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 festi... See more

we could seek out ways to coordinate our days with the biological rhythms where we live. Observing isn’t enough, because kinship time is time made together; we must let wild clocks adjust our sense of connection, particularly where their rhythms are becoming disordered. In practical terms, we might discover this sense of time in ritual.

Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte calls this kinship time, a way of experiencing time in relation to other living things.

It is in the nature of rituals to grow and change, as the world they connect us with changes

“What tense would you choose to live in?” the poet Osip Mandelstam once asked his journal, before answering his own question. “I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.’”

Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene.