What is ritual anyhow?

How are you coming through this portal of the autumnal equinox? How are you feeling this time of transition in your body, communities, on and with the land you call home?

Last week, we co-created our little online equinox ritual space. In that dropping into preparation, we were really in the question of what is ritual anyway?!

I’m so grateful for Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief as a guide and anchor amidst these questions.

Weller offers a compelling invitation towards ritual, reminding me that ritual is something we all need. And something we can all have, even when it can feel out of reach.

Ritual is a means of attuning ourselves with one another, to the land, and to the invisible worlds of spirit. Recovering this fundamental skill would help us better tend the needs of our soul and culture.

- Francis Weller

Yes, please! I want that! And, still feeling for the what, the how… Gratefully, Weller speaks to this, too:

Simply said, ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purpose of healing and transformation….Rituals rise from the land, surfacing through the bedrock and the soil, and enter the imagination of the people that live there. In this sense, rituals evolve to reflect the entire context of the people’s lives - the terrain, the animals and plants, the communal wounds, the patterns of weather, the stories and myth, the collective suffering, the beliefs…. Rituals also reflect the shared values and mythos of the community. While we have much to learn from indigenous cultures about forms of rituals and how ritual works, we cannot simply adopt their rituals and settle them neatly onto our psyches. It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are indigenous to us, that reflect our unique patterns of wounding and disconnection from the land. These rituals will have the potency to mend what has been torn, heal what has been neglected. This is one way that we may return to the land and offer our deepest amends to those that have been harmed.

- Francis Weller

How is all of this moving in you, friend?

I feel so so much longing as I read these words again. And grief - grief at how much we have lost the rituals of our ancestors, and the connection to land from which they emerged.

I also grieve how much our collective lack of deep community and interdependence makes ritual feel all the more out of reach sometimes.

Ritual provides something else that we deeply need: a level of witnessing that truly enables us to be seen. Attention is necessary for embodiment, for fully stepping into the world in an open and vulnerable way. There is something sacred about sustained attention; it deepens connection between all present.

- Francis Weller

How are we to have this quality of witnessing, of being seen, that Weller speaks to here, when so many of us don’t have the level of vibrant, intact community we long for?

Obviously, all of this stirs a great deal of grief and longing in me. And so many wonderings.

I don’t have answers, per se, but I do feel on the path, in the stream of moving towards.

I’m deeply grateful that tomorrow I’m headed into 4 days of skilling up as a grief ritual facilitator myself. I hope and anticipat that this will both as a space to be in my own grief about all of this, as well as to feel for more of how we re-emerge rituals of all kinds, not just for grief.

And as you know, I am deep in all of this inquiry and exploration as we move towards the year-long Weaving New Ritual co-hort.

It feels so essential in all of these spaces to be taking the baby steps back towards living well on the lands we call home, while also accounting for the harm of our/my settler ancestors. It feels essential to be finding ways to experiment with this in collective vs just individual spaces. It feels essential to keep showing up, even in the not-knowing.

This concert between the human and the sacred is ancient; it is held in the bones. Trust this bond. It is our healing ground.

- Francis Weller

When I feel like I don’t know how to “do ritual,” may I lean into this - that this is something all of our ancestors have always done/known/been, that it is our birthright to find our way back, that it is in us, and that the land and more-than-human world and beings will guide us.

So how might we be taking baby steps back towards ritual?

Domination narratives might have us believe there’s only one right way to do it, but I want to invite all of us into the abundance of iteration and experiment. We need all of the leaning into ritual re-emergence we can get, I think!

What’s one way you could lean into exploring ritual in your own life and community?

What’s one way you could tune into the land you call home, into the transition of the seasons that is happening around you?

What’s one way you could learn something about your own ancestors, and their connection to land? Their connection to settler colonialism?

What’s one way you could invite a beloved or 2 or 5 into these inquiries and practices with you?

I’m in these questions and experiments with you, and I’d love to hear what you are feeling and discovering.

And if you’re longing for a deeper collective container in which to explore this work, you might want to consider joining us for Weaving New Ritual! We would love to have a conversation with you if you have questions or curiosities.

We all need ritual, and we can all be in that new/ancient re-weaving. With you on that path.