The week's prompt talks about 'celebrating beginnings, endings and transitions through ritual' as a form of celebrating impermanence. This doesn't connect for me . . . I really don't like deliberate of contrived 'rituals'. I take little notice of my birthday, my religious observance is as an 'unprogrammed Quaker', I don't design rituals for times in my life, and I hate anything that looks like a party . . . I'm one of the world's introverts.
But I do notice the natural rhythms of nature - daily, monthly (the moon), seasonally, annually . . . and cosmically (eclipses, conjunctions, etc). And of course I am, in some ways, a creature of habit, as we all are. So for 'rituals' this week, I have taken some of these.
First, my morning rituals/habits . . . one of the joys, for me, of being retired from paid employment is that I am no longer a slave to the early start and the morning commute. Even after five and a half years this is still a daily, conscious pleasure.
I open my bedroom curtains and take a few minutes to look at my garden, just a little different each day:
And then beyond my garden to the patch of allotments on the other side of the hedge, where I have a share in a plot (although I can't see my plot from my window). There is daily change there, too, and sometimes there is someone already working early in the day:
And then I sit downstairs by the window to my garden, with the first cup of tea of the day, and the newspaper (in electronic form on my Kindle):
Followed by ten minutes meditation (I'm enjoying using the Headspace app):
Later in the day . . . my sitting room faces west, over the allotments, so there is an open aspect and plenty of visible sky. I always watch the evening skies, and this week there have been some wonderful sunsets:
No comments:
Post a Comment