Tangled Up in Ritual
The ladder wobbles. My grip tightens. A stubborn strand of lights dangling, maybe mocking. “Why do we do this?” I think. I probably even say it, just loud enough for Ash to hear and maybe apologize for making me do this.
Every dang year. Boxes dragged from the attic. Wires untangled. Bulbs burned out in existential protest—only to reverse the process a month later.
The sky is January gray. My mood matches. Half a day gone. Nothing gained. No progress. Just an endless loop: up, down, repeat. Sisyphus with tinsel.
"I do it for the kids," I remind myself.
But ritual has a funny way of sneaking in the side door.
I tend to measure time by what I achieve. Tasks checked. Goals reached. Progress made. Or not. Forward motion or failure. That’s the game. But time—real time—doesn’t play by those rules.
Once, people lived by circles. Not lines. Not ladders. Rituals marked the days. Festivals, fasts, feasts. Seasons rolled on, tied to meaning beyond the measurable. Not efficient. Never efficient. But anchoring. Belonging. To something vast. To something sacred.
Mid-tangle, I think: these aren't hollow decorations. They are markers. Time carved into shape. Light in the dark. Hope made visible.
Giving myself to a ritual is a way to step out of my personal, narrow story and into a bigger one. Re-orienting my self in the cosmos.Or at least an invitation to do so. Both centering. And de-centering.
Rituals are sneaky like that. They worm their way in, reshape you when you’re not paying attention. Remind you that life isn’t just a forward march. It’s a spiral. Moving in a pattern. If we shape it to be so.
Sunday pancakes. Evening walks. Candles lit at dusk. Not all rituals are grand. Most aren’t. But they root us. Give the days shape. Turn the mundane into the meaningful.
And the bigger ones - the holidays, the shared traditions - they tether us to each other, to history, to the earth’s quiet rhythms. They whisper that we’re part of a web. Not isolated threads.
Even the mundane can hold ritual. Brewing coffee. Folding laundry. Gardening. Acts so ordinary they disappear—unless you decide to see them.
The last strand in hand. My kids zoom around the ladder beneath me, giggling. Ash stands on the porch, her voice soft with something bittersweet: “They’ll be so different next year.” A neighbor waves as they pass our chaos.
This wasn’t futility. It was marking time. Lights, laughter, struggle—they formed a rhythm. A tradition. Not efficient, no. But vital. Connecting. Anchoring.
I close the attic door, a bit less angsty. A bit more connected - to the memories of my childhood, my parents and what they must have done to create our traditions, to my too-quickly-aging children, to the larger religious and cultural narratives we inhabit.
Now I'm thinking: Maybe we'll do something for MLK Day...
Just no lights.
