On rituals, magic, and connection
Why walking my dog and making a hot beverage are so essential
I’m not sure if it’s just the introspective nature of winter, with its long nights and bitter cold, or the nature of new years, but lately I find myself returning to some themes I think about often.
And so I’ve been reflecting a great deal on the idea of rituals.
This may be partially because I’m reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s lovely Braiding Sweetgrass, which mentions ceremonies and rituals with reverence.
It may also be because I’ve tried at least twice to write a post here about rituals, only to either not publish it or delete it before getting that far.
And it may also be because I just went through hospice volunteer training and one of the common themes in this training was staff and volunteers talking about the importance of developing rituals to help prevent your life from bleeding into your time with hospice clients. For example, one of the rituals that was suggested was imagining a basket next to the door before you walk into a home or room. You imagine placing your day up until that point—all its worries, its frustrations, the busy details, everything—into the basket. Then you go in to work with your client. Then, upon completing your visit, you pick your day’s details back up from the basket on your way out. In essence, you set aside your life so that you can support and be present for the end of someone else’s life.
So needless to say, the universe has been giving me a lot of ritual fodder to think about of late.
But if I reflect on 2024 (which I’ve been doing a bit lately), I must admit that I’d been thinking a great deal about rituals last year, too.
I started reflecting on them during and after my end of life doula training near the end of 2023. And, as is my wont, I asked my good friend Ari Weinzweig what his thoughts were on rituals.
We had a brief email exchange about them in November and December 2023. And since we both chew on ideas for a while, that conversation continued in fits and spurts into 2024. In August 2024, Ari published his own take on rituals in a weekly newsletter piece titled Reflecting on the Role of Organizational Rituals: Done well, rituals can make a meaningful difference.
He published this right as I was drafting and struggling with my own Substack post on ritual, which I never published because it didn’t feel right.
Here, then, is my own meditation on ritual: what forms a ritual, what distinguishes it from routine, and why we could all use a bit more ritual in our lives right now.
What forms a ritual
My short answer: almost anything, if you approach it the right way.
In my reading and thinking about this, I believe ritual has a loose structure:
You’re completing an action that initially, perhaps, serves a different purpose, perhaps a practical one.
You develop a routine for that task.
There is something in the routine that is more than the routine itself. This might be an intention, a bit of joy or delight, a spiritual center—however you want to describe this. It’s an opening for joy or magic to enter the routine. At this point, the routine elevates to the level of ritual.
While the joy or magic might not be present every time, the practice of performing the ritual, like a meditation practice, keeps you open and present while you’re participating in the ritual.
Since you probably haven’t spent months ruminating on this, here are a few examples that I hope will showcase those details more:
Example #1
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about “ceremony” as opposed to “ritual”, but since we seem to be using the word in a similar way, I’m running with it.
She writes about a ceremony her father had when they were out in the woods, how he would always offer the first pour of coffee to the earth and say “Here’s to the gods of Tahawus” before pouring coffee for them to drink.
Kimmerer thought for a long time this was a ceremony that had been handed down in her family for generations, but it turned out that it was something her dad started. First, as a kind of practical matter, because it was boiled coffee and the first cup was full of grounds. But that routine crossed the line into ritual at some point:
“But, you know,” he said, “there weren’t always grounds to clear. It started out that way, but it became something else. A thought. It was a kind of respect, a kind of thanks. On a beautiful summer morning, I suppose you could call it joy.” (37)
I like the threads here:
A thought, an intention.
A kind of respect to the world at large, maybe also to yourself.
A kind of thanks or gratitude, again both maybe to the world at large and to yourself, or for the thing you’re structuring the ritual around.
And some joy, the joy the ritual gives you in being present and taking the moment for it.
Example #2
I've considered ritual a lot from a thru-hiking perspective (shocker, I know!). There's a lot of ritual involved in a long hike, though I'm not sure everyone would use that word.
But the process of breaking camp or setting up camp: those were tasks I performed in generally the same way, in the same order. These served a practical purpose: they were tasks I needed to complete.
Initially they were conscious and varied, but as they became more familiar, I did them almost without thinking. At first they took a great deal of focus and attention and conscious thought, but as I did them every day for nearly six months, they became habit and almost subconscious.
But rituals are more than habits or routines.
What elevated these tasks to rituals, for me, was how much they bookended my day. I started off the day by breaking camp: eating my cold-soaked overnight oatmeal, taking down my hammock and cover and folding them and packing in a certain way, etc. I finished my day by making camp: hanging my hammock, unpacking my pack, eating dinner, journaling, and reviewing what I would do the next day.
I did take delight and comfort in the ritual. But the time also felt sacred, in a way.
