rituals
“reflect on a ritual, whether it’s a personal habit, cultural tradition, or invented routine. what does your ritual signify? what happens when a ritual is interrupted or transformed. how does it evolve over time?”
creature of habit calls to mind an image of someone who lets themselves sleep in on sundays and enjoy a slow morning over coffee and a book. that is, someone for whom the ritual is an exception that sustains everything else, the rest of their orderly, well-tended existence.
not that i don’t enjoy lazy mornings, but my habits, my rituals have tended to be stranger.
when i was a teenager and teaching myself to draw, i could only practice if wearing a pair of fingerless gloves. it started at first because they made it easier to avoid smearing pencil and charcoal, but quickly got to the point nothing could proceed without them, even as the knitwork unravelled and putting them on amounted to weaving my hands through the two tangled masses of red thread.
i tended to arrive at the studios early, before anyone else. i’d make a quick breakfast in the kitchenette, a gruel of oats and water, no milk, no sugar, no honey, no salt, nothing that might make it even slightly more palatable. for some reason i thought that eating like a monk, and being hungry, would make me a better artist.
a lot of things are thankfully different now. hormones, stability, wisdom enough to enjoy my food. and the rituals too. since transitioning, i have on and off kept up daily tarot readings. three cards each morning: one for what i’m thinking about, one for what i’m feeling and one for what i’m doing. as with all the other rituals, it is not clear when or how this one came about, at what point my more spirited efforts to learn the cards settled lazily into the daily warp and woof of life.
when i still had a smartphone the reading would take place, sitting up in bed with the first coffee of the day. it was nice not to have to shuffle the cards. i could jot down a little comment next to each reading, like, “yes absolutely” when the cards really resonated, or, “uh oh” when they predicted difficulty and misery, or, “???” when they contradicted themselves or were otherwise uninterpretable.
then i sat on the phone one day and broke it and in an instant lost that entire archive of spreads and commentary.
now in the morning while the kettle boils i clumsily shuffle the deck and turn face up the three cards, then go and sit back in bed and think about them. no more notes, but that may be better. i feel a relentless need to document my life, but each tarot reading only remains with me throughout each single day before it wisps away into the evening, into sleep and forgetting.
my rituals, frayed gloves or sad breakfasts or visiting the same cafe every week to work in, largely seem to have been a way of demarcating things. a way of establishing a boundary between the rest of my life and something that i wanted, needed to exceed it. i guess that made me a creature of habit, didn’t it?
the tarot though is more ambiguous. i remember starting out with the usual openminded skepticism, you know, the line of reasoning that you cannot actually divine the future from your readings but that the cards are nonetheless an effective means of reflection that can get you to think about aspects of your life in new ways and interrogate your deeply held but otherwise unspoken beliefs and narratives, etcetera etcetera.
as the daily readings settled themselves in, though, that kind of approach began to feel like a half measure, like a way of meeting my obvious need for this practice while pretending i could still be exterior to it. where i’ve wound up, then: so far from serving to demarcate any one part of my life from the rest, the tarot has instead bled through the whole thing.
tarot cards may divine the future, but in a complicated way that is difficult to distentangle from the way they also themselves influence it. the spreads, whether they’re promising or bleak or incomprehensible, pose a question which only gets answered by living through the next sixteen or so waking hours. the question and course of waking life becoming one answer to that day, until evening and sleep and forgetting and the whole thing wisps away.
return to muse ariadne