How to Observe
July 10, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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Erika Howsare | Longreads | July 10, 2025 | 5,859 words (24 minutes)
I am agnostic about many things, but not about spring. It’s holy—what could be more obvious?
I remember an April day, age 11 or so, staring out the window of my mother’s house at the intensity of new green in the lawn. What I felt was shock—a shock that was cousin to joy. Spring was out there, potent and vast. It was happening without me, but I was inside it. The green seemed to expand before my eyes. I couldn’t contain it, couldn’t grasp or own it. All I could do was look.
A few years ago, a friend and I drove up to the northern part of the Great Salt Lake to see Robert Smithson’s sculpture, Spiral Jetty. It was a journey to get there, through remote and somewhat forbidding terrain. But we weren’t the only people at the site; there was another car or two in the gravel parking lot. We went down to the jetty and carefully walked along its curves—at least, that’s what I remember; it surprises me now to think treading on the artwork would be permitted. My memory is of following the spiral inward to the center, and waiting for a feeling that never really came.
But then we wandered out toward the water. The lake has receded a lot since Smithson designed the jetty, and the shore is now many yards away from the spiral. As we walked we noticed a multitude of strange, ankle-high forms on the ground. They were oddly shaped, quivering, light in color. Were we seeing living things? Structures? A mirage? I had no name for this sight and couldn’t fathom it. The things danced and moved, making a tiny, widespread sound.
After a long time we realized the lake had deposited blobs of salty foam on the ground, like soft stalagmites, which instead of melting away were somehow persisting, and moving in the slight breeze. But I held onto that feeling of an encounter without any preparation, no images or language to organize my perception. A few moments of actual mystery.
On February 18 this year, here in Virginia, I saw the first daffodil blooming. On March 16, the first bloodroot. By the end of March, sassafras had bloomed and redbud opened and dogwood budded, and the indigo bunting had started to sing, and we drove past a deafening choir of peeper frogs at night. Violets were blooming profusely, like confetti in the awakening grass. We picked our first asparagus on April 5 and I found some Dutchman’s breeches, with its improbable molar-shaped blooms, on April 7. On April 13 we put out our brassica seedlings in the big front bed of our garden.
I know all this because, as I do every year, I kept notes in the garden journal. And as it always does, my fervor for this record-keeping started out as vivid and singular as those first flowers and dissolved over time. There was too much to track. As green things grew, I surrendered.
Age 8 or so: I remember a mint-and-white Easter dress with a matching plastic bead necklace. I was always interested in the colors that went with certain seasons: the crayons called Brick Red and Chestnut for fall, Cornflower and Yellow-Green for spring, and that very pale green dress. We didn’t go to church; I just wore it to my aunt’s house for Easter dinner. Shopping for the dress was part of the ceremony, and so was arriving at my aunt’s while wearing it.
Those drives to relations’ homes on holidays, one or two hours, were markers of the year: gathering with my parents’ siblings, eating together, the simplest of rituals. We didn’t pray or play games. A meal and maybe a walk was as organized as it got; it was casual talk, laughter, sports on TV.
At home, my parents, who had grown up Catholic but left the church, led us through secular customs, like hanging Christmas stockings and carving pumpkins. But we kept no Sabbath and said no special words, not before eating, not before going to bed, not when we were joyful or visited by trouble. Religion was something I experienced only when I slept over with certain friends on Saturday nights and went along with their families to soporific Methodist or Baptist services in the morning, or when certain of my cousins received their first communion. In other words, it was a room I stood outside of.
And I remember that suddenly, at age 23, I encountered a craving to be inside the room of religion. At the time, I had just moved across the country to Virginia and needed a job; one of my brothers was worryingly depressed; 9/11 had recently shattered the sense of inevitable progress we grew up with. The world felt ominous. One afternoon, as I stood in the aisles of the public library, the desire for a coherent cosmology, and rituals to go with it, hit me like a wave of homesickness.
