I imagine, like me, you’ve been inundated with spam about ‘amazing Black Friday deals!’ encouraging you to go out and consume, consume, consume. As soon as Halloween decorations are put away we see piles of plastic wrapped turkeys, throw-away toys, polyester Santa costumes and trucks full of fallen trees. Sadly, many ritual and ceremonial days have been co-opted and are now commercial observances that stress life on an incredibly stressed planet. The focus on materialism often overshadows the true meaning of ritual.
Rituals play important functions in human societies. They help us mark life major life events and transitions like marriage, passage to adulthood and death. They help us process grief, observe the change of seasons and offer a sense of solidarity. Rituals are performed to ease anxiety and are often used in an attempt to control things we cannot control. People across cultures tend to perform more rituals in times of stress and uncertainty — drought, famine, and overwhelming darkness. Rituals bring us together when times are tough to help us find depth and meaning in our lives.
In this day and age of mass consumption, we can reclaim rituals that not only ease our anxiety but also benefit local ecosystems. Below are some suggestions for upcoming days that you can honor and observe with your whole being and body. Some listed below have become little more than a post or repost and a hashtag in the realm of social media so I suggest (as part of your ritual), that you turn your ringer off and and put your phone away. For a little while, at least.
Friday, November 24th (Day after Thanksgiving) is Buy Nothing Day:
This is exactly what it sounds like it is. Buy Nothing. Stay at home, take a bath, read (or reread) books like The Gift by Lewis Hyde. Savor leftovers, call loved ones or write them a letter. But whatever you do, stay away from stores. Even the virtual stores at your fingertips.
Here is a quote from The Gift:
”The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else’s capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing.”
November 30th: Remembrance Day For Lost Species:
This day of mourning and remembrance is part of a growing movement that uses art and performance to explore the stories of species, cultures, lifeways and habitats driven to extinction by human activity. The Brighton-based arts charity ONCA describes the day as “a recurring annual opportunity to counter mainstream narratives around ‘progress’ and ‘development’ through grassroots storytelling, community connection, celebrating and visioning alternative ways of seeing, feeling and being.” This includes honoring endlings, a tragic word used to describe the remaining members of species who are unlikely to survive.
Here are some of the species we’ve lost because of hunting and human activity:
The passenger pigeon pictured above was once the most abundant bird in North America, with an estimated population of up to 5 billion individuals. But hunting and habitat loss led to their extinction in 1914 and sadly, many have followed: The Dodo, a flightless bird that was native to the island of Mauritius, the Great auk, a flightless bird that was native to the North Atlantic Ocean, the Pyrenean ibex a subspecies of the Iberian wild goat that was native to the Pyrenees mountains, Haast's eagle, the largest eagle ever known, with a wingspan of up to 10 feet, the Caribbean monk seal who was native to the Caribbean Sea, the Labrador duck a small duck that was native to North America, and the Steller's sea cow the largest sirenian ever known, growing up to 30 feet long and weighing up to 10 tons, and many more.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes about the Steller's sea cow in her beautiful book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. She asks, “What can I do to honor you, now that it is too late?” and in her moving answer, she offers us ritual:
“I would honor you with the roughness of my skin, the thickness of my boundaries, the warmth of my own fat. I would honor you with my quiet breathing, my listening further and further out and in. I would honor you with the slowness of my movement, contemplative and graceful. I would try to be like you even though they say it is out of fashion. I will remember you. Not by the name (written in the possessive) of the one they say “discovered” you after generations of Indigenous relationship.
I will say once upon a time there was a huge and quiet swimmer, a plant based rough-skinned listener, a fat and graceful mammal. And then I will be quiet, so I can hear you breathing.”
How can you honor those we’ve lost and help to protect others like the vaquita, a shy member of the porpoise family, the smallest toothed whale and the most endangered marine mammal in the world?, Or red wolves, a critically endangered canid and too many others we risk losing?
If you engage in this day, I’d love to know how you plan to honor and mourn those we’ve lost, while celebrating and protecting those we could lose.
Coming up in a future post:
December 4th: Wildlife Conservation Day
December 11: International Mountain Day
December 21st: Winter Solstice
What a lovely idea!
I loved this post. It’s inspiring me to write a post for Nov. 30 on my connections to the most endangered animals in Texas.