The Comfort of Ritual

I attend a well-known local women's writing group in Cincinnati every Wednesday night, just as I have for the last 3-4 years.  It took me a couple semesters to settle in, to trust that the people and the process itself would be safe to hold the words that I wanted to unleash - ugly words, rage words, sad words, laughing words, poignant words, geeky words, spiritual words and eventually elusive joy words.  Slowly, I began to let those real words leak out into the circle and there they found safe passage.  And my trust grew until I was a true believer in the magic that happens there.

Class is conducted in a circle - a circle of women.  Certain rituals exist that may seem esoteric in the beginning when one is nervously sitting in an uncomfortable chair - the use of a chime, passing a candle, naming yourself into the circle and those blasted little index cards.  But somewhere, you begin to understand the function of those rituals - how they link us like beads on a necklace into something larger, how they pass that necklace from class to class, from month to month and from year to year in an unbroken chain of women's hands that goes back 20 years.  How there is a certain holiness, a certain power that comes to us as women from this process. 

This little writing school has seen a lot of changes in the last 2-3 years.  But it has always grown and become more in the process.  Lately though, I am beginning to feel like something is broken.  Rituals are not observed, something magical falters and the necklace breaks scattering the beads across the floor.