Rituals

Rituals

Samuel Bird

Opened eyes met darker and later mornings. On the window was a familiar shape I had forgotten from the extremity of the summer. Ice crystals had formed on my window to the North. With this first freeze, the leaves would soon begin to shift into the warm colors that suggested the temperature was about to do the opposite. The high altitude and Northern situation meant that I was in for many months of dark skies and bright grounds. Time spent outside would be more at the peril of my extremities as the weather would be so. These long winters had been somewhat of a curse for me in my younger years. I called this feeling the “frigore.” It was that deep abiding melancholy from the frigid lifelessness that would be rolling in, but it was not today. Today, was autumn, and I must approach what is as it presents itself to me. Before that cold came, there was the bedding down for the winter. Like my bear friends, I was prepping my cave and body for a long slowing down. The changing leaves were a changing backdrop to the scene I was switching to. I began to prepare my nest for winter. I did a deep clean of my little cabin and fixed a few things that I had put of up until now. I made a new spot for my kittens to snuggle in my bed. I finished the chicken coop I had built and filled it with warm straw. I sorted all my emergency food and moved my stove to inside the cabin where the heat would now be welcome. In this putting together of my nest for the winter, a few things felt needed. The deep snow drifts would blast past my cabin, stealing any heat I had worked to generate. In response to this, I found someone selling straw bales and purchased some to line my home. There was something deeply nostalgic to me about the procuring and stacking of the straw as stacking bales was my routine before winter. With each bale stacked along the walls, I felt a greater sense that I was settling and coming to grips with the new stage in my life. My body was preparing to heat itself more than cool. My mind was preparing less visual stimulation. My heart was settling down into this new season of quiet reflection. With each non-literal preparation for winter, my heart knew what was to come. Something still felt wrong. Moments vary in the depth to which they are felt. Some moments carry with them only facts, but others carry a quality that makes them surreal and beautiful. It can be difficult not to chase after these. There is a mountain about an hours drive from where I grew up that my father leased to graze our cattle and harvest lumber. We would prepare for the winter by filling the barn with straw and hay, the silos with grain, and getting all the wood we would split and sell later. Before the first big snow that would keep us from getting any more loads of wood, we cram as much as we could into our ramshackle old truck. The pines stayed ever true to their color, but the aspen’s white was matched with its new golden leaves. My breath brought clouds before my face as I drug the last of the pine poles through the underbrush. I would look up and know that this year, for whatever it was, was coming to a close. The world seemed vibrant, rich, and alive. I closed my eyes out of sight of my father, as to not be accused of laziness. I would breathe and revel in the quietness and stillness that would come. My perception stepped outside of myself and allowed for the world to meet me more rawly. My medium for perception quieted down and allowed for a deeper synthesis of the world around me. The world was going to sleep, and I could here its lullaby. 

