“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, 

This tree keeps falling over. I prop it up,
it falls again. And the rain falls
day after day like a broken wet record.
Here are the birds—tiny, smaller

than birds. And like fresh butcher’s
paper, the light so bright it hurts.
So the birds are paper and so is the sky.
It will be easiest if I draw you a picture,

each of us a different shade of gray.
What goes right is an accident. It can’t
be blamed on us. What goes wrong

is almost impossible to see. How quickly
it disappears, like someone’s hand
into someone else’s pocket.

—Matthew Thorburn.

(Image by Geoff McFetridge.)

Rain Making

(Image found here)

The Importance of Ritual

"I pound my feet strongly on the ground several times, I take several deep breaths, and I "shake" my body to remove any negative energies.  I do this often before going to work, going into meetings, and at the front door before entering my house after a long day.

While we wonder what this person’s co-workers and neighbors think of their shaky acquaintance, such rituals – the symbolic behaviors we perform before, during, and after meaningful event – are surprisingly ubiquitous, across culture and time. Rituals take an extraordinary array of shapes and forms. At times performed in communal or religious settings, at times performed in solitude; at times involving fixed, repeated sequences of actions, at other times not. People engage in rituals with the intention of achieving a wide set of desired outcomes, from reducing their anxiety to boosting their confidence, alleviating their grief to performing well in a competition – or even making it rain."

Read the full article by Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton
here

Found here