Ritual as Conduit: Where Poetics of Creating Worlds meets Praxis of Renewing Reality
by Paige Emery
Open (Create Environment)__
How can we dream outside of someone else’s dream?
Within the enormous project of shifting away from the ingrained norms of capitalist individualism and towards interdependence, a prevalent pathway is that of worldbuilding: reimagining new narratives and poetics for engineering new realities. This has been taking place in areas like theory, science fiction, poetry, video games, speculative architecture, and while the implementation of new worlds into lived realities happens over vast time and space, where can working towards this be materialized in the day-to-day? A guiding praxis for this might be the ancient technology of ritual; a demystification and re-enchantment of ritual can elucidate how it can alter the atmosphere to renew relations. “Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based”(Byung-Chul Han). Existing in a designated realm of enchantment, ritual allows for imagining avenues outside of the limited arenas of knowledge and possibility constructed within western capitalist society. Enchantment itself has underlying connotations of magic, a space intrinsically dedicated to a reimagining outside of a conventional “reality.” If we need ways to reimagine and renew our current epistemes, this is the type of realm we need to play with in order to transcend our preconditioned form of knowing and creating. Ritual can imagine alternative realities due to its affinity towards an enchanted realm of transformation and what sets this fantastical reworlding apart is that it is sutured with day-to-day object-beings, making it simultaneously grounded in the material world.
Rituals can make transformation an art, a state of mind that can open alternate constellations in order to relate and respond to the world differently, to shape-shift ostensible rigidities. It is the repetition of a specific practice, and this process-focused repetition is what can make it a continual catalyst of change.
Bring close awareness to the surrounding environment (it becomes alive). Notice where the light reflects, the aroma of place, where the ground touches your feet, the atmosphere that receives your exhale. If indoors, clean the external space to clear internal cluttered space to breathe, burn incense or a purifying plant to clear the external and internal space of negative and stagnant energy. If outside, acknowledge and thank the land. Fill the space with sacred objects that hold meaning—objects carrying memories of love, hope, home, kin. These can be symbolic representations of what you want to connect with. Surrounded by them, they remind you of what you want to remember.
**Adaption (release)**
Ritual has not been diminishing with western modernity but rather recontextualized within capitalist agendas. Its infrastructure has been maneuvered through soft power from the structures which dictate one’s surroundings to the subtleties of normalized routines. An obvious example is that of religious institutions, for example, the Catholic Church. Rituals every Sunday of inscribing belief in something outside of oneself, in turn, become one's reality lived out to such an effect that it alters laws, taxes, and mass notions of what is accepted as human. Another example permeates the meaning-making underlying capitalist finance. The financial market consists of daily arbitrary assignments of value, and through these repetitions, that value is made real. When creating market values, actual future income is unknown, but the repetitive practice creates normalcy defining a value, and this market value then influences decision-making around mass consumption. There has been an emergence of witch influencers and white-washed new age rituals for self-growth, but the popularization of these has also become subsumed within new economies of healing for the privileged. If these ritualistic modalities can be effective on such a global scale—causing discrimination, exploitation, and extraction—what forms of ritual can undo these effects for the betterment of the earth and its inhabitants?
Acknowledge any internal blockages without judgment. Externalities are absorbed beyond your control: ancestral traumas in genes and in land; environmental stressors put on by capitalism and all the connections and values it has stretched its tentacular fingers over. Begin with a release - hold a stone in your palm and focus on what needs to leave your body. Transfer it to the stone with three exhales. Bury the stone in the Earth, because Earth is the great recycler and can absorb the weight and transmute it in ways we cannot.
Intention (Prescribe Meaning)
"The cruelty is that, like erotic love, thinking can become a total stranger to its object at the point where it supposedly attains the highest intimacy with the latter"(Yuk Hui). Like love, it takes a particular commitment to maintain embodied intimacy with the narratives we dream up. A grounding framework can be found in Sylvia Wynter’s thinking on “being human as a praxis,” thinking outside of conventional western thought to reconstitute narratives of what it means to be human and how we can interact with our world in our daily practices. To materialize the modalities of meaning-making, we must locate the places where they convene with intentional praxis, and how to orient ourselves in those locations towards ecosocial renewal. Ritual is situated in the meeting place between poetics and praxis, establishing catalytic channels from the internal landscape to the external landscape. Humans are creatures of habit and ritual praxis can have a reprogramming effect on the habitual psyche due to its underlying form of repetitive attentiveness. Through receptiveness, while responding to valued enmeshment with others, nonhumans, or object-beings, ritual can be instrumental in the reterritorialization of relations- departing from anthropocentric ordering.