The story from here could have continued with a tentative visit to a local church, but that didn’t happen. My identity was too wrapped up in skepticism of Christianity to join that fold, and I really had no idea what else might be possible for someone wanting to practice ritual, much less within a group setting.
My only response to the craving was an aesthetic one: I wrote a poem about it. What I longed for, I wrote, was something like “a red square floating on white.”
It’s probably not an accident that the library was the setting for my stunted revelation. Libraries and museums have always been the contemplative spaces in which I feel most at home, and art is what I’ve always enshrined.
There’s a long marriage between religion and aesthetics, of course . . . but outside of religion, what is the work that ritual might do to channel our attention? What does it take to commune?
For years after that, the most salient thought I had about ritual was that it would be good to do something—make some little gesture—to acknowledge the first day of each season: the solstices and equinoxes.
Seasons attracted me because they are universal, and one does not “believe” in them; at the same time, they are so obviously meaningful whether we formally mark them or not. Their division of the year into quarters is symmetrical and pleasing, but they have a million gradations too. Life in Virginia was tuning me into the temporal symphony of the land: the season in late September, for example, when the monarchs can be spotted flying high overhead, heading south. The seasons are the clothing of the land, a costume that draws the eye to the form underneath.
Four times yearly, I would note that urge to ritually mark the seasons, but not act on it.
Ritual is an urge and an act; it’s an aesthetic gesture. As an adult I established the habit of turning my attention to those subtle seasonal details and recording them. I was loving and honoring the land, but this practice still left something undone. A certain clarity, maybe formality. Something like a frame around a painting, or the white on which the red square floats.
My dad has described a memory from his childhood: his mother, a devout Catholic, returning from the communion line to their pew, sitting down carefully with the wafer held on her tongue and her eyes closed, taking that moment for silence. Communing.
Most of my immediate ancestors were Catholic, and many of my living relatives still are. Catholicism always made me feel resentful and rebellious, but I’ve read accounts by many other writers of their childhood attraction to Catholic ritual, whether they were being raised in the church or adjacent to it. And sometimes Catholicism seems to suddenly possess me. In early May I was listening to some Lucia Berlin stories in the car; the narrator of one of them describes being a Protestant child in a Catholic grade school, envying the faith and entering a confession booth despite lacking the credentials to do so. (A nun gently scolds her but tells her she’s still allowed to pray.)
Later, the narrator says, “Whenever a siren sounded outside in the streets, near or far, Sister Cecilia had us stop whatever we were doing, lay our heads down on our desks, and say a Hail Mary. I still do that.” Listening to this passage, I found myself wanting to cry.
I envy my grandmother, that narrator, and anyone who, whether they’ve inherited or invented it, feels they have clear title to a script: a framework for acknowledging what they find important. There’s a long marriage between religion and aesthetics, of course—think of the music, the stained glass that must have surrounded my grandmother as she sat in that pew—but outside of religion, what is the work that ritual might do to channel our attention? What does it take to commune?
I’m well aware, here, of being a type: a middle-class white American whose connection to ancestral tradition was severed by the large forces of the twentieth century, and who now goes searching, like an adult child, for an anchor. I’m aware of the pitfalls of this position.
It’s always art where my hope resides. In 2022, I discovered the work of Meesha Goldberg, an artist whose paintings and drawings are profound, seductive, mysterious. One of her gallery shows included not only paintings but a short film she directed called Daughterland. It documents Meesha walking, for 13 hours, around an enormous oak tree in a Virginia field.
This act, the walk, is an artwork as carefully crafted as anything that might hang on a wall. Meesha wears a white dress printed with excerpts from her mother’s diary. Her long hair, in a braid, is attached to a bigger braid made of wheat that she helped grow, forming a tether to the tree. She walks clockwise until she runs out of tether. Then she walks counterclockwise until she runs out again: “Circle here, uncircling here,” as she says in the film. Her mother’s diary includes an account of her cancer, of which she died at age 38, the same age Meesha was when she made this piece, and a number that links the 38th parallel of the tree’s location in Virginia to the line that infamously divides Korea, her mother’s homeland.
