Week 1, Day 3: sacred safety and ritual as the village
I write this reflection on the morning of my fourth day in Hastings, looking out at the rain that is set to fall all day, feeling grateful to have felt the sun on my face yesterday. I struck out first thing, determined to make the most of the clear blue skies, but knowing that my still poorly body could only take so much.
I sat on the beach and watched as a family of three (+ dog) arrived on the beach, stripped off and hobbled over the cold stones into the (now calm) sea. I had a quick pang of jealousy - I had chosen to come to Hastings so that I could do just that; I had imagined cold, daily ritual immersions as a way to start my day, and ground me in the work I am researching here, but the rain and the flu made it quickly clear that that wasn’t to be for me. So instead I watched as this family took this time for themselves, making it seem as easy as getting into the sea in mid-summer, and reminding me that nature makes it so easy for us to connect to our ritual selves. I think this is especially true of cold water immersion, as it helps us quickly get to a state of vulnerability that we are rarely otherwise in. We are almost naked, for a start, and being held by the water connects us to our very first experiences of life in the womb. The shock of the cold water forces us to be present, to breathe, and gives us space to think of little else, meaning that we are truly paying attention to the experience we are having. Attention, along with intention, is one of the key ingredients of a ritual separating it from a habit or a routine, for example. In this regard I think it also helps that there are almost no distractions in the sea: no phones vibrating or flashing at us, no overhearing of others’ conversations, no cars honking or sirens wailing. Just the sounds of the waves lapping, inviting us to be a part of it for a brief moment.
(A family of three and their dog walk into the sea)
The reason I’m writing this on day four (and not on day three, as planned) is that my conversation yesterday happened at 7pm (or a Canadian 11am). I was immensely lucky to talk to the community artist Paula Jardine in Edmonton, Canada. I was introduced to Paula by Sue Gill, one of the founding members of the celebratory arts company Welfare State International, who I was lucky enough to learn with in September. Sue runs a course in Rituals and Rites of Passage in the Lake District, where she lives on the beach in a house on stilts. Below is a picture of Sue crowning Christine Jolly (who truly is jolly in both name and nature) as part of her magical menopause ceremony we created on the course.
(Sue crowns Christine with tinfoil on Bardsea beach)
I knew from the offset that my conversation with Paula was going to be a special one, because one of the first things she said when I asked her about the work she is doing in Canada was, “as artists we have a role in the sacred life of the community”. The hairs on my arms stood on end. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to explain and to understand: who has a role in the sacred life of the community. I’ve been trying to understand who is trusted enough to hold sacred spaces and sacred moments for us, when so many of us in Eurocentric societies have lost trust in our religious institutions, and lost our connection to our native cultural practices.
We reflected on the importance of trust in creating conditions that feel safe enough for us to participate in the vulnerable, soul-bearing work of ritual. Paula reflected on work that she had been a part of, in which people who were seeking asylum in Canada were invited to participate in a ritual involving what she called a “tree procession”. She explained the way that ritual can powerfully “create a sense of safety, arrival and welcome. It says, ‘we’ve got you, we’ve caught you. Wherever you are, you're on the earth’ and that’s calming.” In many ways, this connects to the thoughts whizzing around my head after my conversation with Arlene, about the complexity of creating or reinforcing “belonging”. What if then, instead of focusing on feelings of belonging, we concentrated on creating a feeling of safety, of grounding? My assumption is that belonging and safety have very similar physiological effects on our bodies.
This idea was reinforced when Paula suggested that one of the roles of ritual is to replicate the culture we might have had when we lived in villages. This really struck me. Just last month I hosted a bonfire in my garden to mark the full moon. I invited around 20 people to join, asking each of them to bring something to contribute to the evening: a story, a poem, a song, some firewood, some food or a drink. Naturally, each person brought something that no one else did, and we had the perfect amount of food, drink, firewood and story to sustain a long evening sitting around the fire, under the moon. I shared with Paula that what I (and I think many around that fire) experienced that evening was a deep, embodied sense of safety: the warmth of the fire, the nourishment of the food and the wisdom of the stories made us feel held and safe. The emotions that came up as we sat there - ranging from from grief to gratitude - were strong, but we all instinctively knew how to hold them. Without realising it, I had created a temporary village and we knew that we had what we needed to keep one another alive.
(People talk around a roaring campfire under an -almost- full moon)
Of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention the poem that I started my day with yesterday, because (once again) it shone great light on the thoughts and conversations I had. This time, it was Mary Oliver’s ‘Some questions you might ask’, which goes,
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?
The poem lingered with me throughout the day, as I sat on the pebbles at the beach, and slipped through wet autumn leaves on my way home. But it was in talking to Paula that it really sang. Paula and I talked about a number of vehicles for ritual as part of our conversation, one of which is lantern making and lantern parades. I had the great privilege of taking part in a 40-year-old lantern parade in the Lakes in September, which was first started by Sue Gill and Welfare State International. We made our own lanterns out of willow branches and tissue, before walking them through the market town of Ulverston alongside nearly a thousand other people. It was magical, and Paula managed to put her finger on why. She said that when we carry a lantern we have made ourselves, it is as if we “hold the soul somehow outside of the body”.
(A section of the lantern parade as the sun begins to set over Ulverston)
We went on to speak about other sacred rituals and practices, including the making of tobacco ties. Paula explained that tobacco is a sacred herb for people around the world, and that the making and burning of tobacco ties is therefore a sacred practice. She told me how, when her mother passed away, they found dozens of white tobacco ties that she had made and not yet burned, which they used to make a pillow for her before she was cremated. With the words of Mary Oliver still ringing in my ears from the morning’s poem, I wondered what it means for a herb to be sacred (indeed, the final line of the poem is, “What about the grass?”) I wondered if, in the making of tobacco ties, we are giving part of ourselves - our souls - to the leaf to carry up with the smoke as it burns, or if the tobacco itself has a soul that we have recognised as sacred…
The final thing I want to reflect on from this deeply moving conversation is about permission. Paula and I were speaking about using rituals and ceremonies around times of death and dying, and agreed that traditional funeral rites so often feel soulless and insufficient. In response to this, Paula began to tell me a story. She told me that her mother-in-law had been desperate to die in the forest she once lived in, but that when she began to pass away, it simply wasn’t possible to take her there. So Paula’s daughter ran out into the streets around their house and collected twigs and branches to bring home and make a forest for her in their living room. “We know what to do… We need to give ourselves permission to do what we feel like doing.”, said Paula. I am reminded of my conversation with Casper about modelling and invitations. What can I do to help create the conditions that will give people the permission they need to respond to life’s big moments (birth, death, loss to name a few) in the ways they know they want to?