daily rituals

For the most part in secular, young, drastically changed, recently immigrated and culturally flux societies, we may grow up with hardly any moon or sun cycle-based patterns, habits or rhythms.

The following are some routines, based on the movements of our favorite planetary bodies, which might help a person move with rhythm. From a variety of teachers, records and cultures, here are pieces that might make up your average day... (maybe throughout most of human history?) :


greeting the day


sense meditation/ body scan meditation/ Vipassana Buddhist-like meditation 

(breath and inner body awareness)

dream recounting and discussion

being barefoot

(in many human cultures, to wear shoes is seen as a loss of connection to the earth)

walking like a fox

(a manner of walking which can be silent, less unbalanced, enabling one to maintain meditative state while moving, not to disturb living things nearby, and move as part of one's environment)

using owl eyes/ wide-angle vision 

(rather than focusing on objects or specific areas in vision, constantly taking in all that the eye sees, from side to side and top to bottom of the area of vision: a way to see movement)
(personally I'm a bit suspicious that this may be slightly hunter-bias, in part because a lot of wilderness skills learning is dominated by male/hunter types: Is another way of seeing the kind we do to recognize plants by what makes them unique?)

practicing skills/ playing games that are directly tied with survival, subsistence, making a living

interacting with members of all generations

listening to bird language 

(birds as great indicators of changes in surroundings; awareness of the most distant bird, and the tone of their calls)

fire-making and hearth tending 

(by hand, maintaining a village center fire)

food: growing, harvesting, preparing

(pretty much every member of a community has something to offer, participates in the sacrifice of the lives of plants and animals, that give us life) 

gratitude expression 

(words or songs of thanks before/after meals, anytime; creation of artistic objects or prepared foods or other objects given as offerings; recognition of all those with whom we share the world)

sit spot 

(sitting meditation, through all senses, on surrounding environment)

song/ collective music making 

(not just a band, but a whole group of people create and share music that transmits knowledge together)

storytelling / story of the day

hand craft  

greeting the night

acknowledgement of the spirit world/ death/ ancestors/ the past

Sources: Wild Earth, Art of Mentoring, Vermont Wilderness School, Tom Brown and his teacher Grandfather the Apache Sioux, Tracker School, Jon Young, Flying Deer, Camphill Copake, biodynamic farming, Indian Boyhood by Sioux Ohiyesa/Charles A. Eastman, Dhamma Dhara Vipassana, traditional knowledge of individuals

Might elaborate and offer resources on all of these in future posts.