Focus on a relation that needs renewal. In deep attention and listening, find its root, where the change needs to begin. Imagine the flower it can bloom into—write it, breathe it, sing it, paint it, dance it. Write out the steps needed to fulfill this embodiment, choosing a signifier - an object or symbol- to hold this intention, so that when the intention starts to fade, the object/symbol can remind you of your practice.
Extension (The Body Outside of Itself)
This is an exploration of how we can implement rituals for healing what I call the “ecological body”, or the body and its extension to its environment. This means practices of care that are simultaneously for the self and for relating to others and the earth. Capitalism has spread the narratives of individualistic separation of oneself from one’s environment in order to prioritize the body as a force of labor. Our bodies are moving memories, and the practices of how we relate ourselves in our interactions can uproot the fabric which weaves this normalcy. Malleable implementations within ritual, with a fluid framework meant to be adaptable to its ever-changing surroundings, can reconfigure the space of abjection as an ambivalent one - taking the point where boundaries are distinguished between self and other and uprooting it as the point where othered relations can be transmuted to a more-than-human reciprocity.
Continually holding awareness and reverence for the subtle needs of a place, whether that place is the individual body or the earth, can move beyond both purely individualist and purely collectivist assumptions.
This is an exploration for an infrastructure eroding bodily edges, extending the body to its senses - intercommunicating, intra-acting, and expanding perceptions towards emergent ontologies of coexistence.
Light a candle for rejuvenation and hum from the belly button, connecting your internal fire that sparks creativity, drink chamomile tea for healing and pause in taste and smell awareness before swallowing, rejuvenate your body in the ocean and offer her a gift, light incense to ask ancestors for guidance
**Attention (Acknowledge Caringly)**
In such an urgent time, can we slow down time? Slow, careful practice of attention toward this atmosphere of interaction is required primarily in order to reconfigure the fabric we are enmeshed in. Ritualistic practices can address the nuances within interactions, a subtle space of influence in the mind which, being already infiltrated by capitalist agendas, makes the awareness all the more urgent. Can we create ritual encounters that reshape this same sensuous space and can be extended to shaping new relationalities? Relations weave the infrastructure of worldmaking, requiring ethical nuances of how entities are related within complexities. A body as an extension among entangled bodies can learn to respond to such through practices of reverence and care with the Earth. Shifting towards planetary perspectives and new realities of coexistence may be an enormous project, but at its simplest form lie the reciprocal commitments for being /becoming human as praxis
Give thanks to the Earth, sing to plants and call them by name. Make promises while pushing seeds into the soil. Ask what you can give back in the form of your own shining strengths. Giving awareness receives awareness back, receive love by giving love. This can be in the form of deep listening, a listening that sits in stillness open and receptive, a sensuous space that slows down time and opens up the magic of what can be.
________________________________Close (Memory of Change)_____________________________________
Habit lays the groundwork for a sustainable change, as new brain pathways opened in the nervous system ripple out to form new pathways in the physical world. Habit is all the more powerful through the conduit of ritual, for ritual creates the consciousness of change. Repetition for enduring, repetition for normalizing new truths.
As we collectively dream up new worlds to help the planetary withstand the anthropogenic effects of capitalist sorcery, can we implement practices for how we want the world to exist by how we exist in the world? Rituals for the ecological body, as a practice or a model for practice, can be a container that adapts to and for its ever-changing atmosphere. Ritual is not completed with an end goal; rather, the solution is the process - a continual catalyst for renewal. An attentive and adaptive practice can produce drastic change by being the process of change itself.
Blow out the candles with wishes of endurance. Kisses not of goodbye but of transformation. Closing the ritual is not the end, but an integration back to a pulling “real” which can be a new “real.” Repeat (daily, weekly, monthly depending) so it seeps into all the places where it is harder to hold onto intentions, where it is hard to keep peace and connection in tumultuous landscapes, fleeting and full of hardships. Remembering at the tip of a sip of tea, before a bite of food or swallow of conversation, footsteps touched by the earth, choices of translations, mediations, cultivations. Creating new memories, memories of change, to be the renewing process of change itself.
Ritual Text in “[A.rena Annual 2022](https://store.are.na/products/are-na-annual-2022#:~:text=This year's Annual is themed,do something%2C a portal to.): Portal”
Herbal Healing Rituals for the Ignota Diary