My daughter attends a fabulous public, alternative, “Open Education” elementary school. The second/third grade combination department, of which she is a member, is studying California Native Americans. One of her department-mates is a member of the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians. http://mewuk.com/index.htm This student’s family was kind enough to bring some Me-Wuk dancers to the school to perform and share their culture with us. I attended the performance and found it to be powerful and deeply moving. My peak emotional experience occurred during the “basket dance,” which was performed primarily by the women. The speaker explained that the tribe would typically perform this dance in celebration when the male hunters returned to the village with “newly killed meat.” (I love that in the Me-Wuk language, there is a specific word for this concept). The repetitive movements in the dance spoke to me of the intense gratitude the women felt toward the hunters, the animals, and the natural world for providing them and their families with life-sustaining food.
As I watched their dance and felt the emotions of it, I reflected on how little ritualistic gratitude we have in our culture today. I thought about the analogies in my life. My husband gets up every morning, goes to work without complaint, and works hard all day long to earn the money that we use to buy our food. I spend hours every week planning a our meals, procuring food, bringing it home, putting it away, cooking breakfast and dinner, and preparing and packing lunches. I try to remember to express my gratitude to my husband for his hard work and excellence as a provider, but he is not receiving the kind of communal, cultural, deeply emotionally/spiritually connected “thank you” that this dance provided, nor do I have the opportunity to participate in a communal dance with other women to celebrate my gratitude/our shared gratitude for the work we all do to sustain our families’ lives. Watching this performance made me wonder, not for the first time, how much of the suffering in our modern culture, which I see on people’s faces, sense in their body language and behaviors, and read about in the news each day, is the result of our loss of these deep connections with other human beings and the loss of our sense of place in this world. It also made me grateful for the rituals in which my family does participate. Today, we will celebrate the baptism of my nephew – an ancient and, yet, still-modern tradition that has been practiced in much the same way for nearly 2,000 years. We attend Catholic Mass almost every Sunday, and the heart of that service – the Eucharistic celebration – is a ritualized expression of communal gratitude. We eat dinner together as a family, at home, almost every night. We say a prayer together, we share our meal, and each person has an opportunity to share their highs and lows of the day and to converse on whatever topics arise. Our children have a standard after-dinner ritual of cleaning their bodies, reading and being read to, saying prayers, and snuggling before going to sleep. I realize even more deeply now how important these rituals and routines are for our development as humans and for our mental and spiritual health. The world is such an uncertain place. These rituals bring security, connection to self and to others, and to something greater than self. They bring peace.