Meesha Goldberg, “Daughterland.” Images courtesy of the artist.
It’s all so satisfying. And very moving. Meesha was 6 when she lost her mother. When an actor reads her mother’s words from the diary (“My dear Meesha, whatever you do, be happy with yourself and proud”) I feel my own grief rising behind my breastbone, threatening to spill out everywhere. My body hums with the sounds of summer insects in the film. Meesha wears a path into the long grass around the tree, the soles of her feet becoming stained. A spiral more ephemeral than Smithson’s.
Meesha said that she started to consider performance about 10 years ago. “I was putting a lot of care and attention into the paintings,” she said. “Then I got thinking, instead of envisioning a painting, why don’t I create it in the world, a scenario or a ritual?” She brings precision and discipline to both, and the spirit of the walk feels present in the film, the companion paintings, in the gallery show that included the braid of wheat and the diary dress, and in a poem Meesha reads in the film:
Circling, uncircling
and circling again
like a moon
or maybe
a buzzard
in the presence
of the ancestors
walking for my mother
who wrote, Love is
while we live together
in this world
something
more essential
than air.
When, near the end of the film, Meesha releases the wheat braid from her hair, the untethering feels like a deep loss, an undoing of the physical connection. She leans into the tree one last time and then she limps off across the field, and time moves on in its relentless demand that we let go, walk away. Grief flowers and flames within this container she has made. I’m sitting in my office chair, watching the credits, surrounded by sorrow. Something I was carrying has come forward, answering the invitation this film extends.
She ain’t my elder
but maybe she’ll help me find my tongue
Mothertree
may I enshrine you
in white ribbon?
We have to reckon all our lives with our defining hurts. It’s clear in this piece, though, that the reckoning can be an active, and beautiful, effort. And that it has to do with land.
“I think that most all the projects I’ve done have been about connecting to place in a deepened way,” she said. “There’s an acknowledgment of sacred places and a yearning toward the sacred place. . . . It was in engaging with that place and doing this other family work of having my mother’s journal translated for the first time, and researching Korean culture, that I was able to find in my own culture how trees were some of the early shrines. . . . We have it programmed in us to recognize and relate to the land and recognize the sacred. It’s a really devotional act.”
It’s an experiment, too. “I kind of went into [the walk] with a question—what will this experience be like?” she said. “I kind of joke and say that I’m not trained to be a performer in other ways, but I can do really simple things for a long amount of time, and walking is one of them. In Daughterland the walking expresses time, and struggle and endurance. I think it is a ceremonial technology to kind of push the body to a far limit, to break a threshold of consciousness with physical exertion.”
I thought about this idea of “ceremonial technology”—a tool, whether a white dress or a defined span of time, that helps a person get somewhere. Where?
“A lot of this,” Meesha told me, “is also being with the mystery.”
By the time I met Meesha, I had a few more clues about ritual—two decades’ worth—than I’d had back in the library in those post-9/11 days. I had been to solstice parties and studied meditation. I remember a magazine article I read in which a woman talked about starting every morning by stepping outside barefoot. I even shadowed a nondenominational minister as I considered becoming a wedding celebrant.
For my own wedding in 2006, my husband and I asked our family and friends to form a big circle in a field and listen to a performance of John Cage’s silent piece, “4:33.” There was an undeniable power for me in being witnessed by this group as I entered marriage; I remember saying to a friend afterward that I felt like I’d crossed a threshold. When our first child turned 1, we brought everyone down to the creek and dribbled water on her forehead and had everyone add a flower to her hat. Doing ritual, even if we were making it up as we went along, was part of how we inhabited our adulthood.
I don’t know that any of this was art, though we tried to make it artful. We were mixing received traditions with the things we personally held sacred—the land, for one. And our choice of “4:33” was a way of aligning with the sacredness of chance: The four-and-a-half minutes make a frame, and whatever enters that frame becomes part of an observance. A balance of intention and accident. A courting of mystery.
Big milestones like marriage don’t happen regularly. A lot of life is just doing the daily: caring for one daughter, then a second; washing dishes; making calls. But the clock, the sky, and the calendar are always turning.
