Ritual that establishes connection is ever more important in a world that is deliberately trying to drive us all apart and make us completely independent of one another while making it sound like a good thing.  By participating in group rituals together that establish connection, like those found in church or even a sports arena, and by participating in individual rituals that help remind us of the existence of interconnection, it shifts our individual and therefore collective mindsets towards one of cooperation rather than competition.  The competitive nature of the world we live in is unnatural and externally imposed by forces that profit from it being that way.  If we are to survive, we must learn to live cooperatively again.  Cooperation is in our nature as a species, we wouldn’t have survived this long if it weren’t.  The shift from cooperation to competition is precisely why the world is currently falling apart. 

Many people have this strange notion that religious and spiritual traditions are fixed and unchanging, perhaps out of a desire to think of those traditions as having been directly handed down by some external Divine Source.  As Divinity is not external to us, it is internal, then spiritual traditions don’t come from outside of us, they come from inside of us.  As such, we create them as needed to suit the various situations of our lives.  This is why I feel it is extraordinarily silly for us as a species to spend so much time and energy arguing over “the right way” to perform various religious and spiritual practices.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, author Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about the power and necessity of creating ritual, especially where there is none.  As a person of Native American descent, she understands what happens when the chain of tradition is broken when one group of people conquers another.  Many Native ways were lost when White people swept across America.  As a result, people like her father were forced to make up new rituals, such as the ritual he created of offering the first of the morning’s coffee to the Great Spirit.

Was he continuing some great tradition of offering the morning coffee to the Great Spirit?  No, but he was continuing a tradition of making some sort of morning offering of acknowledgement of the Great Spirit.  Even if he didn’t know the specifics anymore, having been lost over the previous decades and centuries, he understood the need for some sort of ritual of connection at that time of day, even if it was only for himself and the family.  And that ritual held no less power than any formal ritual his Native American ancestors may have engaged in prior to his birth.

I and many others believe strongly that the human race will only survive if, as a species, we shift our philosophical and spiritual attitudes towards one of interconnectedness and unity that acknowledges our connection to each other, the land we live on, the air we breathe, and the water we drink.  These are connections we all once had that have been slowly eroded and lost over the millennia with the advance of civilization that saw fewer and fewer humans truly living as one with the land.  This no doubt came with the loss of rituals and traditions that honored that connection.

People feel this loss on some level, everywhere.  If you get a few drinks into just about anyone and get them to open up, they’d probably admit to a yawning hole inside them and a yearning to fill it, but they don’t know why the hole is there or what to fill it with.  What they’re missing is connection, and one of the Paths to connection is via ritual, especially that which is performed in concert with other like-minded people.  This is why things like football games are so popular in our culture.  They are one of the few opportunities we have to fulfill the very human requirement for ritual in our lives.

More importantly, it needs to be meaningful, fulfilling ritual that acknowledges interconnection.  For me, that meant adding elements to my spiritual practice that come from my ethnic ancestry, which is largely Celtic, Norse, Germanic, and Native American in origin.  As an American, I am distantly removed by geography and time from the lands of my ancestors, and I also carry no family traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation.  Thus, I have to make up my own, cobbled together from what I can learn about the people I come from and what resonates with my own soul.

As such, my own ritual and spiritual life is quite varied, drawing on sources from around the world, but all of them with an underpinning of interconnected existence between all beings and things.  This is why my primary spiritual descriptor is ‘Buddhist witch’, because both of those terms speak to that interconnected existence, just in different ways.  And yet it would be just as accurate to call me a ‘Buddhist shaman’ or a ‘Buddhist animist’, for the same reason of interconnectedness.  It’s just a matter of perspective.  And as long as I remain true to that spirit of interconnection, I do not feel as though I am inappropriately borrowing from a tradition that doesn’t ‘belong’ to me.

The need for created ritual was made evident to me over the last year as I slowly created a calendar to worship the local Trees where I live.  I was inspired by the notion of the Celtic Tree calendar, which places the Trees common to the British Isles where the Celtic descendants live according to a calendar based on runic letters.  Many people believe there is historical validity to this Celtic Tree calendar, while others disagree, citing valid sources to refute the idea.  The Trees and the runic letters are historically valid, but not necessarily any calendrical system linking the two.  That was likely a later construction.

At first my notion of a Tree calendar was shaken, but then I decided that it didn’t matter if there was ‘historical validity’ to the idea.  Who cares?  What matters is that someone created a system of Celtic Tree worship at some point that resonated with others, who then went on to incorporate it into their own systems of worship, and now collectively there are large groups of people who follow the Celtic Tree calendar because it works for them.  As such, that system of worship has taken on its own spiritual validity, even if it lacks true historical validity.

So I forged ahead with my local Tree worship project, because it works for myself and the group of people I’m making the rituals for.  I decided it was perfectly okay to adapt the existing Tree calendar to suit my own purposes, and in doing so I have created a whole series of rituals designed to honor the local Trees on the New Moon each month.  I have deepened my connection to the new land in which I live, familiarizing myself with the different Trees and the other plants and animals that depend on them.  By the time I am done with the project, I will have constructed an entire system by which someone living in the area could engage in worshipping the Trees we live with, largely pulling from my own ethnic ancestry.

Some would call this ‘cultural appropriation’, as I am essentially borrowing from cultures I did not grow up in and so technically are not ‘mine’.  And yet I feel absolutely zero connection to the culture in which I live.  Where does that leave me and the millions of other people in our culture who feel no connection to either their current culture or to the ones they come from?  We have a human need for meaningful connection and are entitled to such, somehow.  I feel that humans automatically resonate with the cultures and traditions that will lead them down their Path and so should be allowed to incorporate them into their own self-made traditions as long as they are being true to the spirit of that culture.

I think people should be encouraged to create their own rituals and traditions, especially in the absence of them.  A ritual created specifically for you and your purposes is far more powerful than one created for general consumption, anyway.  Rituals can be anything, too.  Anything that is done the same way repeatedly is a ritual, such as making coffee, brushing your teeth, or taking a shower.  A ritual is a little slice out of time during which you stop and pay attention to what you’re doing to jolt yourself out of the usual daily reverie.  To re-establish connection to yourself and the people and things in your life that really matter, not the speeding rat race we’re all a part of.

It just needs to be done mindfully, with an awareness of your connection to, well, everything.  If that’s too much to deal with, then an awareness of your connection to loved ones and how you all affect one another.  Practicing this awareness will help engender the cooperative nature our world needs so much right now and erode the competitive spirit that is destroying everything good.  Despite appearances, there is more commonality than division amongst people.  We just have to look for it and cultivate it.