The Dilemma of Ritual for One Who Hates Conventions and Habits

Rituals sound beautiful. Ceremonies are beautiful to watch - the deep reverence of lighting a candle to a deity, the pouring of tea, the donning of tribal dress, the smearing on of paint. Even Christmas - the same time, the same place, the rituals observed at a friends where hands cross and crackers are pulled with laughing alternate fingers, the ritual game of cricket uniting fathers and sons under hot Australian skies. The ritual too of oft repeated habits - the scent of tobacco twisted in paper with the morning coffee.

Ecotrain's question of the week is always a prompt for deep reflection and this one is no different - @ecoalex asks:

'What rituals do you have and why are they important to you?'

But despite thinking about it for days, I can't think of something I'd solidly classify as a ritual. I set up the situation for ritual - the altar for meditative practice, the yoga mat, even the daily watering of plants in the summer - but my attention to these is sporadic and inconsistant. I can do a daily japa for a month and abandon and start something new. I can go to the yoga studio everyday for a week and then practice at home instead, bored with the classes.

We are far too airy for rituals. The air in our zodiacal signs make us shy away from ritual - they are too uniform, too habitual. We're flighty, mercurial, changeable, adaptable, rushing from one thing to the next. The two of us don't like to be fixed in patterns and there's part of us that scorns the sameness of ritual. It's not that we don't try to have little patterns that make us stop and think about connections to higher things, people, ourselves. Lakshmi sits in the garden with a collection of stones at her feet - when we think of it, out in the garden, we light incense for her as we garden, think about abundance and Bali where the smell of incense floated from the street. It's a hark back to travels where we admired other people's rituals.

We don't like conventions and we don't like habits - we are too easily bored. If I hadn't found my J., I'm not sure whether I could have stayed with an earth man or a fire man - his air suits me perfectly. I like the way he professes to set a habit and then goes and breaks it - it makes me smile. 'I'm going to eat poached eggs for breakfast and jog EVERY day' he declares, and I smile, knowing after one breakfast and one early morning stumble around the block he'll make an excuse to not do this anymore.

And I'm a frustrating friend and daughter. I make arrangments and change them. Once I lost a friend because we'd arranged to meet at a particular park and I texted to say 'Let's meet at the other one' and she totally lost her marbles - apparently, I always broke arrangements. Her sturdy Taurean nature could not cope with the way I ungrounded everything and I was apparently undependable. Everyone close to me who loves me just accepts that as part of who I am and goes along for the ride. I'm uncomfortable with being locked in to patterns and habits.

But this is a family trait too - sure, we do Christmas, but the menu is different every year, depending on recipes, the weather, whim. And we all go along with that. Even the present giving rules change year to year. The only thing ritual about it is that we all meet, at Christmas, at someone's house, determined in about November. And Dad, J and I are still begging for a beach Christmas, because we always, always do it at someone's house and we're BORED with that.

I also sit outside my national identity in my scorn of Australian rituals, too, that supposed unite us in common myth. Anzac Day is a marketing ploy that glamourises war (don't say that too loudly - people want to deport you for that one) and Australia Day is a commemoration of genocide and dispossession. Fuck your identity forming rituals, until you can come up with one that's about compassion and unity.

I used to really love the rituals of England that marked the astrological calender, the times for planting and sowing, the ones tied to natural cycles - Beltane and Samhain, for example. And Guy Fawkes, with the lighting of a bonfire, the community coming together to drink mulled one, to set up the bonfire. Those rituals made sense to me, but here, we don't have anything like it, and any attempt we made to mimic them just felt sad and made us miss our other home so far away.

We're also not superstitious, so any rituals used to quell nerves, ward off sickness, keep bad luck from happening just aren't part of our lives. J. had an Aunt who was OCD, couldn't leave the house without flicking a light switch twenty times in succession, just in case they crashed on the motorway. Neurons misfiring.

Rituals to give up smoking are meant to work - drink a glass of water and go for a walk every time you feel like a fag - but even then, we didn't do it with ritual - we broke every damn pattern we had and travelled through Asia and used sheer grit and willpower not to smoke. And we did it (I missed the ritual of rolling tobacco, but what angered me about the habit was not that it was going to kill me, but that I was unquestionably BEHOLDEN to this ritual, and thus had to quit it).

I'd love to have a ritual to unite us, to give a pattern to our lives. Sure, there's things we like to do, and often - play reggae on Saturday mornings, drink wine on Friday nights by the fire, but they're easily broken by whimsy and often, a desire to break free of habit and routine.

But I don't. I wake up, take ten slow breaths, hug my lover, and kick him out of bed to make a cuppa. Every. Single. Morning.

Is that a ritual?

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