28 Aug Writing: Ritual

The glass terrarium of leaf-brown cocoons had been sitting on the stone porch for so long I’d nearly forgotten about it. But a party for my birthday was starting in the unicorn room, and just as the human guests started rolling in, so too did an unexpected guest with wings: a luna moth, finally, laboriously emerging like a small miracle, its furred legs quivering. The moth flew clumsily to my hand and clung to me the whole night, as though our shared day of birth created some invisible thread between us.

As I wrote this, the same terrarium sat on the same porch, awaiting the emergence of the newborn moths inside it. Every year when the weather warms, Makoto sets up cocoons of various creatures in the glass case here and waits to set them free. The ritual of their hatching has become a marker in the whirlwind of the seasons.

I grew up Catholic, in the sense that my father had been a priest before my birth. Even though his faith had started to be shaken by the time I came on the scene, my childhood was spent surrounded by the lush symbolism, sacramental rhythms, and traditions of the church. The grainy secondhand TV where my sister and I watched Sesame Street sat beneath a large and looming Virgin Mary, who solemnly observed the ritual of our daily entertainment. As I got older, my father’s full disillusionment with the faith, along with my own queer transsexual life, meant I could no longer find myself in Catholicism. But a desire remains deep in me for the ways that faith makes special the passage of time, the value of our little lives. The lighting of the candles on the Advent wreath, the particular cadence of the Our Fathers, the Hail Marys…

At Lupinewood we invent holidays: Ballgown Season, InfoFest, the Running of the Lampreys. It’s as much about play as a reclaiming of recognition of the sacred. Many of us have fraught relationships with formalized religion, but when we, say, put on wigs and gowns and dance through the darkest days of February, we affirm our collective determination to find delight in spite of the cold, in spite of our breakups and breakdowns and unpaid bills. In collaboration with these people I love, I’ve found out how to fill the year with cause for revelry, with coming-together. This aspect of ritual – its reliable return — offers a kind of connection to time, to place, to people, a way of being with those things that holds an awareness of their impermanence, and thus their specialness.

The asters are blooming again, I bring you their blossoms in a bouquet. Somewhere as we speak there are luna moths forming fresh sets of wings.