I turned on an ancient Gregorian chant and began to place my conscious awareness in that part of my mind where I would encounter God. The rest of my minds cognition that I am not aware of followed me there. I pulled into my mind this conscious entity that preceded all others. I saw the massive chasm in extremities of qualities between us. I found as strangers and yet more familiar than home or kin. I felt ought of place in as far as I was away from this Entity and sought closeness. And still, there was this chasm between us, between the planes we occupied and the sort of being we were. I called on this Entity to come to me, to bridge this distance, and be with me. Heavy iron doors reminded my hands where we were. Bended knee reminded my legs what was happening. Hands clasped and crossed remind my movements why they did so. Incense reminded my nose what this experience was like. Melodic chants reminded my ears and heart the gravity of where I was. My conscious mind took a step back to allow my being to meet its environment in honesty. With no understanding of how I could do it, I sang words I couldn’t tell you I remembered. I recalled the note changes, the next step, and was able to slip into being. Sharing this state with my friend to my right, I felt a belonging that was alien to me. What was happening between these two instances is that I am getting into the ritual of something. Some find value in the repetition, some find it to be silly. What I can say is that it allows us to bring about patterns in the world that don’t exist before our making of them, but making a structure to the world that makes sense of it for us. However, the most vital role that rituals plays is between these different aspects of ourselves. The consciousness of one person is exactly demarcated as to not be arbitrary, but the other facets that comprise our being make us a family of friends or foes that comprise the “individual.” Consciousness as that thing in the mind, mind as world of symbols and perception, and organism as the medium to meet as sense the world meet together in one entity, but with parts. These parts are not without their aims, and those aims can be at odds, or at least thee shared aims can result in disagreement if they disagree on where to find something. The modern age is rife with our lying to the body and brain and then being surprised when they are at odds with our efforts. These other aspects of ourself don’t need to ask our permission to do what they find in the defense of the rest of the self. The flinching eye doesn’t ask you if you want a wood chip to hit your pupil, it just does as it will. The mind doesn’t ask if you want to see how your circumstance could go horribly wrong, it just warns you. This is where we get to the depth of realization. Tell a man a word and he hears them. Let him see the word’s instance and he sees it. But, until these other aspects of himself think away at the thing at hand, he doesn’t know it. One can sit in silence and forget about a question, but then all at once an answer comes to us as something that was not aware there was questioning going on. These other aspects of us are working in ways we don’t know, and want to help where they can. There is a gradient to realization. As I have said before, one can roughly possess an idea. However, from reflection and experience that idea can become more full and alive until a simple idea expands into a world of concepts. This is much of what maturing is. It is not to contain more facts than before, but to deeply know the facts. That is, the best that we can. The mind begins to test the idea at hand with conditionals and disjuncts until it begins to amount to a more complete iteration of the instance in the world, in the mind. There are certain ideas such as love, hope, and faith that are so lightly come by. However, the deepest of thought would lead one to find these characters ever present and involved. The simplest of facts realized becomes an article of power to the perciever. This is the beauty of rituals. They are more than the foolish traditions of soft-minded ancestors. They are the silent wisdom of deeply realizing a phenomenon. Before at odds, the entirety of my being aligns to process some fact in the world. The presupposition that these rituals are an artifact of a less enlightened age has led to their decreased utilization. While one can be easy very critical of the behavior of humans, one must wonder why such was ever a human need. No matter where people fall on that scalar for general intelligence, they are benefited by the oneness by which they view the world. The absence of rituals has only led to worse rituals. The weekly worship is traded for a never ceasing barrage of experiences until the week is punctuated by inebriation. The denial of the divine makes room for a checking of how planets align effects our wanting. Morning prayers are exchanged for a checking of one’s personal technological device. In the denial of his ancestor’s and traditions, modern man denies that part of himself that was passed down by such. He has the same knees that were used for kneeling, the same hands for clasping, and the same mouth from which worshipping came. The lack of external necessity to access the divine ignore whether or not there was an internal necessity.  Where then can he engage in a dance or fight and ceremony? 

Something comes for you. The finality of time brings a new series of facts that vary from your familiarity that will never let you go back. Someone will die. Someone will be born. Something will come while another goes. When that dynamic fact comes, it never goes any direction but forward. While a new summer will come after this winter, it will have new faces and feelings than the summer before. That summer that was will never be again. This upcoming winter will never be again, after it is. My being yearns for pattern and proximity to this world. So, I nest down for the winter. The coziness of a warm drink and book are traded for sunbathing and blossoming. My mind that operates in symbols and signifying seeks to more deeply realize the facts that are ever shifting before me. The movements, smells, sounds, feelings, and thoughts of the last time this change happened, allows me to make sense of the change before me, and be present in it. For this reason, rituals play a crucial role in us engaging with our existence as they allow us to more exactly process it as it is presented to us. The repetition builds rhythm in which we can then find the melody we seek. The wobbling of the earth’s orbit will result in a specific location having annual variances in weather. That is how the world is. However, we too easily discount the world as it seems to us. To you, a new age comes with holidays and snow removal. Swimming and traveling will be put off. When you inevitably find yourself building patterns of behavior to respond to the patterns you see in the world, do not curse it. Let the procedure become ceremonial as you assign meaning to patterns of facts in the world. Revel in those hours of warm leaves and cool air that signify that a new age has come. Then, to you, the frost on the window becomes more than it is. Snow blankets the world around you, but you have prepared for bed with your rituals.