At fairlywell�s behest, I have been thinking about personal rituals. I have many. They are the talismans that keep chaos at bay. They protect me from the things I can�t control. They are magic spells for everyday living.

The ritual of the beautiful day
The process of readying myself in the morning � face washing, tooth brushing, showering, etc. � is nearly choreographed (indeed, there is often dancing involved). I have two versions, one for work days and one for other days. I know this passes from mere practical routine � I need to do these things every day � to ritual because the parallel actions at the end of the day are far less regimented. It is the ritual of the beautiful day, the preparation for everything, the suiting up in the uniform for dealing with the outside world. My morning ablutions are an inviolable ritual.

The ritual of public speaking
This is not a ritual of the every day, but it is used in some form every time I have to talk to other people for an extended period, whether I am teaching, giving a paper, or reading stories to AJ�s class. First, I must engage in an especially careful ritual of the beautiful day. Then I must practice public speaking, out loud and in front of a mirror. I practice the words; I practice the gestures; I practice making eye contact. In this way I feel prepared and less afraid of things that should not scare me but do.

The ritual of the flexible and the strong
This is, plain and simple, yoga. The principal of ritual is a large part of why I find yoga so appealing. Classes and private practices are carefully structured from preliminary meditation to conclusive shivasana. It is the ritual of letting go of the fears that bolster my other rituals. The ritual of making myself feel both strong and flexible, able to deal with what is.

The ritual of sleep
This too is a ritual to keep away a sort of fear, the fear of insomnia that haunts me nightly. It involves stretching, water, books and often scented lotion applied to the back of the neck to remind me of sleep, a lotion only used at night. AJ has a much more elaborate ritual of sleep, one stemming from fear of abandonment in the night. His involves reading of stories by dad, a series of actions � head but, nose rub, elbow bump and thumb wrestling, followed by a goodnight kiss; then stories by me, one regular song, one lullaby and a special song for AJ that we made up together and which gets sung at the end, followed by squeaking out �Shave and a Haircut� on his squeaky stuffed caterpillar. Then there are hugs and kisses, the turning on of his musical monkey, and an exchange of at least two but not more than three �night-nights� until I close the door of his room.

There are other rituals too, minor rituals, like pedicures. Rituals borrowed from others like the ritual of the good cup of tea, learned from a close family friend from childhood, a sort of surrogate grandmother. There are many rituals for holidays � Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays. These types of rituals are not about fear as much as transforming common things into important things. They are about joining the individual into a whole.

We talk a lot about ritual in the early days of my music class, about Gregorian chant and the what happens to text when you sing it instead of speak it. Rituals are all about transformation of one sort or another. In the case of chant, it�s about turning everyday speech into something special. In thinking about rituals in practical use, though, I find it difficult to draw a clear line between routine and ritual on the one end and ritual and neurosis or psychosis on the other. For me the declaration as ritual seems to have something to do with the amount of pleasure taken in the process. If there is tediousness in the repetition, it is routine. If I cannot live without the repetition, if I need it to survive, it has passed into neurosis. Ritual lies in between at a point where the repetition of actions is enjoyable and meaningful.

This will be a week of rituals, as I pull out the ancient family recipes to make Thanksgiving dinner for my family, the way my mother made it before me and the way her mother made it before her. The recipes have changed little in fifty years and we like it that way. The rituals are what bind us together, fortify us as a family. Or maybe that�s just the pie.

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