The first of two guest posts by my dear friend, and multi-disciplinary artist, teacher & body worker
.I’ve been finding new ways to pray.
At times unexpectedly, at times intentionally, I am stumbling into grace.
When joy turns to dust on my tongue with the pain of the world I am brought back to the simple task of noticing.
“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention”
Mary Oliver
Noticing brings me to my senses - to what I hear, see, touch and taste. It invites me to feel what I am feeling. And from that, a sense of being swaddled and held by something greater – a ritual container in my day, in my life.
Mythopoetic author Marion Woodman says when “we have lost our containers; chaos threatens”.
In this chaos that we now toss and turn in, a human made crisis, where we no longer feel held by the institutions that claim to protect life and serve justice, we must create containers of meaning.
For me the notion of ritual and prayer is less about a pious path or notional goodness and more about cultivating meaning and agency in my life, or more specifically creating the conditions in my life that allow me to have agency so I can show up resourced and informed.
We are symbolically and literally held by ritual from cradle to grave, so becoming aware of its role and impact on our lives and our behaviours is a powerful thing.
Celtic spirituality author Dolores Whelan says that “rituals and symbols speak the language of the unconscious and communicate with us at a much deeper level than we could achieve or even imagine with our conscious minds”. She continues - “creating appropriate rituals within our lives…is urgently needed at this time.”
The time-out-of-time presence and intentionality that is required by prayer and ritual alters something in us, resources us from a well of knowing that is beyond any comprehension of self or time or space. We come back with the gold of insight and the clarity of sand settling in water “when we re-emerge into ordinary reality, some element of ourselves will have been transformed”.
I have been close to ancient stone on more than one occasion in the past month. Invited by friends, welcomed in by ancestral whispers, comforted by its seemingly immovable permanence, in awe of the immensity of these ritual structures as containers of matters cosmic, practical and timeless.
They will all be here long after I am gone. That in itself feels like a relief.
I’ve had, too, a metallic taste in my mouth these past months – maybe it’s the broken night’s sleep, the dreams of human savagery shaking me awake.
Maybe it’s the wintering in my bones, or the increased amounts of cheese and chocolate of midwinter feasts.
Or maybe it’s a flavour of stone in my mouth, something mineral, essential, the lingering aftertaste of my lineage, sacred blood, the song of a ghost on my tongue.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t need to know.
“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world”
Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
So all of this is to say that I am simply paying attention.
And in paying attention I am making meaning, being part of something both within me and outside of me. It is in this sharpening awareness, this attentiveness to life that the need for prayer is taking up more and more space in me. I’m not questioning it, because there is comfort in it.
I’m finding new ways to honour the sacred with my feet grounded in the now. Because it’s the only thing that is helping me move forward instead of staying stuck.
I don’t want to be stuck anymore. So I am searching for new frameworks of meaning that include all parts of me and all parts of you, all parts of us in a deep respect of self and other, of earth and life and the elemental essence of it all, with justice at the core.
I consider the teachings of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who navigated war and exile from his homeland and how this experience informed his concepts of meditation and prayer and its function within the wider world.
“Meditation is not to escape from society, but to come back to ourselves and see what is going on. Once there is seeing, there must be acting.”
These words from a Buddhist monk - that we are not escaping society through prayer, but returning to ourselves to act from its insight – further evidence to me that my spiritual practices do not permit me to disconnect from my human experience but to return even more present to it and ever more involved in the revolution of love and justice.
“Meditation is not to escape from society, but to come back to ourselves and see what is going on. Once there is seeing, there must be acting.
With mindfulness, we know what to do and what not to do to help.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
I squeeze my human body into the smallest space I can find at Loughcrew on the Winter’s day when the sun stands still. I push and push inside this cramped space, this immovable force. At first I feel small and insignificant against such power, a sense of “what’s the point” when nothing I do will make it change, and then I start to feel every inch of my boundary, every bit of my skin burns with the effort, my bones, tissues, inner fascial matrix comes alive and I am flooded with a gush of power and strength. This tight container has shown me to myself, made me know myself. We have all known this in our beginnings and becoming, our birth catalysed by outgrowing the womb, the pain and discomfort of knowing we must move, must act in order to survive.
Emerging from ritual containers forever changed.
Love is a mountain
Protest is a prayer
Paying attention is ritual.
This piece is full of feelings, and of “rituals”!
I liked different parts especially about the taste in your mouth, how beautiful, and symbolic! but what I felt so much was the part about the squeezing between two stones “powerful and significant”, I couldn’t but think of this as challenging power systems! Perhaps the msg is different, but our position in fighting against this world of evil and injustice is ritual. Our protest is ritual!
Well done habebti, I’m proud of you! And I am grateful for our shared prayers and rituals ♥️
-Neda’a
"Paying attention is ritual." Brilliant! I hope to see more posts by Ruth Smith soon.