How to make a ritual

You get to decide what's holy

One of my favorite chapters in the book I just wrote is about cardinals.

The bird, not the Catholic Clergymen, although it’s kind of about them too!

Each chapter explores a lesson I’ve learned from a specific animal, and, during the Pandemic Lockdown, cardinals taught me that anything and everything can be sacred.

Feathered New Yorker making its home on the sidewalk

Quick history lesson: The beautiful red cardinal bird is actually named precisely for those big wigs of the Vatican who wear red robes.

The Puritans, who had just gotten their butts out of England after years of persecution and landed on the rocky shores of northeast America, needed to come up with a name for that exotic feathered friend they saw fluttering around their new home.

“Cardinal!” somebody decided, in honor of the bird’s own red robe.

(I like to imagine that it was a toss-up between other red things: marinara sauce, lobsters, beets, rubies, poison dart frogs, etc.)

That decision probably sounds pretty banal to most of us, but it was actually super radical back in those days when the Catholic Church’s power was overwhelming the whole world, and the men in power wanted nothing to do with nature or anything natural.

It was all about keeping a very strict hierarchy of power, which meant severing ties with lowly earthly things like birds, trees, and women.

They would have FREAKED out if they knew that, across an ocean, there was a little songbird bearing, too, their esteemed title.

Guessing this guy wouldn’t have been thrilled about his namesake??

(Of course, the critter already had many other names across the tribes of Native America; listen to one here!)

The Puritans just…DID that. They didn’t ask the Vatican first. They just went ahead and called a new-to-them bird species the same designation as some of the most privileged men in power. Wild! Crazy! Radical! Seriously!!

This was a big deal then, and it has lessons for us now.

I experienced my first wave of Cardinal (the bird) Obsession during the early Pandemic Lockdown, when I kept seeing more and more of them in the park as the natural world fluttered and flourished without its usual human stampede.

I’d never seen them before in New York—or, rather, I’d never noticed them—and they became a guide for me during those disorienting months.

Unlike most other songbirds, cardinals don’t migrate; they stay put throughout the year, throughout their lives. While I, too, stayed put in NYC during some challenging (understatement) months, I appreciated that the cardinals were there too, a symbol of steadfastness through change and discomfort.

But they imparted their most meaningful lesson on me during holidays, birthdays, Sundays during the hour I’d be at church, Tuesdays during the hour I’d be at Power Yoga, Thursdays during the endless evening I’d reserve for being out of my house with others. These were all so sacred to me.

Then…ya know.

How do I make this sacred? I asked myself so many times that year and beyond.

As a Mystic, I don’t discriminate between the sacred and the non-sacred in the world, BUT I do recognize that rituals inherently hold a “set-apart”-ness (the word ‘holy’ means set-apart).

I wanted to set-apart those holidays and birthdays and Tuesday/Thursday/any/evenings, but I doubted in my own power to do so.

THEN I REMEMBERED THE CARDINAL.

Oh yeah! Those Puritans just made this bird holy through its name! They did that! It’s doable!

I didn’t need the services and the Easter eggs and the waiters singing Happy Birthday and the calendar invitations to “set apart” the important stuff; I had that power within me. Of course, they would have been REALLY NICE!!!! But I could make the sacred happen too.

I drew on my long career of inventing rituals.

In preschool, I helped create a funeral service for our class guinea pig, Pearl. A couple years later, as an experienced funeral director, I would hold a memorial service for a caterpillar complete with readings and prayers. I officiated a wedding ceremony between my cat and a houseplant.

I took all major and minor holidays very seriously, and would force my mom to participate in festive activities even if it was just the two of us and the dining room table always looked slightly sad with only two hand-drawn placemats in honor of Flag Day.

And, in adulthood, I started creating rituals around work and creativity. During my years of creating one illustration a day, I would set an intention as I got started: Lighting a candle or striking a singing bowl, I’d meditate on what somebody out there on the wide internet might need to hear that morning.

Whether or not it “worked” didn’t matter—a ritual doesn’t have to work to be real, and important, and worthy of thought and time. The ceremony grounded me, and reminded me that service to the world is much more important to me than accolades from others.

It also happened to get the creative juices flowing!!!!

By doing a ritual before I painted or wrote, I sent a strong signal to Creativity: “I’m ready for you. Let’s do this!”

We became co-workers rather than hot-and-cold acquaintances, and now my communion with Creativity is one of the sweetest relationships of my life.

That’s why I LOVED inventing a tea, particularly for that mystical communion with Creativity. Since it’s a loose-leaf situation, there’s already a ritual involved: you have to take in its aroma, scoop all those gorgeous leaves into a bag, then brew it to your taste (witchy, right??). And, with such a magical elixir (trust me, it’s magical), you’ve set the special tone for your creation station.

You might take your tea to a table, put on the right music (you know I love my Minnz Piano!!), set the mood lighting, breathe in a big ol’ inhale, and…

Well, I don’t know your life!!!

But I know for SURE you were born to create something!

My art show this year was based on sacred rituals I created in New York: the holy communion of a bagel and the newspaper, the hallowed pilgrimage to the corner bodega, the veneration of pigeon saints walking up and down sidewalks, the glory of fashion, the custom of applying makeup before a night out, the hallowed observance of the first warm evening of the year (wherein the most respectable attire is a flirty and floral sundress, pulled out from last summer’s storage).

I don’t know if I could have done that without the permission of the cardinal: to seize what’s holy, right in front of us.

One of my favorite photos: I had just moved in to a new apartment after such a hard year. My friend sent me a rainbow decal for my window to make everything look magical, and I love that the decal even consecrated the kitty litter box with its light!

Thanks to the cardinals and the Pilgrims and Covid and other horrible things that broke through the cracks to grow redemptive things in their destruction…I know that YOU are capable of creating your own ritual and alchemizing the ordinary.

Your own version of sacredness. Your own way of setting something apart. A version that no one or no pandemic can take from you.

And please, please tell me about it…