Remembering Ceremony: An Origin Story

I was one of the lucky ones growing up.

A beautifully loving family. A safe place in the world. Not much awareness of any conflicts outside the small space I was in. Perhaps the odd small glimpse of ‘other world issues’ coming through, but nothing that disturbed the picture I had been given of how life worked.

And the picture was clear: be a good person, follow the rules, and everything will be okay. Life, should be good.

I believed this completely. I wanted to believe it. So, I followed the script as best as I possibly could.

Get through school. Find a decent job doing something you are good at. Meet someone who loves you and who you love back. Build a life together. Have a family. Do your best as a parent. Pay your taxes. Follow the rules. Live a good and happy life.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

I ticked every box. I walked the path that the women before me had walked, women I loved and admired, women who seemed to do it with a grace I was certain I could find in myself too.

And then, I became a mother.

I had grown up in a world that celebrated individualism, independence, the self. I had absorbed all of it without knowing I had. And when I brought two small beings into the world, I lost myself in a way I had not been prepared for. Not in the gentle, beautiful way the books suggest, but completely disorienting and destabilising.

I couldn't work out how to do it the way I had heard or seen it should be done. How to work the same as before and be the parent I so desperately wanted to be. How to hold all of it without dropping everything.

It was my first experience of feeling I was failing at something so significant that had real consequences. And I didn't know what to do with that.

What I didn't know then, what I wouldn't understand until much later, was that what I was living through was one of the most profound transitions a human being can make, whilst also navigating the path in a world no longer designed for it. I was setup for failure, we all were.

Coming out of that time, disoriented and uncertain of who I had become, I did what felt like the only thing available to me. I threw myself into work. If I couldn't get it all right, I knew I could at least get that right. I had always been good as a worker and following that ambition for myself.

And as so often happens when we are at our lowest and moving fastest, what I attracted into my life at that point would prove to be one of the most difficult experiences I have ever lived through.

On paper it looked extraordinary. A career that felt like a dream - doing a role I loved, working for a company creating real and lasting impact. I gave it everything I had. Eighty-hour weeks. Time away from my young family. Every last thing I had to offer, poured in to it.

And in return, I was taken advantage of.

Until that point I had not understood that people like that existed - people who wanted more from you than you had to give, and who would push to take it anyway. That job, that world I gave myself to, was controlled by a person like that. And when I finally understood what had happened, it was too late.

I was brought to my knees. I was broken.

What followed was slow and quiet. A time of getting to know myself again. Of recovering, and healing, and beginning to understand that there was a different realm of possibility available to me - something deeper, something that had been there all along and that I had never thought to look for.

I started sitting with myself in quiet reflection. In ceremony. In search of a meaning that the script had never offered me. I started to understand that the life I had been taught to live was not my life at all.

That time was the beginning of my real education.

Years passed. The healing did its work, and I built something entirely different for myself. I connected with myself, I created a new understanding of my role as a mum and as an individual within the world. I mended the wounds and started engaging again.

Unfortunately, in the way that healing sometimes does, I gradually forgot how powerful it had been. How necessary. I drifted back toward the current, back toward the pace, back toward the version of myself that the world found most useful.

Once again, I lost myself.

Different circumstances, but the same essential shape. People and situations that wanted to endlessly take from me and, once they had what they needed, leave me discarded. I found myself, again, at the edge of something I didn't know how to name.

But this time, when I looked up from my own wreckage, I saw that what was happening to me was not separate from what was happening everywhere.

The same dynamics that had played out in my own life were playing out on a global scale and were becoming impossible to not see. Unfair and deeply harmful power. Greed dressed as leadership. Disconnection from nature, from life, from love. War. Genocide. Fear wielded as a governing tool. Money prioritised above every other thing - above dignity, above the earth, above the lives of children who never asked to be born into any of it.

I had grown up in a blissful pocket of light. But for so many people, reality had always looked completely different to mine. And once I understood that - really understood it, not as an idea but as something felt - an unbearable weight came down on me.