Am I hiding my uncertainty about ritual behind my confidence about writing? Am I turning back toward art, once again, as my own sacred place?
I think it was in 2022 that I finally began to do little seasonal observances of my own. Like 9/11, the pandemic had shaken me. It took away certain rituals, yoga classes for example, but offered new ones: an online poetry group that met faithfully every Tuesday. I’d also just finished a major project and felt a new chapter was beginning. And I was freshly 45.
I started not on an equinox or solstice but on November 1, which is one of four Celtic “cross-quarter days” that fall between the firsts of the seasons—Samhain, a potent day, the first day of the Gaelic year: overlapping Halloween and DÃa de los Muertos, the apex of fall here in Virginia, and a good time to contemplate death, ancestors, endings.
I cannot recreate for you where I’d learned about Samhain, nor is this the place to delve into its history, but it seems kind of important to say I have Irish and Scottish ancestors. Clearly, this occasion was a mashup of cultures, and that was one of many things that made me self-conscious as I headed out into the predawn woods. What am I doing? Who owns this? I scattered marigolds on a large rock (a specific cultural tradition that is not mine) and lit a candle (fairly universal). I was alone. I had brought a notebook and not much else.
What I actually did for the next hour or so is hard to describe. An observer might have seen me standing and turning in a circle, then sitting and writing. “The year falls down, I gather my threads,” I wrote. Then I sketched a circlet of sassafras leaves on a branch overhead. “A redbud we used to climb is dying. Matches cool on a rock.” After the sun rose, I wrote down the names of my grandparents and all the great-grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles I could think of—all of them deceased—and a few other important elders who had died. “I open this space to my own brevity.”
I am, of course, editing now what I wrote then in my book. I am making an aesthetic object of that hour in choosing how to represent it. Am I hiding my uncertainty about ritual behind my confidence about writing? Am I turning back toward art, once again, as my own sacred place?
I remember little of the actual experience. I do remember feeling very tender, as though I’d been scrubbed. And feeling as though the land around me was somehow collaborating with my efforts, as tentative as they were. It’s a mystery what made a ragged sassafras leaf, shaped like a mitten, fall onto my lap. I drew it and wrote, “The imperfect and damaged hand is still part of the day.”
I’ve kept it up since then, eight times a year. I’ve added some elements—ceremonial technologies, that is. I can’t say that I’m any “better” at it, though. The sunrise always seems revelatory, but I can’t say that that feeling of awkwardness, side by side with tenderness, and unease, has changed very much. Doing it alone always feels a little absurd.
But I keep going. It was also in 2022 that I interviewed a Native woman from Wisconsin who instructed me, by email, to sprinkle tobacco under my favorite tree before our conversation. “Acknowledge the universe,” she commanded. I cannot remember another time I was so grateful to be told what to do—an imperative that was also a permission I hadn’t known I craved.
Quite apart from such efforts, life is full of ceremonial moments. This year, as spring progressed, I kept seeing evidence of ritual everywhere. Easter came late and, as always, my children filled baskets with violets and daffodils. Every Tuesday, I met with my writing group, and we kept to the form we’ve developed together. Often, that means we talk and write about the season: wild geraniums blooming, the finding of morels.
On the first Saturday of April I got my family out of bed early, so we could join a monthly bird walk. I wondered if such an event could function as a ritual, and from the minute I woke up, it did feel that way: There was a ceremoniousness I recognized in our predawn preparations at home—packing bags, blearily, with blackness filling the windows. We drove 45 minutes north, a pilgrimage. When we gathered in the parking lot with several dozen other people, it made me giggle that birds were singing lustily all around us, entirely ignored by the humans, who were busy greeting each other.
But, of course, that changed once the announcements were over and we were officially underway on a grassy path. The framework having been set, and the group addressed, we now lavished our attention on the birds. Woodpeckers, kinglets, purple finches at a feeder. We passed information and delight around like trays of sweets, the comments overlapping and repeating. I looked up and 15 people were pointing at the same bluebird—with binoculars, with cameras, with fingers, with their eyes. The flock of us clumped, extended, and called to itself.
