If you have followed me for any amount of time, especially before I started traveling, ritual was something I talked a lot about. It was an anchor in my days when my children were young, that kept me sane.
This past week a Jewish family has been staying with us.
On Friday night they lit candles, well the kids magically turned on rechargeable ones. They said blessings, sang, over wine and bread. They welcomed us to the ritual like we had always belonged there. I sat and watched something I have lived out off and on, for years, but this was a custom thousands of years old. I could immediately feel the span of time that it had been holding its people within. I remembered the family I babysat when I was in high school, and their simple shabbat ritual, that I would sometimes be a part of.
I have celebrated the seasonal festivals for the past 13 years. I have watched and tracked the lunar cycles for the past 5 years. When the children were little, I survived with daily rhythms and the sacred architecture of time. I have built entire systems around this. And still, this week, a family I have known for days showed me something my own knowing and writings had not given me.
Shabbat is simple. It comes every week. It does not ask for perfection. It asks for a candle, a blessing, a table, and people willing to stop what they were doing and sit down together. That is all. And that is everything.
I felt the ache of it immediately. There was a bit of envy in my reaction, but also one of recognition. Here was a rhythm thousands of years old, still standing, still holding a family together across an ocean of history. And here was my own life, full of knowledge about ritual, but empty of ritual itself. I had let the overwhelm take the ritual out of my life, rather than receiving it as the anchor is was meant to be.
I have been in survival mode for most of 2026. I currently have 42 birds: turkeys, chickens and ducks, despite getting rid of 7 of them last week. I got rid of 3 goats, but still have 2 kids who are not weaned and their Mom. I went from 14 cats to 4, with one more kitten going to a new home soon. My days have been shaped by tending, not by meaning. The animals have needed me every single day, often times, multiple times a day. There has been no room left for anything that asked for stillness, and when I was still, I was depleted and exhausted.
That is changing. The goats will be released in a couple of weeks. The bird count is coming down. Freedom is coming back to me in the form of hours I have not had in a long time. And this family arrived right as that freedom opened up, as if to say: here is what to do with the space you are about to have.
So I am building ritual back into my life. Not new ritual. The ritual I already know. The seasonal festivals I have been practicing and hosting for over a decade. The daily rhythm that holds a person steady between the bigger turning points. The thirteen day shift into a new celestial sanctuary, the same sky I have tracked for years, now something I will actually mark with ritual, intention, and an actual space instead of only map. The new moon and the full moon, acknowledged instead of simply noted.
And underneath all of it, something daily and small. A few minutes on the earth. Then a connection with a tree, a hand against bark. Allowing grounding and connection with a being that I can reciprocate between. Something that does not wait for the moon or the season. Something available every single morning, the way Shabbat is available every single Friday, no matter what kind of week came before it.
I am grateful for this family. Grateful for their candles, their blessings, their table, their week inside my home. Grateful that they let me sit inside something they have carried for generations, long enough for me to see the shape of what I have been missing in my own.
Ritual is not a thing I need to learn. It is a thing I need to return to. This week, a family I will not forget handed me back the portal, in which to remember.
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