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

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The relationship at the heart of ritual is the relationship between life and death, mediated by elemental forces. The kinds of rituals that fall out of that might be a monthly day of silence, perhaps periodic fasting, perhaps singing around the fire. All such things need to be done as symbolic testimony to the joy and sorrow of being human, not... See more

Rituals both mourn what is lost and exhort what is to come. They usher us, writes the poet CA Conrad, into a moment “where all of time is suddenly present.” Ceremonies of What Ought To Be could help us embed kinship time in our social structures and institutions. They could bring past and future into alignment with our calamitous present in a... See more