I’ve written before about how long it took me to work out what a ritual even was – turns out I’d been doing them my whole life without the label, from Mass to my hair appointment to a candle lit for an intention. That part I got to eventually. What took me a lot longer, and cost me a lot more, was working out that a ritual needs a proper ending. As in – how do you actually open and close a ritual???
The Candle Was Easy
With a candle, this bit’s fairly straightforward. The ritual ends when the candle burns out, or you blow it out yourself. No grand ceremony required – the flame going out is the close, built right into the object. I didn’t have to think about it. It thought about it for me.
Then I Started Doing Something More Complicated
Not that anything ever happened to me. Nor did I ever faint in the middle of a factory floor, causing panic and mayhem among a bunch of hardbitten steelworkers, an extensive investigation into potential excessive CO2 levels, and some very embarrassing conversations with my manager about blood loss during periods. Nope, never happened…
But it did teach me to firmly open and close rituals.
Here’s roughly what actually went on, if it had happened, which it didn’t. Deep spiritual work, done properly, without a clear ending point – the kind of thing you sit with, that stirs something up, that you don’t just switch off and walk away from. And then straight back into ordinary life. Straight onto a factory floor, in this instance. No line drawn between “I am doing this work” and “I am now doing something else entirely.” The work doesn’t know the ritual’s meant to be over cos you never told it, formally, that it was over. It just keeps going. Quietly. Underneath everything else you’re doing. Until eventually your body makes the decision for you, in the least convenient location it can find, in front of the least convenient audience.
Why the Close Matters as Much as the Open
So here’s the thing I didn’t understand at the start, and genuinely wish someone had told me plainly: opening a ritual is the easy part. You light the candle, you say the words, you know you’ve started something. Closing it is where people get lazy, cos it feels like the interesting bit is already over and you’re just tidying up. It isn’t tidying up. It’s the bit that tells your body, your mind, whatever you want to call the part of you doing the work, that it’s allowed to stop now.
A firm close doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be clear. Blow out the candle and say so, out loud if you can manage it, even just to yourself – “this is ended.” Close a book if you opened one. Stand up if you were sitting. Change your physical position, cos the body remembers position as much as it remembers anything. The specifics matter less than the fact that there’s a specific, deliberate, unmissable moment where the ritual stops and ordinary life starts again.
I don’t always get this right, even now. But I’ve never had another CO2 investigation over it, so I’ll take that as progress.
Learn from my mistakes!!!
