The Butterfly Effect

when routine becomes ritual

The search is the meaning, the search for beauty, love, kindness and restoration in this difficult, wired and often alien modern world. The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be. This idea overwhelms some people. I have found that the wonder of life is often most easily recognizable through habits and routines

ANNE LAMOTT

summer bouquet

We are back in the time of seasonal gatherings and observance, when we honor homespun traditions and religious holidays while wincing at commercial excess. Our household tends toward the secular. My husband is an agnostic suspended between his Jewish and Christian Armenian heritages, while I am a standard-issue WASP and lapsed Episcopalian who very occasionally attends service. This is a sanctioned time of reflection and ritual. And though we often associate ritual with organized worship or neo-cultish behavior, I have a newly minted one that has helped me through this intense passage of grief.

Shortly after our daughter Bailey died on June 4th, a date now tattooed on my consciousness, our friend Chelsea showed up with love, advice, and food. We were now in the same wretched society — Chelsea lost her son Miles in 2020 to the same scourge that took Bailey —fentanyl poisoning. She understood the measure of our devastation and despair. Her son was just nineteen; Bailey was just eighteen. Shortly after Bai died an enormous box of candles arrived courtesy of her thoughtfulness. That simple box of candles got us started. My family and I made a shrine in Bailey’s bedroom curated with mementos from her short and vibrant life, complete with a hurricane lamp for Chelsea’s candles.

Rose leading the way

Every day the chaos in my mind and heart jostled me awake long before first light. I started each dark morning by lighting a candle on Bai’s shrine then headed downstairs for coffee. I waited for dawn to walk the 500 yards down to my large fenced-in flower and vegetable garden, mug in hand with the ever-devoted Rose leading the way. I cut flowers, walked back to the house, and assembled a bouquet for Bailey. Finally, I returned to her room with a fresh vase and read in the chair I used to read to her in, the same chair where she consumed book after book until she left this house and us. Then I turned to the rest of my day. Routine pushed into ritual, and this simple homage to our daughter became indispensable to my sanity.

in the garden

My gardens are now in a deep sleep and covered in snow. In the fall I blanket the garden with leaves donated by our neighbors and open the gates so the elk can bed down in layers of leaves for extra warmth until deeper snow drives them to lower ground.

Instead of flowers, I found another way to maintain my ritual and honor Bailey by making a small daily mixed media featuring a butterfly. I still light her candle and make the coffee but now head to the studio at daylight to make her art before I start writing. Butterflies were a logical choice — beautiful and fleeting like she was — but they also represent immortality, the souls of the departed, and reinvention across a myriad of cultures.

Butterflies for Bailey

I turned to Casper Ter Kuile's The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices to better understand the vitality behind my new ritual:

“The word “sacred” itself comes from the Latin sacrare, which means to consecrate or dedicate. And to consecrate means to declare or make something holy. So the sacredness is in the doing, and that means we have enormous agency to make “sacred” happen ourselves.” CASPER TER KUILE

According to Ter Kuile, rituals help us create critical connections during times of isolation and anguish. I needed a practice I could perform on autopilot to jumpstart each day. With the help of a friend’s candle and some preternatural survival instinct, I have a map with simple navigational points that nudge me forward, will me to seek beauty, and insist that I will fall fully, madly back in love with this life again.

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