Mark the Moment

Life Rituals and Traditions

“Traditions don't come out of nowhere. They come from something sacred and strange.”

Corey Ann Haydu (The Careful Undressing of Love)

Traditions and rituals are ways that we celebrate, or mark, transitions in our lives. Some of us are bound to our original traditions (which are ritualistic in nature). We always have a turkey and dressing for Thanksgiving, or we always decorate a tree with lights for Christmas. We light the candles on the menorah as dusk falls on sabbath, we celebrate Confirmation and Bar and Bat Mitzvah for coming of age. If we are strict adherents to traditions and rituals, we truly suffer when they are missed. I know people who go into a deep depression if their family does not want to celebrate a holiday in the way it's always been done. It is as though such a celebration completes the year for them, but only if everyone is there celebrating in exactly the same manner as every year before. Rituals connect us with our past, and with our tribe. They reassure us that the future is safe because the torch is handed to another generation.

We create and enact rituals for particular events in our lives—from the silly to the sublime. We wear garters for weddings, and make outlandish toasts to the bride and groom. We sprinkle water on the head of a baby and call it baptism. We cast a spade full of dirt onto a coffin to mark the finality of death. We pile bouquets of flowers, candles, and teddy bears against fences and walls to memorialize the fallen. For whatever reason, we humans are given to ritual, whether we recognize it or not. Rituals, and the need for them, come from someplace deeper in our brain than our cerebral hemispheres. They are more analogous to the way an animal paws the ground and turns in circles to mash down the grasses for their bed, even when that bed is a pile of blankets on a hardwood floor. It's instinctual. When we want to mark something, we often create a ritual.

This piece, called “Honoring the Blood Moon,” was the ritual I created to mark the cancer scare I had two years ago. I didn't create it through a thought process, but as a growing awareness after the fact. It is a reminder to me that all parts of my life should be honored. The question is not whether times are easy or hard—life is a gift every single minute of every day, through every experience we have. We celebrate that gift, and then we mark the moment with a ritual.

                                                                   In the Spirit,

                                                                       Jane