photo by Ben Gruagach
Wiccans often describe the sequence of annual celebrations or sabbats as the Wheel of the Year. This imagery is very apt. It illustrates the cyclical nature of reality: what we celebrate now will come around again in due time. It also helps us see the sabbats as part of a greater whole. Each sabbat is a spoke on the great Wheel. As the Wheel turns, the seasons turn, and as the seasons come and go our lives progress through a repeating sequence of celebrations, times of work and times of rest.
We humans have a tendency to spiral our attention down to focus on the small details of our lives. There is great beauty in the smallest detail just as there is magnificence in the larger patterns. Unfortunately, focusing on the small details often results in losing sight of the larger pattern. We sometimes gain a skewed sense of proportion and importance from paying too much attention to the small details at the expense of keeping the larger picture in mind. Balance is important.
When you perform a ritual do you worry and fuss over every little detail? Do you feel your ritual is a failure if you stumble over a word or gesture or cue? Do you worry that your ritual tools are not quite perfect? Do you obsess over having just the right people in the right places at the right times for your rituals?
Relax!
Rituals are a dance: even if a specific step is missed, the overall feeling and pattern is more important. Rituals are a work of art: even if a particular brushstroke in one spot isn’t quite right, the overall balance of colour, form, expression, and subject matter is more important. Rituals are a song: we might miss a note, but what is in our hearts and how much effort we put into the song, and whether we enjoy ourselves in the process, is much more important.
Try and see your rituals as a whole. What is the overall pattern of the ritual? Does it express the intent, the emotion, the central idea you have in your heart? How does the ritual fit in to a larger pattern of days, weeks, months, years, and even generations? Does the ritual help you feel more in tune with the Divine?
In “The Charge of the Goddess” the Great Lady tells us: “All acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.” She doesn’t say that rituals must be precise in order to please Her. She doesn’t say that mistakes in wording, gesture, or sequence will disappoint Her. Her words leave it all very open for us to decide how we will express those acts of love and pleasure. She might actually like our mistakes in ritual if we laugh at ourselves when they happen.
Perception is an amazing thing. We are blessed with an amazing flexibility in our senses and ability to process information. When we focus our attention we can become oblivious to the things that rage around us. For instance, when you are watching a good movie how often do you fail to notice the people who might be sitting around you, the traffic outside, what the weather is like, how your clothes feel on your body? When you get wrapped up in a good book isn’t it amazing how time can just fly by?
We can stretch our senses the other way too and notice things that we often overlook if we just turn our awareness in the right direction. Can you hear things around you, like the ventilation system in the building where you are now? Do you hear traffic, people, birds or animals nearby? Can you hear the wind? Do your clothes make sounds as you shift and move?
As you focus your attention it’s common for awareness of time to shift as well. Time can appear to stretch out or to compact itself so that an hour can seem like just a few minutes. During ritual it often happens that time just slips by unnoticed. Yet if we focus on the small details, worrying and obsessing about whether we did a gesture just right, time can crawl.
One way to balance out our perceptions to go into a ritual with a healthy outlook is to ground first. Grounding puts us in contact with our foundation, Mother Earth. It gives us a moment to calm down, smooth out our perhaps conflicting emotions, and find a still peace from which to flow into the dance that is ritual. You can’t ground too much before a ritual (unless it puts you to sleep!) but it is possible to not ground enough before a ritual. When we go into a ritual without sufficient grounding we increase the risk of getting sidetracked by the details.
Slowing down, breathing deeply in a slow measured pace, and touching inner stillness if only for a moment is probably the most basic way to ground. Feel the Earth beneath you and know in your heart that She is there to hold you up. When you feel at ease you are ready to proceed.
Grounded perceptions help us to grasp the larger significance of our rituals. We can throw ourselves wholeheartedly into the performance of the ritual, mistakes and all, and see the end result of the ritual as just a closing bar in the song rather than mistaking results for the whole thing. Artists often describe their art as a process as much as a finished product. The creation of the product is as important as the final product. They are both, process and product, part of the whole.
During my coven’s recent Midsummer celebrations, as the sultry night embraced us at the end of the day we decided to dance on the lawn in honor of the faeries while holding sparklers and glow sticks. I brought my digital camera along and snapped some amazing photos using the low-light mode. While we were caught up in dancing around with our sparklers, waving them around in patterns both random and purposeful, the camera was able to capture some of the magick in slices of time that are not visible to the human eye. And as if to illustrate the time-awareness effect even more, we had to wait each time a picture was taken before we could see what it looked like on the camera’s little screen. When making a purposeful design with a sparkler we had to just trust in the process and let the details take care of themselves. And the results were amazing.
Spiritual ritual is the same. We might not have the ability, right now, to see the larger picture. All we might have visible to us at the moment are the small details that drive us crazy because they seem so nit-picky. If we can trust in ourselves, in the Divine, and in the process of the ritual then we might find that the larger pattern does come together.
And that is when real magick touches our lives.
*** This article was originally published in Circle Magazine issue 94, Summer 2005. ***