For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

From the Maya to the Shawnee, from the indigenous people of the Philippines to the indigenous people of Finland, the moon has been considered both overtly womanly and worthy of worship. Perhaps the connection comes from the parallel natural cycle of our bodies. Or maybe it’s because, for so much of human history, women have been allowed so few role

In a way, it’s really science that’s been inspiring rituals all along. Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology. The changing of the seasons, the long summer days, the harvest, the endless winter nights, and t

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness; in reality there are atoms and space. —DEMOCRITUS

So much of ritual is the retelling of stories. A philosophy requires more than just a list of things to believe in. These tenets must be illustrated in a way that moves you, draws you in. My mother’s vivid, careful telling and retelling of the family sagas, origins, heartbreaks, and triumphs were part of an ancient tradition, older than the written

How astonishing that being bathed in rays of light from a 4.6-billion-year-old mass of hydrogen and helium located 93 million miles away can make us feel happy?

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.

Whatever your ancestry, the list of wars, raids, plagues, famines, and droughts your genetic material had to overcome is stunning.

As long as I get to spend it with you, one blink of an eye in the vastness is enough for me.