Every Ripple Matters…
This fall, before the rush of school started, Natalia and I went backpacking with our 9-year-old daughters. We wanted to do a ceremony, recognizing the onset of fall, honoring the living things around us, preparing for winter, and connecting that with our own rhythms in our bodies and hearts. It’s not a custom my sister and I learned from generations before us. Wherever our ancestors came from, any felt and known memory of our connection to the rhythms of earth and the customs we had to keep this alive no longer exists. I realize we are not alone in this. It seems to me there are a lot of orphans in our current society in this regard. Nonetheless, the grief at disconnection and the longing to be more in harmony with all living things is there for me, and I want to show my daughters the possibility of another way.
In my efforts to bring more depth and spirituality to my existence, I discovered the importance and forgotten craft of ritual and ceremony. My association with these practices was confined to organized religion, something I have never found deep belonging within. I spent several years delving more into what ceremony and ritual outside of any sense of religion can look like. I can feel the spiritual and psychological benefits as I experiment with these practices. Even so, I often worry I am fraudulent and don’t know how to do such sacred practices correctly, and I should leave it to the experts. And yet, I am also afraid that the fear will stop me from learning a new way, a way that is desperately needed for everyone. So, instead, I am trying to hold the balance of deep respect for what I am coming to learn and also a sense of belonging. And by belonging, I mean that I often feel like a guilty intruder on the more-than-human world. For generations we have lived within a consciousness that only allows for the earth to be a resource that we extract from, rather than a home. I feel the resulting sense of separation, as though I no longer have a right to belong to this earth. Longing brings me back and reminds me that to give up the pursuit and practice of learning how to re-engage would be far more of a tragedy than to continue the consciousness that industrialization has forced upon all of us.
As I wade through this struggle in my heart and head, I often feel hesitant to show my kids the parts of a ceremony, or lead them through it, but my need to help them back to the belonging we have lost outweighs my self-doubt. And so, we planned our fall ceremony. We were camped around an alpine lake that we hiked into the night before. We were the only ones there, and pikas serenaded us through the evening with their little “meeps” from the rocks. When we started our ceremony the next morning, it was overcast and damp with the chill you begin to feel in the mornings as fall settles in. We went about the parts of our ceremony and, in the middle, as we were creating our offerings to everything around us, the quiet was interrupted by the most beautiful morning thunder. Ripping ourselves away from our creations, we ran for the shelter of our tent, while also feeling as though the sky was talking back to us. I will always hold in my heart the magic of that morning, listening to the rain and rolls of thunder as we wrote poetry inspired by the fall and wonderment around us, and read it to each other. Giggling from the coziness of our sleeping bags, there was a contentment and aliveness that was so simple and enormous. We left the tent as the thunder and rain passed to return to our ceremony site and close with our prayer and offering.
The girls each found a rock, bowed their sweet little heads solemnly over their rock as they whispered their final prayer, then threw their rocks carrying their heartfelt wishes out into the placid, smooth alpine lake. We watched the ripples grow around the places the rocks entered the water. Soon, they spread out across the lake, intersecting with each other, and forming chaotic little waves where the perfect circles of ripples met. It was mesmerizing watching the tiny circles of ripples grow and grow and collide, eventually reaching the edge of the lake where I imagined them turning into tiny little waves that lapped the shore.
I often think of this moment with them, and wonder how this ceremony and this memory will ripple through them over the years, and ripple out of them-consciously and unconsciously. There were a lot of fall poems this year from my daughter. There were moments of depth, like the rock sinking in the lake, where something seemed to settle into her heart, where I saw her take in a moment, a detail, and I knew it had become much more than that for her. Are these part of the ripples of that time? That time, when morning thunder crashed through the middle of our ceremony as we paid homage to the beginning of fall at the edge of the alpine lake with the pikas calling out their “meeps” from the rocks behind us?