I did what I could. I examined where my money went and tried to keep it away from the hands that would use it to extract more. I gave up meat and dairy. I stopped purchasing materials that cost the earth what it couldn't afford. I read Braiding Sweetgrass and felt it rearrange something in me. I started learning about the land I live on, who it belonged to before it belonged to anyone. I began trying to understand what had truly been taken - from women, from communities, from the natural world - through centuries of something incredibly harmful and dangerous.

I went in deep.

And it was nearly, truly, too much for me.

Because underneath all of it was a question I couldn't stop asking: what had happened to being a good person and following the rules and everything being okay?

Did the small child killed in a war they never asked for have the opportunity to be a good person who followed the rules?

Was any of this fair - to the people who suffered it, to the planet that bore it? The damage our collective species had done in such a small time, so much of it irreversible. The weight of it sat on my chest like something I would never be able to put down.

Until I remembered.

I had been here before. Not at this scale, not with this much beyond my own self - but in the wreckage of my own life, I had found my way back from something. And I remembered exactly how.

Not through doing more. Not through working harder or being better or finding the right system.

Through stillness. Through quiet. Through sitting with myself and with something larger than myself, in reflection, in ritual, in ceremony. In joy, in love, in creativity. Through reaching back toward something older than the scripts I had been handed. Something that had been here long before any of this - before the systems, before the extraction, before we forgot what and who we were.

Across cultures and across time, for as long as humans have been gathering, ceremony has been how we found our way back to each other and to ourselves.

Not ceremony as performance. Not ceremony as product, as package, as something you hire out and consume and then leave behind with the empty glasses and the folded napkins. But ceremony as a living practice - participatory, particular, created by and for the people gathered. A way of marking what mattered. Of slowing down enough to actually feel the weight of a moment. Of witnessing each other through joy and grief and all the complicated territory in between.

It was how communities turned toward their losses and toward their celebrations with equal seriousness. How the changing of seasons was honoured. How new lives were welcomed, and the dying were held. How people remembered that they were part of something larger than their individual survival.

We still gather. We still mark occasions. But somewhere in the long drift toward speed and individualism and the commodification of everything, we forgot how to let ceremony do what it was always meant to do. We go through the motions of the rituals we inherited without asking whether they still serve us. We take the pause, and then we return, almost immediately, to exactly the life that made us need the pause in the first place.

I keep coming back to the question of what we are missing.

Not out of nostalgia - I am not trying to recreate the past. But because I believe that if we can understand what ceremony was before it was taken from us, before it was templated and sold back to us in packages, we might be able to understand what it could be now. What it needs to be now.

Grounded. Inclusive. Participatory. Alive with actual meaning.

Ceremony is one of the last places we still gather. One of the few moments we have not yet fully handed over to speed and commerce. And I believe - I have known - that when it is done with real intention, it changes something. Not just in the moment, but in the people who were part of it. It gives them a felt experience of something they may have forgotten was available: connection, meaning, the sense of being witnessed by the people who matter most to them.

That is not a small thing. That is practice for living differently.

This is where Ceremonial begins.

It is a space for exploring what it means to remember - to return, slowly and honestly, to the kind of gathering that actually serves us. A space to learn from the traditions that held communities together across centuries, to ask hard questions about how we honour what was before without appropriating it, to practice creating ceremony with integrity rather than just with habit.

Right now it is small. It is me - writing, reflecting, sitting with questions I don't yet have answers to, developing practices and sharing them with anyone who wants to think about this alongside me.

In time it will grow. More people. Other voices. Expanded ways of learning and practicing together. But it begins here, with this.

An invitation to anyone who has felt what I have felt - the burnout, the disconnection, the grief of waking up to how far we have drifted from what matters. Anyone trying to live with more intention. Anyone who suspects that the gathering, the slowing down, the witnessing of each other, might be more important right now than almost anything else we could be doing.

You are welcome here.

We are not going back to the script. We are remembering something older than it. And, something truer.

Written by storyteller, celebrant and founder of Ceremonial, Diana Fisk.