About Me
Hi, I’m Siân and I live in beautiful East Lothian with my partner and our young son. I'm legally authorised to conduct marriages anywhere in Scotland, and happy to travel further afield for wedding blessings and commitment ceremonies.
I work with Independent Humanist Ceremonies, an organisation which was set up to offer humanist celebrations with fewer restrictions, allowing everyone to have the wedding, blessing or end-of-life ceremony they truly want.
I started on the path to celebrancy following many years working in public engagement with science, writing and delivering lectures and organising a festival or two! I feel very fortunate that my job combines three of my favourite things: spending time with people, hearing their stories and creative writing. Getting to stand beside two people as they make their lifelong promises to one another or welcome a child into their community is a true honour, and I take delight in crafting a truly personal ceremony to sit at the heart of your special day.
When I’m not working I can usually be found lost in a good book, adventuring in my temperamental campervan, spending time with friends and family or rambling through the hills and wilds when the winds are fair and the weather allows.
Why Wyrd?
What’s in a name? The word wyrd comes from the Old English verb weorþan, or ‘to come to pass’. It’s a rather wonderful and somewhat untranslatable concept that I first came across as a devoted undergraduate many years ago.
It is the root of both our modern English ”worth” and “weird”, though the meaning has shifted through various beautiful forms over the centuries, encompassing ‘honour’, ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’, from the Proto-Indo-European root 'wert' via the Latin vertere, to turn or twist.
The concept of wyrd as inescapable fate was fundamental to Anglo-Saxon culture as a kind of vast, shimmering, inexorable tapestry of possibilities in a constant state of flux - not a pre-ordained fate, but one that is woven by our own hands in the moment of knowing and doing.
Wyrd is that which shall come to be, a turning towards another with honour and an understanding of their worth. It’s your destiny…
