Rituals sound beautiful. Ceremonies are beautiful to watch - the deep reverence of lighting a candle to a deity, the pouring of tea, the donning of tribal dress, the smearing on of paint. Even Christmas - the same time, the same place, the rituals observed at a friends where hands cross and crackers are pulled with laughing alternate fingers, the ritual game of cricket uniting fathers and sons under hot Australian skies. The ritual too of oft repeated habits - the scent of tobacco twisted in paper with the morning coffee.
Ecotrain's question of the week is always a prompt for deep reflection and this one is no different - @ecoalex asks:
But despite thinking about it for days, I can't think of something I'd solidly classify as a ritual. I set up the situation for ritual - the altar for meditative practice, the yoga mat, even the daily watering of plants in the summer - but my attention to these is sporadic and inconsistant. I can do a daily japa for a month and abandon and start something new. I can go to the yoga studio everyday for a week and then practice at home instead, bored with the classes.
We are far too airy for rituals. The air in our zodiacal signs make us shy away from ritual - they are too uniform, too habitual. We're flighty, mercurial, changeable, adaptable, rushing from one thing to the next. The two of us don't like to be fixed in patterns and there's part of us that scorns the sameness of ritual. It's not that we don't try to have little patterns that make us stop and think about connections to higher things, people, ourselves. Lakshmi sits in the garden with a collection of stones at her feet - when we think of it, out in the garden, we light incense for her as we garden, think about abundance and Bali where the smell of incense floated from the street. It's a hark back to travels where we admired other people's rituals.
We don't like conventions and we don't like habits - we are too easily bored. If I hadn't found my J., I'm not sure whether I could have stayed with an earth man or a fire man - his air suits me perfectly. I like the way he professes to set a habit and then goes and breaks it - it makes me smile. 'I'm going to eat poached eggs for breakfast and jog EVERY day' he declares, and I smile, knowing after one breakfast and one early morning stumble around the block he'll make an excuse to not do this anymore.
And I'm a frustrating friend and daughter. I make arrangments and change them. Once I lost a friend because we'd arranged to meet at a particular park and I texted to say 'Let's meet at the other one' and she totally lost her marbles - apparently, I always broke arrangements. Her sturdy Taurean nature could not cope with the way I ungrounded everything and I was apparently undependable. Everyone close to me who loves me just accepts that as part of who I am and goes along for the ride. I'm uncomfortable with being locked in to patterns and habits.
But this is a family trait too - sure, we do Christmas, but the menu is different every year, depending on recipes, the weather, whim. And we all go along with that. Even the present giving rules change year to year. The only thing ritual about it is that we all meet, at Christmas, at someone's house, determined in about November. And Dad, J and I are still begging for a beach Christmas, because we always, always do it at someone's house and we're BORED with that.
I also sit outside my national identity in my scorn of Australian rituals, too, that supposed unite us in common myth. Anzac Day is a marketing ploy that glamourises war (don't say that too loudly - people want to deport you for that one) and Australia Day is a commemoration of genocide and dispossession. Fuck your identity forming rituals, until you can come up with one that's about compassion and unity.
I used to really love the rituals of England that marked the astrological calender, the times for planting and sowing, the ones tied to natural cycles - Beltane and Samhain, for example. And Guy Fawkes, with the lighting of a bonfire, the community coming together to drink mulled one, to set up the bonfire. Those rituals made sense to me, but here, we don't have anything like it, and any attempt we made to mimic them just felt sad and made us miss our other home so far away.
We're also not superstitious, so any rituals used to quell nerves, ward off sickness, keep bad luck from happening just aren't part of our lives. J. had an Aunt who was OCD, couldn't leave the house without flicking a light switch twenty times in succession, just in case they crashed on the motorway. Neurons misfiring.
Rituals to give up smoking are meant to work - drink a glass of water and go for a walk every time you feel like a fag - but even then, we didn't do it with ritual - we broke every damn pattern we had and travelled through Asia and used sheer grit and willpower not to smoke. And we did it (I missed the ritual of rolling tobacco, but what angered me about the habit was not that it was going to kill me, but that I was unquestionably BEHOLDEN to this ritual, and thus had to quit it).
