What sustains me #2: Rituals
I was on a zoom workshop last week contemplating a sense of place and the rituals that we use to relate to it. We were tasked with getting ready to clear the space that we were using during the call. I have known about space clearing from several different traditions. I’ve spent time living somewhere where Feng Shui was a common practice for treating and setting the sense of place towards a better purpose. Friends told of practices from their origins, where parents had used milk or salt to take care of clearing the space in the house. I also met people from my North European origin that did their own space clearing using burning and spoken texts. In my childhood I had seen the incense being used to clear the space around the altar in church. I can see the container being meticulously swung in the designated directions and I can smell the headiness of the smoke now. My grandma is beside me, I can feel her weight.
I hadn’t called it space clearing as a child, but I can see it now in my regular reorganisation of my room. I used to process times of emotional shift or something coming to an end by moving the furniture and changing the décor. I’d find spare things around the house and make a new window hanging or a collage picture. I would move the bed, the rug, the lighting. On my own body I’d mark change with a new hair style, changing the colour, the length.
It was time to make a decision about what material I was going to use for my space clearing during the workshop. My mind turned to the shops I’d been drawn into since I was a child. They were the ones with incense, stones, aura reading machines, crystals and runes. I had wanted things from these places but I was beginning to see that aesthetics’ and practices were organised into categories. I saw that once you wore a Celtic cross, you would also need to adjust your hair colour, your make up and clothes to fit the category you had committed to: category hippy.
I didn’t get along with my categories and would explore the boundaries in my teenage times through my clothes. One day I’d be wearing the ankle length school skirt that moved around me and reminded me of elegant women from 19th century novels. This look was designated hippy. I would follow the next day wearing a tight pencil skirt rolled up far above the knee. Now I was category tart. This behaviour was not allowed, I was humiliated, insulted and bodily assaulted by children who’d learned that categories were sacred, that danger lay in the traversing.
I learned to be more deliberate as I aged. A friend and I turned up to the 1997 student women’s conference wearing heels and lipstick, challenging the majority culture to include us in their idea of what a feminist looked like. Our memory is that we were refused entry. I think now of the need to protect that space, the realities that other women where living, the levels of violence and denial that their female identities had to risk. The very act of my playing with the categories I wanted to associate with is testimony to the power granted by some of my social identities. It is also a behaviour formed in the marginalised identities my ancestors lived through, where they developed a defensive sense of needing to remain outsiders.
What would these people that I come from have used to clear their space? When I think of the last two generations I’d say “nothing”, as for sure it would’ve been categorised as ridiculous behaviour to try and clear the immaterial. There would be sympathy and curiosity for these practices amongst some. But the dominant story would be from the misogynistic ‘rationalists’, saving us from the danger of listening to old wives and considering a world beyond the comfort of the intellect. More broadly the internet says that people from the northern tribes of Europe would’ve used mugwort, amongst other things. I unsuccessfully tried sourcing some in the neighbourhood. My backup plan was to use the myrrh that I bought a few years ago in memorial to my Catholic church-grandma memory.
The workshop call began with sharing stories of the landscapes and places that had formed us. We were a group including people formed in the Netherlands, where I live and the workshop was organised from, in India, China, Romania, England, Venezuela and Iran. We all began our space clearing in different ways. I noticed the woman that lead the workshop had a familiar atmosphere of anxious excitement. I have seen the same state in myself and others as we cross the categorical lines prescribed to this particular White European Woman linage I come from, but have no good name for. There is a sense of liberation, and also a frustration of trading one restraint for another, from being ‘rational’ to being ‘emotional’. This great tradition of binary thinking is the system used to keep all this category policing in action. In daily life I wrestle with defensive postures, reactions. I meet all the caricatures I carry and try to fit myself and others into. I have preferences for which groups I want you to put me in. It’s a grim dance of disassociating myself from others. It’s a space that needs clearing.
As I begin to wander beyond the categories I realised that space clearing rituals were passed along to me in other ways. The singing together in the car and the kitchen, there was a hesitance that stopped it being a ‘group activity’ but everyone was participating in being with the music and mouthing, singing or humming along besides each other. The walking we did, to ‘blow the cobwebs’ away, ‘get some air’, have our ‘character’s formed’. The washing up time after meals has a particular flavour of intimate time between those who shared the task with me. The building of fires, clearing the garden to burn in piles as bonfires or the fireplace, made tidy enough to feed the fire with air — opening the windows and closing the doors to pull the draft through and up the chimney.
Later as an adult KTV would clear space in my body, it would joyfully make a room full of connections. Yoga would clear a new space by making bodily presence out of tension. Travel made space for what happens when I’m not in a familiar context. The wardrobe warriors would help each of its members clear space in their wardrobe and in their sense of what they can wear and show of themselves. Telling my stories to listening ears would clear space in my perceptions, replacing distortions with a more vivid and multihued reality.
I moved around the studio/hallway room I was taking the zoom call in with a spoon full of myrrh and a lighter below it. I heard a tiny echo of the self-consciousness that would have been engulfing some years ago. I carried out my tasks to speak to different memories in the room, things that had occurred there in its four years of living together. I wondered if breathing in this much myrrh was a good idea. The room grew bigger and calmer.