“My western tanager landed in the redbud so there was this beautiful gold in the pink,” exclaimed one woman. “Oh!” said another, reveling in the image. A tree swallow perched on a weathervane and somebody said, “It’s just like a picture!” Some people were chatty, others silent and absorbed. I was walking near a tall, quiet man when we both clocked a towhee call at the same time, and named the bird out loud: sudden eye contact, a connection.
We were led by a gentle young guy who knew everything. Within minutes I had learned about a birdcall I’ve been misidentifying for years: the Louisiana waterthrush. Then he pointed out a palm warbler and the entire group stopped to focus intense eyes and voices on its yellow-black body in the dry meadow.
People talked to the birds, sang to them. Strangers sidled up to each other with questions or tips. We slowly made our way toward a lake—we’d been promised a good view of a heron rookery. Sure enough: three great blues, crouching like dinosaurs in their enormous nests in the tops of pine trees, huge and hunched. Someone also spotted a little blue, and instructions for finding it were repeated over and over, like a map to a sacred spot. I told my daughters, “To the right of the dark tree, and down . . .”
I don’t use binoculars much, so I’m unaccustomed to the way they make things seem extra real, somehow, within that black circle. The nature of the group did that, too: Our focus increased the drama of a heron chasing off a cormorant. This was happening, and we were seeing it together.
Later, a single Canada goose dabbled in the shallow end of the lake, neck folded, as two dozen of us gazed at it from only a few feet away. I was feeling the private mystery of its existence, its quiet being, when the spell was broken by a 10-year-old boy announcing earnestly, “We’ve got a pretty good view of a goose here!” And we all laughed at the same time.
In the days that followed I noticed my attention to birds was heightened. There had been some sort of salutary effect from that group endeavor—as though I had walked through a doorway, and could now, if I chose, linger in the room of the birds.
The first Saturday bird walks were started by Leigh Surdukowski, a cofounder of the local bird club, more than three decades ago—”always in the same location, always at 7:30,” she told me. More than 300 Saturdays! It’s always been a popular event, but grew a lot during the pandemic. “There are people I only see on this bird walk, and I see them every month,” she said.
There’s a citizen-science aspect, since the group keeps a tally of species spotted each week. But more than that, Surdukowski talked about what I had felt: awe, maybe love. “There’s the amazement of what these birds can do—especially during migration, to think that bird may have been 300 or a thousand miles away just yesterday. How do they manage to fly at night and get to the same spot? That just humbles me.” Birding, the observation of birds, as contemplative practice. Noting the spring return of the Louisiana waterthrush, she told me, is a birder’s annual ritual.
As you might expect, in three-plus decades of doing this, she’s had the satisfaction many, many times of thrilling someone with a new fact or experience. “For some people it’s like, ‘I saw my first robin of the spring!’” she said, and started laughing, because robins don’t leave Virginia in the winter. “They’ve been here all along, but you just didn’t see them.”
The bird walk was a framework, like “4:33” is a framework; it helped us pay attention. It wasn’t art, but it was ceremonial.
Observance itself, in the literal sense—seeing and noticing—is also a kind of observance, in the ceremonial sense.
Spring rolled along. The day after Easter, Pope Francis died. Vatican flamboyance soon filled my news feed: the Swiss Guards’ costumes, outrageous pageantry of fat gold and blue stripes, puffed sleeves and red plumes. I read in The Guardian that they are, in fact, an army. To join, one must be a Swiss male, Catholic, unmarried, and taller than 5′8″. Rules that make a container to hold a billion-plus believers.
Maybe the stronger the aesthetic tradition, the more vulnerable it is to irony. Soon the solemn news about the conclave, the most medieval-tinged global ritual I can think of, gave way to memes about the cardinals lighting each other’s cigarettes while wearing red robes. They were being discussed in terms of nonsacred power—of aesthetic power, that is. Fashion, as though the conclave were a cousin of the Met Gala, which also happened that week.
