The Root of Ritual

Cycle of Ritual illustration from Year of the Dark Goddess

✨No Perfection::Only Devotion✨

In the midst of transition I learned to trust my ceremonial practice. I’ve been through enough now to know it is the cornerstone of reciprocal consciousness, raising my awareness of the sacred balance of offering and receiving happening in every moment. When I feel off balance, overwhelmed or afraid, I turn to ritual — ritualizing my routine, my days and encoding my prayers in symbolic action.⠀⠀

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Ritual acts on the unconscious/spiritual/energetic level, opening pathways and transforming life force energy, also known as the web of wyrd, through simple action imbued with intention. I often say anything done with intention is ritual, and often the easiest and most supportive way to build ritual into our lives is to bring intention to what we do already — eating, bathing, sleeping, for example.

Ritual is co-creative, it requires agency, but also allows for a dynamic support beyond the concept of self. In ritual I may work with the elements, plants, ancestors, the time of year, solar/lunar influences, the directions place wights, stones, insects, animals, birds, a thousand-million-billion-infinitude of possible allies in the transformational relationship. Ritual reminds me that even in the darkest or most unstable times in my life I am never alone, connected forward and back through all of time and creation.

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Thus ritual is deeply supportive, and also sovereign. When supported in ritual by my ancestors and helping spirits, the elemental and animate life around me all the time, this helps me be less reliant on my human relationships for constant approval or love. I can root into the natural world, the restoration of spiritual practice rather than grasping for others — helpful as no humans are available to meet all our needs all the time. Connectivity, affirmed in ritual, reminds me that I am always accepted and loved by nature, by my ancestors, and by the vast incomprehensible macro-micorcosm of creation. In ritual I come home to myself.

ritual circle with mugwort and snow

My rituals are pretty simple and repetitive. They begin with gratitude, hold symbolic acts of feeding the spirits, and center on clearing so I can better hear what is being asked of me. When I am in crisis, sick or hurt, scared or sad, my rituals become the anchor of my day — morning, noon, before bed, bathing at meals and before work, in alignment with the seasons or cycles of earth and moon…every act is an opportunity for ceremony.

This is what sustains me. When life tips again to center, I still practice. These tiny rituals make my life more beautiful, my relationships more balanced, and increase my love in each day, even when it is difficult. The process is imperfect, nonspecific, lived.

It is a prayer: by this and every effort may the balance be regained. ᚨᛚᚢ