Many tribal people the world over celebrate the rising of the sun every day, not for the sun's benefit, but for their own, for the connection, for the reminder. But most of us forgot, and as the world became busier and noisier and faster and more sophisticated, we started to think that ceremony was something that ancient peoples did or tribal peoples did because it was long ago, or they were strange, or they had other needs. Or we remembered the negative aspects of negative rituals and worked to put lots of space between them and us. But then the yearning starts within us again because it is all going by so fast. The milestones and benchmarks pass with barely any notice, or none at all.
Families are often far away, or estranged.
Friends are strangers and we can't find our place in something called community. Time, that old gypsy, as one poem says, keeps ticking, ticking, ticking, and age and change wrap us in that ancient shawl. It is time here. It is time now. Every milestone in our lives needs acknowledgment, needs a ceremony, to center us, to connect us to the universe and to each other and to every other life form and non-life form with whom we share this planet.