Our traditions and rituals were awfully upended this past year. The circumstances of the pandemic have dismantled so much of the architecture on which we would normally rely for modalities of meaning and connection.1 I see it in my own dormant rituals, like the regular brunches I used to host which haven't happened in over a year. I see it in community traditions, reduced to an empty square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica, even on Easter.
In the absence of safe public space, the rites that we use to connect with each other and craft a sense of belonging have become invisible. When the pandemic left my sister furloughed, me out of work, and my spring visit home cancelled, she and I started a new ritual. Every day we called each other on the phone, at the start of her day/the end of mine. Rarely did we have much to report, but we always had something to talk about. Speaking with her became my lighthouse when the days ran together and I lost track of time and space, or when I just wanted to feel seen and heard. In our daily calls, she ‘saw’ and heard me, although we were unseen by anyone else.
The rites that we use to connect with each other and craft a sense of belonging have become invisible.
It makes me think about how traditions ask us to practice consistency and, in doing so, elevate the banal to a container for emotional meaning. The phone calls with my sister are as connective for their regularity as for any of their actual content. The Christmas meal that my family sits down to every year is important because it’s our Christmas meal, complete with the foods that we like and have been making every year since before I was born. These traditions contain histories that connect us in the present moment, but also transcend temporality. In a way, I’m sharing that holiday meal with everyone who came before me and is no longer here; my chats with my sister are part of the collective fabric of sisterhood. There’s no inherent meaning in putting candles on a cake, singing, and then blowing them out, but because we’ve loaded this sequence with symbolism, it becomes a gesture marking both selfhood and belonging.
Traditions contain histories that connect us in the present moment, but also transcend temporality.
Anyways - I’m musing on this a lot at the moment. I started this week with my birthday, a magical day that I spent by myself, looking to the ‘life year’ ahead. The choice to celebrate alone was conscious, not corona-dependent. After all of the upheaval and disruption last year, I wanted to take my birthday to practice living (I think this is where I’m supposed to add “my best life”). The solitude was exactly the container I needed for that sense of selfhood and belonging to evolve. This year, I created a new ritual for myself, one that is invisible and internal, both quotidian and special.
Astrologers call birthdays the “solar return” when the sun returns to the exact position in the sky where it was when a person was born. I like this idea of the sun returning to shine on you for your birthday, singling you out. Even as I’m aware that science disproves astrology, I appreciate the language that astrology offers about the dynamics and characteristics of our human experience.2 The sun isn’t really shining on me alone on my solar return, but the grammar of astrology is a modality that creates meaning out of words where before there was none - another kind of ritual.
Unsolicited Recommendations
Killing two birds with one stone here - I anyways wanted to compile a link list of the poems that I read during my virtual birthday party/poetry reading this week.
The reading is on my IG feed in case you want to hear some poems by me and others, such as:
Chords by Arielle Twist
The Creator is Trans by Billy-Ray Belcourt
bone (no. 19) by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Talking in Kitchens by Nick Laird
Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney
Meditation on a Grapefruit by Craig Arnold
[you fit into me] by Margaret Atwood
My Imminent Demise Makes the Headlines the Same Day I Notice How Even Your Front Teeth Are by Momtaza Mehri
Questions to Ask when you’re alone.
Esther Perel has interesting things to say, as always, on the topic of routines and rituals.
I’m not sure what philosophers or sociologists would say about all of this, but I think astrologers would say that my birthday-related navel-gazing comes down to my ascendant Sagittarius and my moon in Aquarius…