searching for ritual

on marking time and making meaning

A few weeks ago I got back from visit to Aotearoa New Zealand, to attend the wedding of one of my oldest friends. One of the worst things about having lived in various countries is that you end up with friends scattered all over the world, which is lovely when you get to see them but painful when you don’t, which is most of the time. And catching up isn’t grabbing a coffee down the road, but paying thousands of pounds to fly half way round the globe, feeling guilty about the environmental impact the entire time, and being faced with the undeniable effects of entropy as the physical effects of such travel increase with every year.

I wouldn’t, of course, normally travel 11,000 miles for a wedding; it’s difficult to get me out of Glasgow for a wedding in the usual course of things. But this isn’t just any friend; this is a friend I have known for a long time, whose entire family I know and love. All three brothers, The Matriarch, the partners and kids. My relationship to this family is one that’s hard to define, marked, across a decade and a half, by years of not seeing each other and not even that many voicenotes. My partner and I both were invited to the family holiday that preceded the wedding, and to The Matriarch’s commitment ceremony that took place during it.

The Matriarch, a woman of great wit and insight whose four-decade marriage ended a couple of years ago, is not a woman to blindly hew to the normal way of doing things. I was surprised, then, that she was to hold a commitment ceremony with her new partner, with all of us as witnesses. It was a very causal affair held in the garden of the house we were all staying in on the South Island: non religious, just the family and us, grandsons dressed in matching shirts, a few readings and a bottle of champagne afterwards. In the ‘Art Club’ I was doing with the kids every day, we made cards and bunting and signs for the occasion. It was sweet.

In the run up to the ceremony, the Matriarch spoke often of her belief in ritual. She is a woman who has worked in family social services for a long time; she’s seen relationships break apart and tried to hold people together in the aftermath of it. She’s been witness to painful changes in the course of many people’s lives. Last year she was in attendance as her first granddaughter was born at home, giving in-house support for the first weeks of her life, something that is common in some cultures but rarely seen in others. As she talked about the marking of change, and the passing of time, she was adamant that ritual is an inherent part of our lives, whether we recognise it or not. That marking life, and death, and love, and birth are as natural to us as breathing.

As if bewitched by her words, the whole trip was steeped in rites. At my friend’s wedding, the rings were passed around the attendees so they could be blessed with a good wish for the couple’s future. At the reception, a man told me what it meant to him to have a haka at his wedding, performed by himself and his groomsmen. At lunar new year, my Hong Kong friends cooked a fish meal and told us all about the ritual of giving laisee (red envelopes containing cash) to everyone you know; we painted new year dragons and the kids told me about the parades on their home island of Ma Wan. Even I introduced a ritual of my own; a cheersing of drinks with the odd little phrase what a life, gleaned from a friend whose partner passed away, a brief moment of gratitude for the ludicrous luck of being alive. The Matriarch is right: we need ritual, no matter how small. It’s what holds meaning. It’s how we mark the changes of our lives, the births and deaths and turning of the seasons, the years, the days.

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As a person without kids or religion I don’t have a lot of the traditional rituals in my life. I’ve no interest in marriage, and I hate Valentine’s Day and anniversaries; I love birthdays but increasingly want to spend them alone. I’m a bad card-sender. I love The Wicker Man for its uncanny liturgy but can’t get on board with anything that sniffs of modern witchcraft, and find names like ‘imbolc’ to be wildly offputting even if I do like the idea. I can never remember when Easter is and often forget Pancake Day, which is actually quite important to me, for reasons of crepe gluttony. I do like consistency in the things that happen annually: I like to play cricket on the Northumberland beach where my family holidays every year, and I always take my birthday off work. When it comes to anything formalised, though, I realise I’m empty handed. This year, talking to friends about their Ramadan rituals, I have been a little jealous, impressed by the shape it gives to a month of their life, the things they are led to think about, the connection it gives them to their bodies and their beliefs. I’ve started to feel the real lack of something structural.

What I do love are the seasons. I’ve written before of how unsettling it was to live for three years in a place where the days never lengthened and the temperature never really dropped, where Christmas occurred in the scorching heat, with blow up snowmen stapled down to the sidewalks of Transístmica. The endless kind of stasis I felt as someone used to a closing off, a closing in, a rest and recuperation. There were, of course, rituals there—both religious and political, whether that was bundling off to Las Tablas for Carnavales or hitting the party scene as people received their 13-month wage, an additional monthly pay packet that is legally stipulated for all workers in Panama. But these things weren’t mine. The seasons: they feel like they belong to me.

