On Change, & Ritual as a Grounding Act

Hello! I’m Heather Lanier, essayist, memoirist, poet, and professor of writing. The Slow Take is my very occasional newsletter, inviting us to lean into what makes us feel more human. Think of it as the opposite of a botox billboard or an AI-written thank-you note. There are only real thank you’s here. Thanks for being here!

Things change even when you go nowhere. It’s a revelation to me lately, because my beloved and I have spent our twenty-five years together moving around every few years, for many reasons: contingent work, international adventure, graduate degrees, more contingent work. Now, thanks to a glorious thing called tenure, we’re staying put. And this fall, I noticed something: Even when you stay put, things change. Change happens around you.

Case in point: On the first week of school, we got our teen and preteen to their respective junior and senior high schools. And then I went for a run by my kids’ old elementary school. Heading into the building were the tiniest humans I’d ever seen. Which is not true, because I raised a baby that the world told me was the tiniest baby they’d ever seen, and that baby grew into a kid always half the size of her peers.

But these preschoolers! How could a human ever be so miniature? They wore hilariously empty and ginormous backpacks, the lengths of which reached well past the backs of their knees.

So the change is on a personal level: I don’t do the precious preschool drop-off anymore, holding the hand of my teetering kin. But the change is also public: No kids have ever walked into that school so small, because that building used to house elementary kids—including mine. Now, it’s being rented out by a neighboring district for an early ed center.

The very small town I live in has been in flux. A new funding formula, doled down from the state, has sliced the school district budget so badly that was once lean is now bare bones. Two out of five buildings closed. Grades got shuffled into new buildings. Seventh graders are now with twelfth graders.

All of this has meant a change in rituals. I read the online buzz about a canceled monarch butterfly parade. Kids used to dress up as different stages of the butterfly’s life. They sung songs in the town square. They released monarchs. A significantly shuffled district meant the parade was canceled, and parents mourned. Their mourning looked like how mourning often does: outrage, complaint. Maybe the parents remember releasing butterflies themselves. I think the tradition was decades old.

Because I’m not from here, the ritual of the butterfly parade was easy for me to release (yeah, like a butterfly). But it’s funny how quickly I’m capable of clinging to a tradition, even when it’s newly established. The town’s junior high used to hold a “black box theater” of one-act plays. The plays were weird and fantastic! I can only remember two years of them because prior to that was Pandemical Apocalypse™, and prior to that, my family lived elsewhere. So it’s a tradition I’ve witnessed for literally just two years. And it is not happening this year. And I’m so stupidly sad about it.

There are probably thoughtfully researched think-pieces about how the speed of change is faster than ever now, thanks to the pandemic and AI and fascism. (See writers Sarah Menkedick and Erin Raffety on two very different ways that the current administration’s attacks on art, free speech, Medicaid, and immigration, are wreaking havoc on American lives.)

But I think we can all feel it: The ground we live on feels increasingly like sand.

And I live in south Jersey, where the ground is literally sand, because the ground was once the ocean floor.

This Sunday, I stood in a 165-year-old church (on the firmer ground of PA) and prayed with a liturgy that is 1,500 years old. I thought about what a relief it is to enter into a ritual—a stable thing no budget cut or cultural trend will topple. I go to mass weekly, but it felt especially sacred this week. I watched the acolytes kneel and stand with their tall candles and white robes. I let the choir’s Latin notes wash over me, ignorant to Latin as I am. I listened to the man I married chant the prayers at the altar. At home, he says novel and witty things daily. Here, at work, his words are over a thousand years old.

For all its imperfections, religion gives us this grounding experience of ritual. On Rosh Hashanah, my Jewish family members fed me apples and honey so I’d have a sweet year to come. Some fasted a few days later, on Yom Kippur. In a few weeks, my Hindu friends celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights. On the other side of winter, Muslims and Christians will both start their weeks-long fasts in mid-February.

We feast, give thanks, fast, mourn, atone, give thanks, then feast again.

We put pumpkins on stoops, catalog the red and gold and umber leaves, light the pillar candles.

We look up at the changing light, the shortening of days, name what it means, and what we want it to mean for our lives.

This season moves into the next season, and we name the change. Amidst the tumult of the world, it can be grounding to name the change with gestures older than smart phones.

If you mark your seasons by the fluorescent lights of the retail box stores, you’ll always be pushed forward too fast. I waited until September to buy my kids their new folders and pencils, but the box store had already cleared the back-to-school section and replaced it with ghosts. Now it’s October, and some of the cobwebs and monsters are coming down, not for Thanksgiving, but for Christmas. And in the Christian calendar, Christmas is actually preceded by Advent, which the secular-consumer world skips entirely because, well, you can’t sell quiet.

I once told my agent I wanted to write a book about all the small moments in life that have no rituals but should. We chatted via email about the kinds of moments we could include: Getting your first reader glasses. Sending the last check on your student loans. Bearing your stretch-pocked postpartum belly for the first time in a bikini. (Pregnancy and early parenting are shockingly bereft of rituals.)

Where is the ritual for when the kids’ black box theater program closes? Where is the ritual for when your grant gets eaten up by authoritarianism? Where is the ritual for when yet another sanctuary gets shot up by a raging man? Big and small, we’re moving through it at all at breakneck speed.

I crave the things that last—and outlast the pendulum swings. I crave the centuries’ old poem. The didgeridoo. A ritual is not just “a series of prescribed events.” That’s half the definition. A ritual is meant to “alter the internal or external state of an individual, community, or environment.” A ritual is meant to change us.

I want a ritual for when you see a super tiny kid who reminds you of your own, even when yours is much older.

I want a ritual for whenever a woman’s ovaries release their last egg.

I want a ritual for when you want to go to bed without carrying the world’s doom into the sheets with you.

What do you want a ritual for? Can we make our own? Can we borrow one? Light some candles? Utter some words a person wrote a thousand years ago? Can we reenter the rituals of our ancestors, shrugging at the imperfect language and tapping into the intention?

If we do, I think we can remember that beneath our feet are not just sand grains but layers and layers of rock. That while the core of the Earth’s outer layer is liquid, its very center is solid—and it’s four and a half billion years old.

Tidbits and Things:

• Today, I’m celebrating that my essay, “The Body of Apologies,” was a “notable essay” in this year’s Best American Essays anthology! Thank you to the editors of River Teeth, where the piece first appeared. What’s the ritual for when you have minor but still delightful news?

• My friend Natalie Shapero just released an amazing book of poetry, STAY DEAD, and it’s been Longlisted for the National Book Award! Natalie’s work is like no other. Highly recommend!

• My newest essay, “An Ounce of Light,” is coming out with Colorado Review this fall.