No matter how rough the day had been, I had these two certain rituals that I would do. They were things I did no matter the weather or my mood, but they were also the only substantive chunks of my day where I wasn't hiking.
With no "home" to go home to at the end of the day, they were how I constructed my sense of home. There’s magic in that.
Example #3
The consistency of routine is something my partner teases me about sometimes, how there are certain ways I like doing things. To an outsider, it might seem like a control or a pickiness thing, but underlying a lot of it is that same sense of ritual. Here is time I set aside in my day to do x, and I do x in these ways...
There is something meditative about it. I am both paying attention but also not paying attention. It's familiar so I don't have to think about it a ton, but there is a sense of doing the thing the "right" way and a sense of rightness as it is done. Making my morning hot beverage has this feel.
But there’s also something in the form of disciplined practice about it, practice in the sense of meditation or gratitude. I show up, I complete the ritual, and there is a deliberateness to it that matters.
Take walking the dog. For many people, this is often viewed as a bit of a chore, and you look forward to having it done more than doing it.
For me, it generally is a ritual. Being out on a walk grounds me. It helps me connect to my thru-hiking self, the Sassafras part. I walk quietly with my dog in the hopes that we’ll see good critters. Lately we’ve been seeing or hearing a lot of owls, and you have to be really quiet and pay attention to catch them in flight because they’re so quiet. In warmer months, I stop to photograph fungi or I stare at mosses or lichen. I watch my dog closely to soak up some of her joy and delight in being out.
Walking has long been how I process things, especially the heavier emotions like anger or grief or sadness. Having a dog just makes me do this far more consistently than I did before her.
Are there days that feel more like habit or routine? Yes, definitely.
But there are also many days where the walk transcends habit or routine. When we listen to a barred owl hoot for 15 minutes and, maybe, catch a glimpse of them. When we almost stumble into a porcupine, or we accidentally time the hike just right to see the setting sun, like this:
Why rituals matter
Part of why I believe rituals matter is the consistency or discipline of doing them often, if not daily. Doing something consistently creates an underlying thread tying our lives together, through the good and the bad.
They’re often taking something mundane and morphing it slightly into something that is, if not actually magical, then something that has room for magic.
Again, Robin Wall Kimmerer has some good insight here:
That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.
What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home. (37-38)
Why rituals matter so much to me right now
Why am I finally writing about this, almost a year and a half after I began my conversation with Ari about it?
Rituals bring a bit of comfort amid chaos. No matter what’s going on in your life, many rituals are things you can still engage with, to create that sense of consistency and, perhaps, comfort—or at least familiarity.
There’s also a foundation here that helps us weather the unexpected. Rituals ground us. The very mundane, routine nature—the initial practical motivation for the ritual—keeps it relevant and present. But it also grounds us and keeps us tied to reality. No matter how lofty, this ritual was most likely born from some kind of basic need. So we’re grounded even as we may face the unexpected: maybe magic, maybe presence, maybe a door opening to something surprising or shocking. Because the ritual is grounded in a need, there’s a piece of it that’s always familiar and mildly comforting, so we can enter the unexpected a bit calmer and more centered.
I don’t know about you, but my reality of late is full of a lot of unexpected things, many of them deeply stressful. I’m struggling a bit to manage these stressors. In the last few weeks, I’ve developed mystery sore throats, GI distress, massive overnight fevers, and some wild facial rashes. These are all Long Covid-related stress symptoms for me. So in every way, my body is sending up every red flag to say: Whoa, things are NOT okay.
These symptoms are signs for me that I need to find ways to remove stress where possible. Rituals can be one way of doing this.
But I would suggest it’s something more than this, too. As Robin Wall Kimmerer says:
“Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land.” (37)
Rituals—or ceremonies—are ways we connect ourselves to others, whether those others are of the human, animal, or plant variety, or whether they are our planet itself. In a time ripe with chaos and uncertainty, when we seem to be battling isolation, a turn toward a bit of ritual or ceremony feels like a turn toward connection.
So, my lovely, give yourself some time this week to contemplate the rituals or ceremonies within your life. Maybe they’re something as simple as making your morning cup of coffee, or the hug you give your partner before one of you leaves for work, or an activity you do with your child. Maybe they’re slightly more formal, like a prayer or service, a workout or practice, an agenda you use to structure all your work meetings.
Make no mistake: we all have these rituals. But often we complete them more in the way of routine, without the awareness and space to elevate to a ritual.
This week or month or year, my wish for us is that we can place enough awareness or attention on these so that they do transcend to the ritual. So that we may be both more grounded and more connected—to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us.
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Beautifully written! I loved Braiding Sweetgrass.