I went into a store and took a picture of a chart, “The Power of Colors,” which listed the symbolisms of various hues for candles. (white: enlightenment * healing * purification . . .) I’d just been reading Lydia Davis’s collaged essay about Joseph Cornell, which struck a similar note: “RADIANT HEALTH (Red), WEALTHY WAY (Green), GLOW of ATTRACTION (Gold or Yellow) . . . when you order from your dealer always give your date of birth . . . purchase one of the Basic Candle Burning kits . . .” There’s an ever-present danger in our commercialized, huckster world that the urge to do ritual can quickly become an opportunity to consume—buy a candle, buy a book, pay someone to tell you how to do it—making the skills themselves a commodity. Yet art can recast that dynamic too. What is a Joseph Cornell box if not a kind of altar made of capitalist remainders, one that refocuses our attention once again?
And the occasions keep coming, free of the economy. One daughter had a birthday and we rang bells at her birth time, another ritual we’d invented. The final soccer game of the season happened, and the coach made a touching speech afterward. On Mother’s Day, my kids made me cards and I gave one to my mother, who told me she enjoys thinking about how, on that day, families all over are celebrating, each in their own way. I saw a friend’s pictures of his daughter in a prom dress, and graduates in caps and gowns. The black locusts bloomed. I learned of the death of a college friend, and our mutual friend and I enacted a spontaneous, natural ritual of talking through our memories of him. Those bell-bottoms he wore, with lacy cuffs!
I stayed in a hotel where the Knights of Columbus were having their convention. They crowded the elevators and greeted each other fondly. They wore suits when I first encountered them in the evening, and even nicer suits the next morning on their way to breakfast. “Your jewel is on backwards,” one of them told another, who started fumbling at the medal around his neck with shaky hands. I left the hotel to take a walk, and when I returned, they were all seated inside the ballroom, facing the front and laughing politely.
As for the season itself, it was passing so fast (“Faster than usual?” I annually wonder). The intense noticing that spring invites always has some anxiety woven into it: It’s so ephemeral, always slipping away. This year I was anticipating a visit from friends who live out West, and the prospect of their seeing Virginia springtime gave the season a peculiar flavor: With every exquisite stage that occurred, I would think, “Oh no, they’re missing this part!”
When they finally came, they were so enchanted with every tiny detail—furled ferns, and a faint syrup scent from a blooming maple tree—that our walks together happened at a snail’s pace, with constant stopping to look and exclaim, and all my worry about time that was not now dissolved into the moment that was now.
Observance itself, in the literal sense—seeing and noticing—is also a kind of observance, in the ceremonial sense.
Last year I received another good piece of advice, from a Joy Harjo poem:
She washed her face with water, which she was told
By the Old Ones, washed the dreaming state
From the night away,
So that she could engage fully
In the realm ruled by the sun.
She remembered to go out into the morning
And give thanks, as they had reminded her.
A tiny, perfect ritual. I have done it many mornings since reading the poem, often while standing in the creek near our house. It’s made of the land, plus a gesture, and I learned it from art.
Woodpeckers nested near the creek, calling over and over from their hole in a dead ash tree. On a sunny Saturday, we went to our daughter’s piano recital. One of the students, the most advanced one, refused to bow after his pieces. It struck me as a type of pointless individualism, an up-yours to the collective. And it helped me be a little clearer about why I’ve felt so odd doing ritual alone—because a group brings with it accountability, and so much of the meaning.
Yet how could I turn away from the possibilities of the individual, self-expressing? The last thing I’d want is a world of conformity.
Another of Meesha’s pieces took place in downtown Charlottesville, where for a long time, a statue of Lewis and Clark, with Sacagawea crouching submissively behind them, stood on a pedestal. In 2021 it was removed, but the pedestal remained. In 2023, Meesha was living nearby and would pass the site often on foot.
