Quotes on Ritual, Ceremony & Awe

“Ceremony can bring the quiescent back to life; it can open your mind and heart to what you once knew but have forgotten.” -Robin Wall Kimmerer

Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, lightning, the deaths of all those you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she traps you. See that stone finger over there? That is the only one who ever escaped. — Joy Harjo

“I believed I wanted to be a poet, but deep down, I just wanted to be a poem.” – Jaime Gil de Biedma​

I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They’re all we have, you see.
All we have to fight off illness and death.
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.
Their evil is mighty,
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories,
but the stories cannot be confused or forgotten.
They would like that.
They would be happy
because we would be defenseless then.
–Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

With the demise of religion, many people are left stranded in a chasm of emptiness and doubt; without rituals to recognize, celebrate, or negotiate the vital thresholds of peoples lives, the key crossings pass by, undistinguished from the mundane, everyday rituals of life. If we approach our decisive thresholds with reverence and attention, the crossing will bring us more than we could have ever hoped for.” -John O’Donohue

We are most human and most alive when we allow ourselves to be touched by the wonder of the world and when we feel genuine gratitude for the life we have been given. -Michael Meade

“If we do not birth and die ritually, we will do so technologically, inscribing technocratic values in our very bones. It matters greatly not only that we birth and die, but HOW we birth and die.” -Ronald Grimes

We exist because our specific particulate arrangements won the battle against an astounding assortment of other arrangements all vying to be realized. By the grace of random chance, funneled through nature’s laws, we are here. Science is a powerful, exquisite tool for grasping an external reality. But within that rubric, within that understanding, everything else is the human species contemplating itself, grasping what it needs to carry on, and telling a story that reverberates into the darkness, a story carved of sound and etched into silence, a story that, at its best, stirs the soul. -Brian Greene

“When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.” -Allen Ginsberg

I want enough time to be in love with everything. -Marina Keega

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation. -Abraham Verghese

“And as I grew older I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.” -Leonard Cohen

“She taught me this above all else: things which don’t shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth.” – Leslie Marmon Silko

“Ceremonial observance adds lucid layers—depth, dimension, drama and distinction—to our lives, making the ordinary seem special, and the special, extraordinary.” -Donna Henes

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement.….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” -Abraham Joshua Heschel

Admire as much as you can. Most people do not admire enough. — Vincent van Gogh

“The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred until the sacred in them remembers.” -Sarah Durham Wilson

Our mind is enriched by what we receive, our heart by what we give. — Victor Hugo

“Rituals are like electrically powered transmitters sending stimulating sparks of electric current or inspirational feelings that connect us to our inner being or soul.” –Wes Adamson

“That, I think, is the power of ceremony. It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine; the coffee to a prayer.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer

“The real ceremony begins where the formal one ends, when we take up a new way, our minds and hearts filled with the vision of earth that holds us within it, in compassionate relationship to and with our world.” –Linda Hogan

“What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.

When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” ― John O’Donohue

“A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.” –Joseph Campbell

“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.” –Elizabeth Gilbert

Ritual affirms the common patterns, the values, the shared joys, risks, sorrows, and changes that bind a community together. Ritual links together our ancestors and descendants, those who went before with those will come after us. -Starhawk

One cannot live in the world; that is, one cannot become, in the easy, generalizing sense with which the phrase is commonly used, a “world citizen.” There can be no such thing as a “global village.” No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality. -Wendell Berry

“We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.” -Annie Dillard

“One purpose of creative ritual was to experience the connection to “the other” as well as a deeper connection to oneself. That’s why ancient people would say: that ritual made me more aware of how I’m connected to life, to the earth, to the spirits, to the song of creation, and made me more aware of who I am inside, at the level of my own being. What we’ve lost is partly the sense that we are each connected to the whole thing, that each human soul is secretly connected to the living soul of the world.” -Michael Meade

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. — Rilke

If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold ever-­more wonders. -Andrew Harvey

“Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

No matter our spiritual or religious background, whether we are atheists or church goers, perhaps we can all agree on this: life is wonderfully mysterious. How could one gaze at a beautiful Colorado vista, or the stars stretching out into the universe, or a couple who is deeply in love, and not feel a sense of wonder? -Jen

The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. -Thich Nhat Hanh

“Ceremony may be self-derived, it may come from vision, it may be given by a teacher, it may be cultural. But from all sources it has the same underlying root. It is a process in which the human capacity for sacred feeling and reverence is given form and expression.” –Stephen Harrod Buhner

“We are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.” -Jill Tarter

Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way.The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power.If you aren’t willing to be changed by the ritual, don’t do it. -Starhawk

“This is the first, wildest and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.” -Mary Oliver

“Ritual and ceremony are powerful bonding tools. They result in a sense of community, a feeling of unity far beyond what you might expect.” –Del Suggs

“You are not a separate being. You belong to the living body of Earth. You are the Earth, looking up at the stars. You are the Earth, becoming conscious of itself.”  –Joanna Macy

Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do. -Terry Prachett

I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion—and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies. -Ram Dass

Ritual is able to hold the long-discarded shards of our stories and make them whole again. It has the strength and elasticity to contain what we cannot contain on our own, what we cannot face in solitude.
-Francis Weller

“Memory is tricky-memory for certain facts and or details is probably more imaginative than anything, but the important thing is to keep the feeling the story has. I never forget that: the feeling one has of the story is what you must strive to bring forth faithfully.” –Leslie Marmon Silko

It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, “Being here is so much.” It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. — John O’Donohue

Gratitude and grace cannot really be measured; nor can they be willed. Each requires that we be open and vulnerable. Grace is a kind of wonder that can fall upon us unexpectedly. Gratitude is like a desert flower that spontaneously blossoms from within us. The presence of either one can break the limits of time and open a moment or a life to wonder and wholeness. -Michael Meade

It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly, all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. –Linda Hogan

“To love another another human in all of their splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task…tremendous and foolish and human.” -Louise Erdrich

“When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?” –Muriel Barbery

“There is a way to be a human being that causes all life to thrive.” — Pat McCabe

I’m going to make everything around me beautiful. That will be my life. -Elsie de Wolfe

We are awakening to the crisis of the earth and the effect of the loss of the sacred feminine, but few people understand that the causes of the crisis have spiritual values at their roots–values of the sacred as immanent, imbued in all of life, and all life as interdependent. – Lama Tsultrim Allione

Love loves to love love. — James Joyce