The ceremony of innocence is drowned:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
What does the world need now?
A friend asked this today because soon she must gather her tribe and rally them. It is her job to offer them a clear vision of better work and true purpose.
Small steps twoards deep community are needed, we said.
And as we discussed this she reminded me that most of us don't know much about ceremonies of innocence, whatever those were in the past or should be now.
Once they may have been linked to church or Sabbath or knowing how food goes from seed planted to fruit borne, things our grandparents did or which now occur only in the hinterlands.
We meditate. We go to yoga class. We click to donate to Ukraine. Good. But we think of these as life hacks or ways to live well or ‘be good.’ A personal crisis? The crisis of the moment? Which is which? Say Namaste. Roll up your mat. Then, of course, check your phone. Even if we withdraw and purify and give, it all smacks of the mechanical. It is addiction, not ceremony.
Exercise or eating vegan or, indeed, helping someone from Ukraine may be far closer to a ceremony of innocence than anything Yeats had in mind, is likely far better regardless. Still, do these bolster conviction? Fend off the worst intensity?
What does? What would?
Something sustained. Something continued. Something practiced and insisted on, not because it ties you to god or power or answers or even health, but because it reminds you of a first step, a way of stumbling before you knew where you were going, before your days of compass.
Like the first time you tied your shoes, the reverence and awe of that doing.
Or a little girl, skipping because she can, because the world has not run her over yet.
Think of it. A world made of skippers. Where the center holds.