Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger

For many years in the late 60’s and through the 70’s a group of twenty five friends and co-workers would camp for a weekend on an island in the middle of Long Lake, in the Adirondack mountains. At the time these were the people who were closest to me, even more so than my family. The island we camped on in the middle of this magnificent lake was as beautiful and tranquil as you might imagine it to be. You could only reach it by boat and the isolation added to the feeling of peace that settled over us when we were there. An old mansion had once stood on a rise looking out at the Lake. All that remained of it was a huge fireplace and chimney. We would cook large dinners as twilight descended. As we ate our meals more wood was piled on the cooking fire until it was a large blazing bonfire and we would get high, talk, gaze into the fire’s ever changing shapes and play/sing music as night descended, sharing the communion and the warmth of our interrelationship.

As I recall those long weekends four decades past, I recognize that we were taking part in a ritual as old as the beginnings of human society. The sharing of a communal meal, the comfort of close companionship, primitive music and a roaring fire keeping away the terrors of the night. These earliest of human rituals developed the beginnings of that which we call society. Ritual as I define it is a combination of repetitive actions, rites and procedures performed by two or more individuals that provides comforting feeling and a sense of shared togetherness. The behaviors tap into the most universal of human archetypes and thus are easily recognized as reassuring by participants and by groups. I’m using my own definition here because if you Google “ritual defined” you will get a multiplicity of definitions, all with some precision, that in the end make the explanation of ritual more complex than it should be, hence my own hubris in creating my own definition.

As millennia passed the communal campfire developed into a complex mixture of ritual that bonded people together and like the earliest ones provide the comfort of safety in a fear ridden world. My generation of hipsters abjured the rituals we inherited, even as we created rituals of our own. It is a fact of humanity’s existence within society’s that communal rituals are needed to bond us together and that the breakdown of some of the binding rituals of American society, have separated us and have made our lives more chaotic and less personally meaningful. Let me explain what I perceive. Continue reading “A Meditation on Ritual” →