“Every time I’d walk by it, I had this sense of really wanting to go up there,” she told me. “It kind of represented an incomplete reckoning with the history of genocide and colonization and manifest destiny. I kept chewing on ideas of what I’d do once I got up there. What’s proper to do up there? Who was going up there, what were we going to do, was it even right for me to go up there?”
Eventually she landed on the right gesture: a long, long hug. “It was kind of a symbol that was just immediately perceptible,” she said. “It was about care, a kind of femininity and motherliness. There was grief in the hug, love, tenderness, and being up there had also a fierceness and courageousness and boldness.”
She found two friends, Aidyn Mancenido and Cheryl Robinson, to join the performance. Robinson already had her own ritual with the site—flipping it off every time she went past with her running group. On November 18, 2023, the three of them donned flowing robes the color of Virginia clay, and ascended on a ladder.
From Meesha Goldberg’s “Empire is Over.” Image courtesy of the artist.
Meesha’s walk around the tree had been solitary, but this time a crowd gathered. A photographer snapped pictures of their red-orange forms against an azure sky. The police came.
“They ended up having four cop cars come out and negotiate for us to come down,” she said. “They said ‘It’s your last chance, you have to come down,’ but once we were there in the hug we were just so . . . we were really high. We were like, ‘We don’t want to come down.’ It was a standoff, and then somebody finally called a former council member and they called the police chief and that’s kind of what defused the situation.” In the end, the three women hugged on the pedestal for two hours.
A few months later, I heard Meesha give a talk at her gallery show that included the photos of the performance, along with the ladder itself, and other work she’d done with the journals of Lewis and Clark. Empire is Over, proclaimed pennants hung in the gallery. Ah, that sky—what we see when we look up at whatever’s taller than us. I hadn’t been there in person for the hug, but I was feeling it now.
“What does it mean to say ‘Empire is Over’ when the empire is really going full throttle right now?” Meesha said to me. “Everything is so intense and urgent right now that symbolic gestures feel a little empty.”
That fine line between protest and art—not a boundary but a place where different things touch, and feed each other. I thought about the importance of the witnesses to the hug: that the self-expression of the gesture was met by the weight of community expectation, giving the hug somewhere to land and to take the form of resistance. A dynamic process, involving the heart, the dynamism powered by the invention and surprise—the mystery, that is—of the individual idea.
Sometimes I just want to inherit a solid tradition, a solid location. But sitting in the church to watch the piano recital, even before the rejected bow, the sanctuary felt so static to me: the white walls and Bible quotes on banners. The fonts in which the quotes were printed. I could not live in that world of certainty.
Somehow, Meesha—who, like me, grew up without a religious inheritance—has figured out how to do ceremony at a high level. She told me she’s had a number of teachers and guides, which seems to have fed her confidence in devising the scripts. This year she posted photos of a more recent project: another special dress (blue, printed with her poems), another simple but profound action (getting into an icy river).
For me, designing such gestures is an elusive skill. But maybe the lack of a clear tradition is not only a dearth but an opportunity—I’m at the beginning of something new. Now that’s mystery! And peril. It’s not lost on me that I’m a white woman who has received some of her best clues about ritual from women of color. Even my connection with the land, as vital as it feels to me, is fraught given the histories that landed me here.
Ritual seems to be an inescapable part of being human. So maybe the question is, how will we relate to it?
I called the friend who’d been with me at Spiral Jetty, to ask if she also remembered walking on the art. Yes, she did. And she also remembered the moments afterward, of not knowing what we were seeing. We’d been there, in that mystery, together.
I remain agnostic about many things. But not about the holiness of spring. This one’s nearly over. It’s brought me here, to this moment in late May: I’m looking out at an ailanthus tree dropping spent flowers all over one corner of our garden, where squash seeds are waiting to sprout. The Louisiana waterthrush is singing. I know its name now, though I’ve still never seen it.
Erika Howsare’s first nonfiction book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors, came out in 2024 and was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Previously, she published two books of poetry and worked as a local journalist for more than 20 years. She teaches writing privately and lives in Virginia.
Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/10/attention-ritual-art-observation/
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