Creating The Webbd Wheel: Initiation and Ritual
In which we honor important milestones ...
Our ancestors lived close to the land. They organized their sense of time, cycles, and seasons around the moon, the sun, the stars, the weather, and the reproductive cycles of their animals and crops. All my life I’ve felt a sense of loss about marking these deep natural cycles as I’ve politely fulfilled expectations around Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc. Our modern observances seem empty and superficial to me, yet another reason to spend money on junk and simply do the done thing rather than the meaningful introspective work of inventory and meditation about how we’re doing and how our lives feel.
Initiation and ritual are not an exercise in consumerism, but a choice to pause, to take stock, to pray, grieve, practice gratitude, rejoice. Whoever we are, wherever we live, we have birth, maturation and death in common. We have children. Women menstruate and then cease to do so. Men become fathers, creators, leaders, warriors, hunters, and then, if lucky, elders.
Elders are, of course, the leaders and guides of such celebrations. It is they who hold the wisdom, the stories, the skills, and the life experience to support and sustain younger generations. Our modern culture no longer places the same value on the role of elders, however, and most of us, aside from birthday celebrations, do not have an opportunity to mark our milestones unless we do it for ourselves. Spiritual rituals are church-based, as are death and marriage, but menopause is mocked. For many young women, the first period is an occasion for mortification rather than celebration. We celebrate high school graduation, but we pay no attention to the transformation from dependent child to self-sufficient adult. Those years are buried in educational and economic struggle, as well as attaining the legal age to drink, drive, and buy tobacco products.
All doing and having. No being.
Indigenous cultures throughout the world have celebrated harvest and the strengthening light and stirring new growth in spring. They’ve celebrated the shortest day and the longest day, the balance points between the two. They’ve rejoiced as they bred, birthed, and slaughtered animals for food. Story, dance, prayer, vision questing, spending time in solitude, and withdrawing with others of one’s own biological sex have been ways in which people have sought to understand and mark the journeys of their lives.
In the Webbd Wheel series, I’ve brought ritual and initiation back. In the next part of The Hanged Man, several characters gather together to undergo a series of tasks and challenges, led by guides and elders. It’s not a summer camp. During the initiation, secrets are revealed, fears faced, painful truths examined. The purpose of initiation is to move into a different level of being; birth is always difficult and frightening in its power.
I wonder sometimes what would happen socially and culturally if we brought this kind of ritual back. Would gangs and cults have less power over those who are lost and frightened? Would rates of addiction and suicide go down? Would prison and mental health institution populations dwindle? Would more people develop a healthy sense of self and practice better self-care? Would family and community bonds strengthen, especially multigenerational bonds?
I don’t know. What I will say is living by the cycles and seasons outlined in the Webbd Wheel has brought me joy and comfort. Having a formal opportunity to pause at each turn of the wheel and assess my life has been a healing blessing. I do not have a group with whom to make such observance, but I have myself, my Tarot cards, my writing, my garden, my candles and rituals, my prayers, and my solitude.
I had the great good fortune in my old place to be part of a dance group of mostly women. In that space we celebrated and mourned our experience as women, as mothers, lovers, daughters, sisters and artists. We shared our changing bodies, our wisdom, our failures, and sometimes our poor health. We cried, laughed, played, and danced our rage. We held hands and spoke our truth in candle-lit dimness, secure that our secrets were safe. We held space for one another, however we needed to be in those moments. It was the most powerful and healing connection I’ve ever made with other people. We told stories, shared poetry, wept together, giggled, and marked the wheel of the year.
I have tried to find or form such a group here, but it hasn’t happened. Still, I hope, one day, when it’s the right time, I will again find a place in such a circle. In the meantime, I dream of community rituals and imagine an initiation of several young people on the cusp of individuation from their families, ready to don the mantel of adulthood.
(This essay was published with post #42 of The Hanged Man.)