Tag: ritual

by jad

Only Connect (Burning Intentions for the New Year)

There’s been a lag this year between the official threshold ritual and the actually lived experience of the settling of accounts, that balance sheet of mental assets and liabilities we call reflecting on our year. It’s a lag that pretty much describes the last three years, give or take. That’s the temporal metaphor I keep coming back to: a slippage out of sync, a running out of breath, the reel of events speedily unspooling while the laugh track awkwardly tries to catch up. There’s a spatial metaphor I keep thinking about too. Transparencies of the self and world like many … Continue reading “Only Connect (Burning Intentions for the New Year)” →

by jad

A Season of Grief, Ofrendas, and Grief Bursts

We are in a season of grief. Ofrendas are everywhere, in galleries and at protests. KEXP is playing music about it. There’s a play titled “Eulogy: Or How to Plan Your Own Funeral” showing on Capitol Hill. Some of this comes from wider diffusion of traditional ritual: from All Hallows’ to All Souls’, via Dia de los Muertos, the culture is learning to look past the ghoulish masks of Halloween to the thinning of the veil that they celebrate. So many of us this year are choosing to walk through that, into the vale of tears and out into garden … Continue reading “A Season of Grief, Ofrendas, and Grief Bursts” →

by jad

St. Patrick’s Day

I’ve marked a St. Patrick’s Day ritual of some shape or form for 16 years, and this is how we mark it in Seattle. “It’s just another Monday, right?” That’s how the guy at Market House Meats laughed off how busy it was when I was straining to hear my name being called out. The scene today was straight out of a movie, complete with a couple of New Yorkers trying to figure out how to order in that loud New Yorker way. There was a padre there and a cadre of cops too; a construction worker and a plumber, … Continue reading “St. Patrick’s Day” →

by jad

Advent I

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the start of a season that’s become a bit of a barometer of my mood every year. There have been years when I was energized and engaged, turning the weeks before Christmas into an art project or two, often using the prompts made by @adventword. And there are other years when I felt the exact opposite: drained, dejected, and disengaged. This year feels different in a new way. I’m somewhere in between. I’m busier than ever before, but I don’t want the same old rituals. Or maybe I want to engage with them … Continue reading “Advent I” →

by jad

The Feast of Saint Marinx

“[T]he question of the pharmakon reappears in the digital stage of grammatisation—the first stage of which was the alphabetic writing of Plato’s epoch. Like every technique and every mnemotechnique, cultural and cognitive technologies are pharmaka: at once poisons and remedies.” (Bernard Stiegler) Communication has made itself felt as a matter of concern at numerous times and on multiple planes over the past few weeks. ☿℞ or not, at some point, it seems like the artifice of this act of artfully inscribing interior realities back and forth on these proverbial clay tablets has been lost by our culture. I’ve been thinking about … Continue reading “The Feast of Saint Marinx” →