Meditations on Purification Our lives are crafted of ritual and ceremony. It’s the contract we enter into when we are born as humans. As a child I was purified in water from an altar’s basin (a precaution from my just-in-case Catholic parents) and just days ago I was humbled in the steam of a sweat lodge, seeking at once clarity and a cleansing. We might first specify and separate ritual and tradition, ceremony and routine. If ritual is an action that expresses a belief, then tradition is the collective experience upon which a belief is based. Ritual, then, can be either alone or in the presence of others, whereas tradition will always be panoramic, the wide scope of passing down behavior or systems from generation to generation. A ceremony is an observance, at once formal, grand; routine is your morning coffee. A contract I entered into – one both spiritual and legal – is ending. The love that I thought would be forever is not forever. I’ve chosen to think of it not as a divorce (a word so fraught with the perceived rituals of screaming and fighting, jealousy and the throwing of china that I dashed it almost immediately from my mind), but rather as an un-marriage, an untying of the knot that binds, that chokes. Instead we’ve chosen a slow fade into the ether, almost comically sober, together realizing that the relationship we’ve chosen is not the relationship that serves us best. Part of it was the pain of realizing that what we regarded as ceremony was actually our routine, and it’s true that routine – or, perhaps more accurately, the perception of it – is the death of passion. The sweeping scope of our adventures (exchanging “I love you’s” within two weeks of meeting each other, backpacking across Europe for a year, cross-country road-tripping for months at a time) at once fortified our bond of friendship and undid a married future. How could the ritual of Sunday pancakes ever compare to midnight bike rides around Paris? And yet – the part of me that grows stronger is the part of me that craves those traditions. You can only look forward to yearly October hayrides when you’re willing to settle in as witness to the seasons. Little by little, I become less afraid of being the one who stays, the one who testifies. This is what I’ve seen; this is what I know. Probably because I’ve been the one who has left so often. For some time, it felt like quite the rub, this transition from wife to friend to memory. Slowly I’m starting to see how this un-marriage is not a tradition passed down from my also divorced parents, but how rather, it’s part of my own scope and latitude in crafting a life that feels like mine: a life in which certain routines feel precious (like the way milk blooms in my coffee every morning) or the way some rituals can be newly defined year after year after year (grateful though I am, Thanksgiving has been in a new place every November of the last decade) or the way the circumstances of ceremony can change as long as we have certain pillars to hold onto (the food and theme and location of my women’s circle change monthly, but the women – they are the same). Little by little, I become less afraid of being the one who stays, the one who testifies. This is what I’ve seen; this is what I know. Probably because I’ve been the one who has left so often. He asked me what I’d thought of the heat and it was then that I realized that it didn’t feel hot – it wasn’t the trickle of perspiration that pricks up on my face and shins during a power vinyasa or even the skin-searing full body sweat of a 110-degree hot traditional class – no, the constellating embers and ancient steam of the sweat lodge were not a heat I’d ever known before. It was a fever flush with spirits, and my sweat was less sweat and more tears that streamed from the eyes of my every pore. I won’t explain the tradition of the sweat lodge in these pages. Both the magic and the trouble with the ceremony is the necessarily secretive nature of it. It’s an experience that is powerful and altering such that our desire is to share it and yet, in this particular case, its dissemination means that the wisdom received and the relationships formed risk becoming diluted, risk turning common or dowdy. In some sense, I walked into that tent wanting to be purified. I stretch and step forward into a life less complicated, a life that doesn’t feel tarnished by the past but instead is reconciled merrily in the present. I seek to receive the message of my ancient relations, that I may take them with me to a future that is not ridden and rather ripe.
