“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

For me, the visit to the bakery was more about the brownie with mint icing that I called a “greenie,” and that I ate ferociously in my car seat on the way home. This was another kind of holy sacrament, my first appreciation of what it felt like to finish the week, to transition from work to rest (even if, for me, at that time, work largely

We needn’t resort to myth to get that spine-chilling thrill of being part of something grander than ourselves. Our vast universe provides us with enough profound and beautiful truths to live a spiritually fulfilling life.

Nature is full of patterns and we humans love finding them, creating them, repeating them. That’s at the core of language, math, music, and even ritual, which is the repetition of words or actions deemed worthy of representing something bigger than ourselves. Some rituals are very private, some are very public. Some are so commonplace we don’t even

No matter how many rituals we have, we all also experience uncertainty every day. Maybe even every hour. What should I do? Is this true? What is going to happen? Impossible to predict, the future tortures us. Something absolutely shocking can happen at any moment. What a toll this takes on us. How many small tools have we created to combat this, to

He saw rite, or ritual, as a kind of three-step path from a state of separation to a state of togetherness. Things are one way: separate, apart. Then there is a transformation, a transition, a change. When that is complete, everything is together, united or reunited.

The ideas that “everything happens for a reason” or that certain things are “meant to be” are often offered as reassurances. But, to me, they are not as astounding or awe-inspiring as the idea that, in all this chaos, somehow you are you.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly

Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change.