Patti Smith. By Sarah MacDonald
I can’t see the moon from my new home. While I have a terrace big enough to make two additional rooms in my apartment, the sky—still so wide above me—is blocked off on two sides. I live in a U-shaped building, you see. I don’t see the moonrise or the moonset in the evening or morning. I must walk into the courtyard, chilly and crisp as the season turns, and look west to see her cross the pale blue sky on our part of the hemisphere, saying goodnight and good morning to the day.
Morning moon conversation became a ritual for me for a few years. Even when the clouds covered her, I spoke softly, deeply, and sometimes said nothing at all to her while I drank my coffee, read my book, or looked out at the world. I wonder about rituals now that I’m trying to refocus in this new home, new neighbourhood, and new state of mind. I whisper this too during my morning meditation, my balcony door open to the autumnal morning breeze, and try to sit in the painful discomfort of beginning, once more, again.
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We had a flood just over a month ago. One Thursday night, water began leaking from my brand new ceiling, drop by drop. I watched the water alter drywall and paint in real-time; smudging the stark white walls around my closet like it was melting away, forming ominous cracks in my ceiling until it reached the fire and smoke alarms, water leaking from there, the alarms sounding on and off for hours. At first I was apathetic—exhausted from the spring and summer of decisions, flights, apartment viewings, and packing up and tossing out old versions of myself—and then I very quickly began to panic.
The next morning, sitting back in Parkdale with no sleep after abandoning our soaked apartment, I sat in front of a big window with the breeze coming in, listening on the phone to my mother tick off all the things that had happened to me in a short amount of time: lost job (check), started a freelance writing business (check), lost apartment (check), endured apartment hunting in Toronto (check), moved in and out (check, check), and now, a disrupting flood. I began to cry. She clicked her tongue and softened her tone the way she used to when I was upset as a child. I wished to curl up in her lap but we were a hundred kilometres apart. All these years later, I am mollified by my mother’s voice. She said, “you can get through anything” and I answered, “but what if I’m tired of that?”
I touched my swollen eyes and picked up the phone once more to see my nephew. He screamed I LOVE YOU as he shoved food into his mouth. My back, one vertebrae at a time, released tension and I leaned into how calming his voice is to me. My therapist once said that he’s a nervous system regulator for me, and I think about that with every moment I spend with him, in-person or digitally. My chest feels less heavy with him—the stone in my belly, where I feel, where every pain goes, softens, too. Speaking to Jensen is a ritual. It’s an exercise in loving him and loving me, and cracking open further each moment he discovers this world.
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We spoke about rituals in tarot circle last week and I’ve been letting those thoughts slip around my brain ever since. Routine is often what comes to mind (getting up at a specific time, drinking a specific coffee or tea, performing a specific task, and so on and so on) and the word, the act itself, seems heavy to me. I love a routine, and I do need it to exist, but it’s rigid. I feel it can trap you. Using a bullet journal to dictate your life sounds tortuous to me. Ritual, however, is devotional. How loving and clarifying to perform these specific tasks of joy day after day or week after week. A new month begins in less than a week and I look forward to spending my first day of the month as I always do: settling in with a mug of coffee, my laptop, and the blinds pulled up so the morning light can come in so I read my monthly horoscopes and write my intentions in my Many Moons planner. I pull tarot cards for the month, and check in with myself and my brain.
This is an act of ritual to me. I think, as we spoke in tarot circle, dedication to acts or routine can become ritual. But ritual, to me, is what separates living your life to loving your life. To dedicate yourself to you. Flowers are ritual to me; speaking to them, trimming them, being in awe of them. The moon, the breeze, the lake. It’s not just nature but that’s a good place to start. Ritual softens me.
I suspect this urgency toward devotion comes because of the cost of burnout. I kept a tweet from poet laureate Ada Limon that I return to often about burnout and getting through the next thing and the thing after that until we’re exhausted and can’t find energy to love what we love anymore. I’ve thought about this a lot, and privately talked about it with friends, when it comes to music and music writing and thinking. I’m still a music journalist. I’m not the same one I was before. I don’t participate in the same kind of rhetoric or posturing, largely because of my retreat into myself and into safer spaces like basketball Twitter, but that person is still very much there. I devoted so much of my life to being in the music, twisting around lyrics—buoyed by and in awe of other people’s gifts. When you make a career out of that, especially one that becomes more about who you are and what you can do, the love slips away. Ritual, devotion to music—these things I’d lovingly given my life to—had become wicked. I hated it.
This is all to say that when I stood in front of Patti Smith three days after the flood, her face beaming into a full crowd of people, I felt my way back to this as ritual. It was amazing to behold. I’d thought I’d lost this ability to really enjoy the way music lives in my body. I’d been to shows since the pandemic, since this shift in thinking, and they weren’t the same. I enjoyed them, sure, but Patti electrified me. The familiar steps of swaying, singing loudly, too loud even, and smiling, and gasping at the chords of the next song, knowing the exact words to come. The flood hadn’t happened to me at that moment. The following two weeks of repairs, waiting for construction workers, lack of clarity on timelines, none of that mattered. It was just me and Patti. It was me and this ritual.
~
I often feel very morose writing these or thinking through the stickier, less than ideal thoughts I have around change, hardness, and, very often, stress. I write to feel less alone, even if I sound like Eeyore most days. I tell myself it’s an act of vulnerability to say how fundamentally exhausted I am—from brain to bone—but if that’s all I’m telling you, too, that’s exhausting. Where is the joy? How can I hold what is difficult and what is beautiful? Ritual is a way to do that.
What has anchored me to myself is slowly coming back. I’ve taken care of people and crises and absorbed change so much in my life that I’ve lost the plot. I’ve forgotten who or what I am supposed to do, and how I get there. The flood opened up something in me. The pandemic fucked up so much of my life, and everyone else’s, that the burden of time, of stasis, and fear has held me in a vice grip. The flood reminded me that that doesn’t have to be. I don’t know. There’s something about watching cracks in your ceiling drip water from an unknown source that reminds you to stop worrying and thinking and start being and doing.
Yesterday morning I did what I always do in this new space, less than two months into living in the East, which was to go to the market in my neighbourhood. I’ve come to enjoy my morning walks to Greenwood Park; making friends with farmers and local vendors who set up there once a week until the air cools, asking how to cook delicata squash and hearing them cheer me on in my culinary journey. I buy misshapen carrots, some that look like thick legs, and radicchio and garlic bulbs and butternut squash. I looked at the bright stems of chard at another stall, like they were a flavour rainbow before me. I started at quite possibly the biggest shallot I’d ever seen in my life. (It was the size of a giant white onion!) I get ruby-hued strawberries, pick dahlias, snack on a beignet, and grab a bottle of wine before heading back home. Here, I tell myself, is a ritual I can hold; one that brings me back to me—enjoying nature’s offerings and seeing into myself by being outside in the world.
Some Sunday mornings on my walk to the market I see the moon. I speak to her then. I tell her what I’m afraid of and what I’m excited to do. I repeat Mary Oliver to her over and over again:
just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world
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"Summer of decisions" is so real!! It's been a hard couple of months, and I've never appreciated my little apartment and daily rituals more. Reading this brought me some much-needed calm and gratitude. Thanks for sharing, Sarah!
It is such beauty to witness your process 🌘