In former times, when I was well tasked, and all cylinders were firing, ceremony and ritual were just there, behind the Orphan Wisdom School curriculum, the Nights of Grief and Mystery dramaturgy, the Iron God of Mercy Farm’s moral code. And when asked in countless interviews and Q&A sessions how some great undoing of our undoing might begin, I anchored my answers in ritual and ceremony: you start with your poverties, with an unadorned acknowledgement of the ceremonial illiteracy of your times. Or you probably won’t start.

When the people are starving, when they mistake many things for food, you don’t – if you want to be useful to them – give them soil sample readings and farming handbooks. You give them something they can eat, something that is food, and then you slow down. No more spiritual fast food. And then you play the long hand: maybe now you are working for a time not your own. Somewhere in there you’ll need tempered, tested ritual, to get you past the hard days and the half understandings that come with injury and trauma and cultural orphanhood.

What I haven’t done yet, over a quarter century of this kind of work: brought attention to bear upon ritual per se, the spirit mechanics of an orchestrated, lucid and purposeful engagement with the divine, or with spirits of place, or with whatever we might still mean by ‘the other world’, or ‘ancestors’. 

So, while the candle still burns, and while I remain able, and for those who haven’t entirely turned away from the hard tuition of such things, I mean to devote the January 2027 Boreal Session to The Post, Then the Beam: The practice of ritual, and to the ritual of practice.