Lantern floating is a beautiful opportunity for the community to come together for a collective moment of remembrance and reflection. This year we will not be holding a Arcata Lantern Floating Ceremony at the Arcata Marsh. This is due to an abundance of caution in wanting to encourage social distancing and staying home instead of gathering in large numbers, to stay safe during the Corona Virus pandemic.
This year we are offering alternative ways to offer intentions, hopes and remembrance in lieu of lantern floating. We plan to co-create this year’s ceremony in a video of photos, artwork, remembrances, hopes and intentions. It will be released via YouTube, here on Saturday, August 8th, and remain available on this website thereafter. The video will include local musicians, poets, our mayor and other speakers interspersed with images from this years submissions. We have a message board for intentions, hopes and remembrances on this website. We have a photo gallery of past ceremonies and for us to share your images this year of those you miss, intentions, hopes, community art and inscriptions. There are also videos on this site, including a documentary of the Arcata Lantern Floating Ceremony by local filmmaker Brianna Chapman and other videography.
This event is an opportunity to offer spiritual consolation for people we miss, departed loved ones, ancestors, intercultural harmony, healing and all we hold dear.
This event is also a memorial for all those affected by the WWII bombings of Hiroshima August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki August 9, 1945. The Arcata Lantern Floating Ceremony was introduced thirty eight years ago by the Arcata Nuclear Free Zone Commission, in part to commemorate the tragic loss of life in the atomic bombings. It is also the intention of this ceremony to bring awareness to the dangers of nuclear proliferation, and to advocate for peace and environmental sustainability.
Offerings of Intentions, Hopes & Remembrances – in lieu of Lantern Floating
We invite you to email us photographs, artwork, and inscriptions for those you miss, departed loved ones, ancestors, peace, racial and cultural harmony and all we hold dear to be displayed on this website and in the ceremony video.
Community 8.5×11 or 11×8.5 art and inscriptions submissions will also be displayed in the shop window in downtown Arcata. They can be mailed into the Arcata Public Library or brought to the library. You can also send them digitally. Pictures of the physical submissions will also be displayed on this website and in the ceremony video.
Community groups helping to create these events include the:
City of Arcata, Humboldt Buddhist Peace Fellowship, GI Rights Hotline, Shinnyo en, Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Social Action Committee, Arcata Zen Group, Veterans For Peace, Humboldt Friends Meeting (Quakers), United States Servas & Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Our deepest gratitude to Mark Larson for the photo on this page and for the many photographs he has taken of the Arcata Lantern Ceremony over the years, many of which are in our images gallery on this website.
