follow in due course. I didn't expect it to be so soon.

I have Cro's ashes and will take them out with me when I visit, and I will leave instructions for mine to follow when the time comes. I like the feeling and ritual that we have made. And if by then I have met someone else I love as much as Cro, I'm sure they will give my mourners plenty of ash to go round.

Our other invented rituals have followed a similar furrow. Here is how we got to our wedding:

And this of course is how we saw Cro on her way, with the first Viking funeral on our river, as far as I know, since the actual Vikings sailed up it.

So all our rituals have helped me to remember all the joy I have had in my life and remember it clearly. I also like the idea that you really can - if you want to - choose exactly how you mark those moments in your own life, to be able to live, as Blake says, in eternity's sunrise.