Everyday rituals

Three weeks ago fifteen hundred people joined together to celebrate the Winter Solstice at CERES in Brunswick East.

It’s such a simple event but every year more and more people come to CERES Solstice to gather around the fires and be momentarily transported together through ritual fire, words, music and the darkness.

We give our thanks to the seasons, we let the hard things go up with the flames and we welcome the light of a new year. I don’t know how it works but everyone agrees it’s kind of transformative.

Every society has its rituals. It defines us as humans. We’re pre-programmed to take the profane and make it sacred.

Seasonal markers like Solstice or Harvest are a wonderful time for our big collective rituals but when you can’t get a thousand or so like-minded neighbours together around a fire there are the everyday rituals.

And understandably many everyday rituals revolve around food and drink.

I do a morning coffee ritual that slows down my too-busy mind, makes me thankful for what I have and reminds me I’m part of something bigger.  

Coffee is what I use but everyday rituals work with most any food or beverage – obviously tea is popular but equally powerful are smoothies, salads, toasted sandwiches, rooibos, slow cooked stews, even two minute noodles can be effective.

These are some general features that help with an everyday food or drink ritual but it’s an entirely personal thing…

1.       Slow, deep breathing – helpful for feeling present, keeping an over-active mind occupied and getting a bit dreamy

2.       Exaggerated purposeful movements – I do a sort of sliding waltz step between the cupboards, the sink and stove – it helps take up thinking space, gives a ritually sort of feel to things and is good to do in socks 

3.       Separating each step – brings focus on the individual elements and keeps me in the now

4.       Gratitude – giving thanks comes with the territory and feels right

5.       Timing – I do mine before everyone gets up in that magic time just before daybreak

Method:

First, I get the coffee pot out of the drying rack and carefully place each piece on the sink with a purposeful clank. I thank this wonderful device for the work it does or sometimes I get deeper being grateful to the steelmakers, the factory workers who made it and metallurgy in general.

Same goes filling the pot with the water – I can simply thank this beautiful clean water or do some detailed gratitude to the global cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation and/or the incredible combination of catchments, pipes and people who bring us our water at the turn of a tap.

I slide-waltz over to get the coffee beans out of the drawer and as I pour them into the grinder I give thanks to the land from which they grew, the Timorese farmers who harvested them, the coffee co-op that processed them and Andrew and Alice Mahar at The Corner Store Network for their skillful roasting and thoughtful fully compostable bag.

I put the pot on the stove and light the gas – another everyday miracle of drills, pipes and people to acknowledge – and I breath deeply until the coffee brews.

As I pour in the milk, I thank Simon Schulz and his cows in Timboon, the careful way he looks after his land and all the thought and hard work he’s put into building his on-farm bottling plant.

Then I sip and savour each mouthful.

And just by making this one cup of coffee, I feel so calm, so ridiculously fortunate and so connected to a much bigger world that when my teenager slouches into the kitchen, complaining loudly that there’s no food in the house, despite there being several types of cereal, bread, numerous spreads, eggs and all the makings for pancakes, I don’t shout at him.

Instead, I sip my coffee, smile, accept the life journey he is currently on and lovingly say, Good morning my son.

Have a great week

Chris