No Ceremony At All Just Fire

Dear Friends,

As I made pilgrimage to Beacon where an oud of mine had gone for repair, time opened for a call with a friend, space to talk about the everything-nothings which our doing culture doesn’t ordinarily cede time to. We spoke of the sluggishness of the air, not on account of the heat or thunder, but the crippling slowness of a new world whose future is unclear. We survived, but barely out of the thicket, we’re consumed by yearnings, to breathe without fear, and to mourn in perpetuity how much is lost. 

She spoke to me of the zoom cremations she was watching in India, at the height of it, no ceremony at all, just fire. And the realization of the profound human need for ceremony. Death hammers the lesson home. Death without ceremony strips us of the beauty of our humanity, the angelic in us, the transcendent. We’ve released the ceremonies from so many of the places in our lives, meals, morning beverages, losses, lessons, transformations mighty and minute. It was an important reminder of the ‘why’ that lives in my devotion, the quiet deep significance of ceremony.

At the beginning of this year, I was transformed reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. I had been a person who lived in the discomfort of not knowing how to ask for help. But I let my head go plastic, neuroplastic, and came out the other side with a new ethos -- every time you ask for help, you’re giving someone else an opportunity to give. And the person you ask, it may benefit them greatly to be the giver of a gift. We’re in a grand economy of bestowing gifts to one another, like music, nothing is really possessable forever. And asking for help moves the gifts along, adds fluency to the current, creates, magnifies and reestablishes the bonds of connection between friends. We are all making life together.

When our lives are stripped of ceremony, the animal of loneliness and isolation grows in us, it feeds on the lack. Even ceremonies of mourning nourish the right beasts in us. Thus I learned, and thus I ask … we made a beautiful album, and a beautiful book, and I need your help to share it with the world. Will you send us some dollars, or words, or prayers. I will take the gift in any form.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zachfredman/ten-at-dreamland-healing-and-lineage

Thank you everyone who plays in this gift cycle with me. Wherever you find your altar today, make sure to make ceremony and invite a friend.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Zach Fredman