I’ve realised that I do see the year in three trimesters; the first, Jan-April(ish), the quiet, hunkering down, sorting and planning time of the year, before everything gets a bit out of hand. The second, May-the end of August, when Scotland finally gets some sun, when book world goes nuts and it’s the period of great socialising. The third, September-December, is the great Wrapping Up, the trying to achieve your goals before Christmas comes around and the normal world is put to bed for a fortnight. The cardamom-spiced, almond-cream-stuffed semla buns from Honeytrap Bakery and the hunt for wild garlic are signals that we’re turning from the first to the second trimesters; the buns are a lenten tradition from Sweden, only available for a few weeks from the end of Feb, and the wild garlic runs riot across the Southside from March and across April, when you rush to get it before it turns bitter / before it’s pissed on by dogs. By the time these two things have passed, it’s basically summer. The brambles come out at the end of summer, marking the turn into the third trimester, and Christmas comes around before you’ve any idea what’s happened.

But is it enough to feel these changes, without marking them properly? Of late I’ve developed an obsession with the Weird Walk zine and its explorations of the sacred sites and odd festivities of the British Isles, the macabre and bizarre manner we have celebrated harvests and equinoxes and abundance and the long dark. A writer pen pal and I have been discussing how he turned to ritual at age 40, getting odd on purpose, leaning into the irrational aspects of the world, connecting to it on a different level. I can’t shake the feeling that harvesting wild garlic in Linn Park probably isn’t enough of an observance; that I should be doing something more thoughtful, more reflective, more connected. To what, though, I’m not sure.

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While we were staying on the Kāpiti coast of the North Island, someone died in the sea just by my friend’s house. The details were unclear; all we knew was that it was an accidental drowning. I was told that the local Māori community would then establish a rāhui on that part of the coast, a kind of embargo on swimming in the water (or, indeed, fishing in it, or otherwise having access to it).

Professor Hirini Moko Mead, a Māori historian, has written about the different types of rāhui that can be established on a place:

1. A rāhui following death

2. A rāhui for conservation

3. A no-trespass rāhui

When a rāhui is established for conservation, it is often to let land or water recover from processes like overfishing or a fire; a no-trespass rāhui is similarly protective. Following death, though, it is primarily to honour the life of the deceased, and to mark the event of their passing. I found myself really touched by this, a kind of extended minute’s silence, an acknowledgement of perhaps a week or more for the death of a total stranger.

Thinking of the rāhui, I realised there is one instance in which I do have private rituals: the marking of death and its anniversaries. When my friend’s partner died in 2020 and she came to stay with us, we made our own, very practical rites: that every day she would drink a smoothie, have a shower, and go for a walk, no matter what. No matter how hard it was to do so, she would cling onto structure. When her partner was buried three months after his death, in a funeral none of us could go to because of lockdown, a group of us all took separate walks (in our restricted areas) to think about him as the funeral was going on. I wrote a letter to him and burned it by a river. Now every year, his friends visit a woodland dedicated to him by his workplace. Every time we drink a glass of wine in a beautiful place, we clink glasses and say: what a life.

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I’ve started to wonder if my rituals are not lacking, but more everyday. I have many customs (as my partner and friend have recently told me, I am particular) but they’re often small. Making a coffee is a ritualistic process, and there’s absolutely no need for me to serve it in a glass jug with two small handmade cups—bought from New Zealand—but I do. There’s no need for me to make pasta from scratch when you can buy it for about fifty pence, but when I have come back from a trip or had a busy week, I do. There’s no need for me to plate up a lunch for one like I’m desperately angling for a Michelin star… but I do. These are all recognitions of moment, a small taking of time to appreciate the way time is moving by.

But still, I think, there is a gap. A need for something a little less stomach-focused, a little more nature-reflective. I have a big birthday in a few years and an eclipse will be happening before it; I wonder if I will head north to see it, getting naked in the brief blackness like some sort of shedding. Or maybe I will start to bring ritual to those three trimesters of the year: already May Day holds Jack in the Green festivals, and September 1st is the start of autumn, and new year is so much less about parties now, more about sweeping things clean, clearing off. Perhaps I can put together my own practices on these days, taking inspiration from the old ways of this land. There’s something for me in diaries of old sailors and in the dirt-ridden pages of old pagan calendars. I can feel it in my bones.