I'd love to have a ritual to unite us, to give a pattern to our lives. Sure, there's things we like to do, and often - play reggae on Saturday mornings, drink wine on Friday nights by the fire, but they're easily broken by whimsy and often, a desire to break free of habit and routine.
But I don't. I wake up, take ten slow breaths, hug my lover, and kick him out of bed to make a cuppa. Every. Single. Morning.
Is that a ritual?
https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU9f4FK9j91cnUGYk9hnMXuYdAFcnF6ekkpXZ5DfiByfG
This resonates with me so well. I know I just wrote about our own rituals but they are so unstructured (or at least I think so). I get really uncomfortable when someone suggests we make something a "regular thing" - like coffee dates with the girls or Friday fitness class. Immediately I go the other way feeling stifled and constrained by the mere suggestion. Don't try to pin me down. Why complicate things?
That said, the two people I have stuck with longest in life ... my husband and son BOTH love routine! They adore consistency. I seem to live to whip their world upside down and shake them up until they are completely outraged - then they rebalance until I do it again. I am positive this is my gift to them a lesson of sorts! :) :) They've stuck with me so ...
I really enjoyed your response - I found it so honest.
I'd have never guessed this about you! What a dynamic with your guys!
Ha, me too!! I mean, look at her storage solutions - so organised, everything in just the right spot!
Thanks lovely. Oh that's so true - we balance each other out. I bet they ground you! My little Taurus son would just stomp his feet and say BUT I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING! He could cope with change as long as it was EXPLAINED to him. And then he'd ground me when i was FAR too airy!!
And yes, gawd, hate being stifled - even work is a push for me!! What, show up, every day, in the same place? Eeek.....
oh, that sounds SO familiar! It would seem that our boys would have a lot to talk about! :)
I am a great organizer but the rest of the house looks like it was raided by bandits. I am skilled at simultaneously organizing and creating disaster wherever I go. Is that an employable skill?
Ahahahaha!!! Gosh we are EXACTLY the same like that! Chaos and order, yin and yang - life's great juggling act! By the end of term my cutlery draw looks like a game of pick up sticks, but at the start it's immaculate and organised!
I hear you about not wanting to conform to rituals and I was sort of against them until I realized that I needed my morning ritual to get myself out of bed and well prepared to meet the kids who are in my Pre-K class but I always remain flexible and this serves me well. Maybe your morning wake up routine is a ritual in a sense, for I'm sure it gets your day off to a good start.
So true - and I think J. is worse without a cuddle and a cuppa in the morning too - he gets a bit miffed if I'm up and off down the beach without that little ritual - he says it throws his day out!
Yep! It's always good to start your day off with a cuddle! Do you live right by the beach on the ocean? That is another one of the places I'd love to live besides living in the forest. Something very soothing about the rhythm of the waves.
I must confess to also having no ability to stick with rituals. I also tend to skip ceremonies if I possibly can. I didn't even go to my own high school or college graduation ceremony!
I have done once-off rituals in the past that were very powerful, such as candle burning rituals. And when I move into a new house I like to burn sage, if I happen to have some, to clear the energy. These are rituals. It's doing them consistently that I question. One might say, "If it works, why not keep doing it?" To which I'd reply, "If it worked, why do I need to do it again?"
I'm with you there. I didn't go to my college graduation either, or to the reunions - icky! And yes, one off rituals I've certainly done. Haha yes indeed - why do it again if it worked! I think rituals like that are nice to wrap your head around something - it's clearing space to think and process yourself, in my view, rather than the actual act or the repetition of it. I guess at times in our lives we have more need for rituals than others.
the only rituals that make sense are those that harmonize your soul. All others disappear over time or dont make sense anymore.
i prefer to think of cultural rituals as ones that give you the most satisfaction because they inspire your engagement. Religious rituals give you the most peace because they encourage your disengagement.
Shopping is a ritual that many people practice and it affords them peace of mind but not peace itself!
All of us have rituals that make sense to us but we know not the ones that we do unconsciously which balance life for us.
enjoy your rituals!