Since my earliest years, I have been a very ritualistic person. Whether I understood it as ritual or not, I enjoyed having space to honor things in myself and around me. The more I became embedded in the Southern Baptist tradition of the faith I was raised in, the more I wandered from that ritualistic way of being. Ritual is allowed in the church but only in ways that fit, that are part of the atonement process to cleanse our souls from sin and embrace a certain kind of community. As much as I wanted to be close to God, I also lacked that closeness because I knew only a colonized version of God that did not value all of my questions or the nonlinear way I wanted to understand the world around me.
In the last few years I have come back to ritual again but in my own way this time. I honor the seasons and cycles the way my Potawatomi ancestors did. I allow myself to process on a cycli- cal timeline instead of a linear one. I take breaks to honor rest, and work to decolonize the aspects of my spirituality that clamp down on my questions. Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hersey writes about the importance of rest:“My rest as a Black woman in America suffering from generational exhaustion and racial trauma always was a political refusal and social justice uprising within my body. I took to rest and naps and slowing down as a way to save my life, resist the systems telling me to do more and most importantly as a remembrance to my Ancestors who had their DreamSpace stolen from them. This is about more than naps.”
Tricia knows that naps (and cycles of rest that buck the status quo of white supremacy) are resistance and ritual, that they save us, hold us, and give something back to us when we are weary from colonization, racism, white supremacy, and hate.
One afternoon in early winter, I felt this ache that I couldn’t put words to. I knew I was grieving—specifically, grieving things I’d lost in the last year or two. I was grieving all that the pandemic took from us; I was grieving the loss of our dog, Sam, who we had since before Travis and I got married and who died while we were living in Vermont; I was grieving the change of other relationships. I needed space to honor the changes.
So I went into my office, closed the door, and lit a few candles. I placed them on the floor and sat down, bringing strips of paper and a pen along with me. I took my time, letting the tears come, letting myself feel whatever I needed to feel. I was angry. I was so sad that it felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was also somehow grate- ful. I wrote down the things I’d lost on the first strips of paper, honoring each one slowly, naming them to myself.
Then I moved to the next pile of papers, where I wrote something I’d gained. We’d lost our dog, Sam, but gained a new puppy named Blaze. I’d lost relationships, but I’d gained other ones, as well as a better sense of myself. I said goodbye to the season before and welcomed in the season here and the season to come. I cried more. I took deep breaths until my body’s systems found their grounding. I honored everything that is sacred about hurting and healing and not knowing what comes next.
Living resistance is about letting ourselves hurt and heal, with- out knowing what comes next in a society that tells us we should shut off our emotions and always have a plan.
That day, it was necessary that I stop and engage with where I was. If I hadn’t, I would have kept it balled up inside until it inevitably worked its way out, eventually, in ways that might have ended up harming me and the people I love. Ritual helps us practice recovery and pay attention to the space our soul is inhabiting. Suleika Jaouad writes about her recovery from a horrific diagnosis of cancer in her breathtaking book BetweenTwoKingdoms.When processing the aftermath of the cancer, the part where she must enter the world of healing again, she writes,“ Recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of the one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.”
Recovery and discovery both require presence, and more often than not, those spaces require some sort of ritual. Suleika’s ritual (and her understanding of moving between realms) was a road trip across the country to visit a number of people she respected and loved—it was a giant ritual of gratitude, requiring presence and, yes, resistance to the status quo that would have her believe that pushing away the fear of the unknown is what is best.
When I enter into ritual or ceremony, I am reminding myself that it matters to be present to the human experience. It matters to let the mystical and sacred pull us out of ourselves in ways we don’t understand, through a lit candle and a piece of scrap paper, through a song and a howling cry, through a dance or the echoing silence of being alone and letting the soul speak.
Ritual, paying attention, and being present, it’s all resistance, and it all teaches me that the human journey matters.
Kaitlin B. Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity. https://www.kaitlincurtice.com/ This essay is an extract from Kaitlin’s book Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day.
