One City’s Secret to Happiness: The Annual Burning of a 50-Foot Effigy

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

... See more

Ritualization is a potent stabilizing agent, a simple salve for a stressful time if only we are mindful of how we use its powers.

Absorbed in comfort, we are restless. Drowning in excess, we are hollow. The statistics confirm what our souls already know: despair has metastasized, anxiety has become our natural state, and in the absence of real suffering, we have made a spectacle of our own discontent.