Tending to our simple rituals in an uncertain world

sitting with mystery as we gather and mend

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a hamlet in a forest. I’m Jan and I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. My Sunday posts are always free. Let’s create a little alchemy together.

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How do we face all the uncertainty that life brings? 

I'm someone who finds the evening before travel excruciating. I'm a logistics person so everything is always organised. Yet packing always seems like an existential crisis until I realise that it really isn't. And once I'm on my way I'm more than fine. It's just that liminal space between states of belonging...

Travel is a minor uncertainty in the scale of things. I've rarely had a journey unravel and on the occasion when the trains from Paris to Zaragoza via Barcelon went on strike, I calmly had a new route sorted out quickly. Similarly the last train I took from Llandudno Junction after almost 20 years living in the village of Tanygrisiau, nested at the foot of the Moelwyns.

It was during a period when lockdown was about to begin again and train travel needed a reason that the police patrolling the station platform would accept. Moving house passed the test but every train my daughter and I got on was terminated early or rerouted that day. We patched together a bizarre trip to my older daughter’s home where I would see my new granddaughter before going on to join A. and my son, who had moved ahead. Uncertainty was the air and taste of that journey, and we had to rebuy tickets for ‘allowed routes’ despite being unceremoniously dumped several times, but it wasn’t impossible.

Some things are not so easily solved and leave us in an uncomfortable liminal space for much longer. We experienced this collectively during the pandemic, with lock downs of elastic duration. I recently listened to the psychologist Esther Perel talking about the many kinds of stress that came with global uncertainty and ways to ameliorate it. 

When our nervous systems are constantly trigged, what soothes and nurtures?

lighting a candle before I begin to write

getting into the forest or, on the craziest of days —

just stepping onto the balcony to hear the river flowing

tending to my breath 

a cup of herbal tea

All these are rituals. Rituals mark time as different, they shift the space we inhabit by demarcating this time as holy, particular... They take our attention into a deeper time that is both grounded — due to the ritual's structure — and expansive.

Rituals help us navigate ordinary days and periods of not knowing. And so too does eros. This primordial god of love, desire, passion is about all the ways we live in the senses, all the ways we connect with the other without othering.

I wrote about this in ‘The Deepest Life Force’ post and quoted from Audre Lorde. In Sister Outsider she says:

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self  and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of  satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can  aspire. 

[…]

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros,  the personification of love in all its aspects — born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic,  then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that  creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now  reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our  work, our lives.

We need rituals that ground, contain and consecrate our lives. And we also need delight. Enlivening moments that come in encounters, surprise, mystery, spontaneity. All this this is eros and we make space for it when we are creative. When we value relationships that are full and messy and change us. When our work enables belonging, purpose, and growth rather than transactional productivity. When we are open, making and mending in the ways we live each day. Eros is why we quilt or grow flowers, mend a blanket  or tend a vegetable plot, bake bread or gather with those we love to eat and talk, travel to new places (whether a local coffee shop or something further afield) or write a novel...

We don't always choose ritual and enlivening moments to soothe frayed nerves and to tend to our bodies and souls. When life is at its most uncertain, confusion, overwhelm and exhaustion, often ungenerously accompanied by negative self-talk, can step into the breach instead. 

The mental health crisis of the pandemic demonstrated this and goes on reverberating. Working from home brought benefits but also collapsed boundaries and raised expectations of our constant availability.  Unlike ritual, which marks a space of time as sacred, the blurring of work that can intrude at midnight leaves us feeling fragmented and fatigued. I hear more and more people talking about exhaustion and often it's not that they are burnt out and not that they are working insane hours (though some are). What they have in common is working reactively in an environment where work can intrude at any time and there are no demarcations.

And this can be exacerbated when life contains uncertainty because it can be easier to numb the confusion by hiding in more and more work or busyness. It's a trap I fall into over and over again. On the cusp of major changes or in periods of change and doubt, my 'must work harder' voice takes over. It's a form of control, or an attempt at it, because it doesn't change the world, only tires me. As George Saunders says in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:

It’s hard to be alive. The anxiety of living makes us want to judge, be  sure, have a stance, definitively decide. Having a fixed, rigid system  of belief can be a great relief.

But he also notes

In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often  mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

How do you respond to uncertainty and change?

In my current life, I know change is coming. I came to the forest for it — to welcome an elderhood that revolve aroung sharing healing and transformation. But in the midst of saving an indie press after the ravages of lockdowns, renovating a house that is still communicating her many needs after long neglect, training as a herbalist and juggling writing and family... my rhythms of ritual and eros can feel drained of colour and energy.

A wise friend suggested logging how I use time each day. I did it for a month and reading the numbers was salutary. There are 168 hours in a week and 72 of them go into work — divided between my work as an editor, mentoring writers, leading courses, writing newsletters and posts and herbal study. About 36 hours a week go on the things that keep life running — logistics of the house renovations, cooking and eating meals, catching up with family and a daily walk. And around 50 hours are sleep. The remaining 10 hours are for journalling, reading, daydreaming in the bath (or I extend those hours at the cost of sleep).

The words that came to me looking at those numbers were 'cramped' and 'unbalanced'. The rhythm was off. And I believe rhythm is everything. I come back to Virginia Woolf and believe what she says of writing is true of all parts of life:

Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I  sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so  on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is  very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to  fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture  this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to  fit it.

So I've been tended to the rhythm of my life this month as we travel around the UK for a mixture of work and seeing family and dear friends. We’ve paused along the way to gather ourselves and are currently at a friend’s familiar cottage in Cornwall that is always a soothing place to be before heading home. From such tending I know the rhythm of rituals, and moments of eros will emerge again. Things like the writing project I'm currently passionate about because it's part of my enquiry into what lies beyond my uncertainty.

What are you tending to?

In the matrix of rituals and moments of delight, sometimes we simply need to befriend the uncertainty. Of course, it's easier to find our rhythm and passion when life is not throwing a thousand and one things at us. And when the world we live in is just and well-ordered. But that's rarely, if ever, our reality. 

Befriending uncertainty allows us to to come back to a still point, to rebalance, because mystery is at the heart of life. We live in a culture of facts and data, much of it shaky or unproven, but still stridently proclaimed. But in reality we humans know so little. There is so much mystery in this universe... and our lack of knowing it all can be a source not only of humility and walking gently on the earth, but also a way to find wonder and awe.

And in this uncertain world I'm also tending to gatherings. More and more, I know that community is urgent — from the three people who sit around our shared kitchen table for dinner each day to meeting in circles of support and connection wherever and whenever possible. 

Gatherings are places where we hone our stories — the ones we are writing and the ones we want to live. They are places where we mend. I love the art of visible mending and, like the rhythm of words, it's another great metaphor for our messy, beautiful lives and all the ways we stitch them together. 

I'm currently putting this into action with some beautiful blankets that have been in A.'s family for many years and need some tending. And also with my occasional workshops — the next one is: gather story mend. I'd love you to join me as we tend to our rhythms and rituals and delight in mystery in this most uncertain of worlds that still affords us so much tenderness.

Substack is the place where I bring all of my work together — the space where I can offer joyful service that tends to our stories — through words, through the wisdom of nature, and through the alchemy that is around us every day.

I’m here to support your journey.

How can I help you with the story you want to live?

My Sunday newsletters and lots of other content will always be free. You are so welcome to simply spend time browsing and I’d be really grateful if you can hit the little heart, leave a comment or restack the post. And if it’s possible for you to support this work with a paid subscription, I’d love to work with you.

Most of all I want to make this a space for community with gatherings to write and nurture our creativity.