I graduated from acupuncture school.

My last big celebration like this was my wedding. It always feels like a dramatic shift in consciousness. Which is good; which is what’s needed, to propel me through the rite of passage, through the death and into a new birth.

It’s unfortunate in my mind that other people don’t consider things the same way. I attended the last two graduation ceremonies at my school and both of them were lackluster in terms of ritual force. Yes, they had their usual speeches and congratulations and everything, but no one understood that rituals and ceremonies are supposed to be theater and drama, that they are supposed to inform the body that transformation is occurring, that they are supposed to carry all participants on a journey.

Several years ago I attended the wedding of a friend that was a minimalist ceremony. No one really dressed up too fancy, it was done outside, everyone stayed standing because there were no chairs, but that was okay because the whole thing was literally ten minutes long. Everything was quite loose and casual and that was the way they wanted it. They were part of my primitivist group of friends and accordingly they kept things very simple. But from a ritual point of view it really didn’t honor the efforts of all the family and friends that traveled across the country for the event. It really didn’t contact and connect everyone with deeper and larger forces at work in the cosmos, which would have actually been more consistent with truly a primitivist cosmology. I know that they were trying to make the statement that these surface things really didn’t matter, that it was only the deeper things that were important. And I do agree, but I also now see the value of surface expression as a tool for actualizing and manifesting the deeper, hidden meaning.

I was valedictorian of my high school, so I spoke at my high school graduation, in front of a thousand or so people. I gave an extremely brief and irreverent speech. It consisted of two parts: (1) thanking three random people because they asked me to thank them! And (2) saying, “I don’t have anything inspiring to say to you, so you’ll all just have to go inspire yourselves.” At the time I did not have the same respect for ritual I do now, but also the circumstances were different — things can become too formalized and I think I was reacting to that. Probably pissed some people off. But it was hilarious to me and I have no regrets. In a way maybe I played the role of a “trickster” aspect of the very long, boring, and stilted ritual of high school graduation.

I think the real aim of genuinely powerful ritual is not about the length or about the formality but about the quality of consciousness and magnetic force imbued into it by whatever means. I have spent three and a half years in this school, learning skills that have become very meaningful to me, and I wanted my ceremony to reflect that meaning. I wanted it commemorated with genuine force. And based on the last couple of graduations I knew that it would not be done to my satisfaction.

And I was right. Many things were done without much thought. They did zero coordination of our entrance into the ceremony. The location was beautiful, but they made the mistake of seating all the graduating students behind the podium, so that if the speakers wanted to address us, they’d have to turn their heads — and remove their lips from the microphone, thus making their words inaudible to everyone else. They placed the keynote speaker first on the schedule rather than toward the end.

All of the speakers were our teachers, and they had good things to say and some of them were quite heartfelt. I felt and feel very good about them as my mentors in this art. But they were not very good at instilling the ritual force I needed. Three speakers in and things were fraying at the edges.

There was just one more speaker. Me. I think I agreed to speak because I guessed that I would be the only one who could give the ceremony the force that I was looking for. And I was right.

That day I gave a pretty damn good speech.

I had a lot of people come up to me afterwards, even complete strangers, telling me what a good job I did. A couple of them told me I saved the day. It was good to hear. But as much as I enjoyed being in the limelight, the real point of it was that I needed to carry people on that three-and-a-half-year-long journey with me. I needed to sweep everyone up into a mood, an atmosphere, a state of consciousness that showed that heights and the depths of what I felt. I needed to take my feelings and spread them wide to everyone so that they would all know the meaning of the day. So I did it, through comedy, and then through the quiet drama of personal reflection.

I’m so glad I did. It made the day for me, to be able to make the crowd mine. It’s one of the few times in my life that I’ve done that, and it’s amazing to me the power that words and presence have. Through my pouring my presence from my whole being, through my body, gestures, looks, words, voice, I touched everyone there and I gave them the only gift I knew how to give: myself. And for a short time I felt everyone with me in unique celebration of our achievement.

And so it was that I received my Masters in Oriental Medicine.

In many other ways it was such an emotional day. Imagine spending every week for three and a half years with people, sitting next to them and talking and learning and practicing day in and day out, then suddenly not seeing them again for a long time. I felt so incredibly sad, even though I was ready to fly the nest, even though I had not made any connection with them on the deepest levels. Still I came to care about them and really enjoy our collective energy and camaraderie. It’s hard to know that things will never, ever be the same. It reminds me that all things are ephemeral.

These things are as they must be, and every death leads to new birth. But death is death nonetheless.