Ritual of rupture
You build a life piece by piece, and then it rips away in a landslide.
People think moving means you cheat your self a little, get a fresh start that dumps you further on the road to self-development. That’s not what it is. Moving tears away what’s been covering your little love of a pin-prick place. It’s a reckoning of evidence:
seven crooked candles in a cocoa tin, the lettuce wildly seeding in the garden, lids which have no corresponding jar. The tumble of days. One large, slightly warped picture frame. Flamingo murals. Rip it all off, they say, like a band-aid. The squeezed & sticky Rwenzori bottle of red palm oil. Your aggravating comb. A lumpy handsewn rug of coral and turquoise sky. One sturdy stool.
Each time you asked yourself, “How much do I spend when I leave in six, five, four, months?” you gave it all anyway; you painted the walls, you made the new friend, you calloused your thumb sewing that lumpy rug. For richer, for poorer, you are in love with your one
life
and now you give it all away: feed the birds your last pot of rice. Peel roasted matooke with a friend. Clean someone else’s future. It’s time to insert the next pin on the map of your body, the shock of a new place. First, give away all your band-aids. Open the gate.
When your friend’s brother swung open a gate and walked away, cows spilled out in their own dusty brown tangle. He never once turned to see them separate and fall in line, or the motorcycles dodging the cows, or whether one stopped to tug at a shrub. It was cool twilight and he was theirs, and so they followed him, all the way home. •
The art is inspired by an interview with Willie Jennings — about joy being anti-despair, anti-death work. A work requiring spaces that can hold repetitive, communal joy (interview is in the chat!).
What are your rituals of rupture? How do you walk through a transition? And how do you practice joy?
Today’s lyric essay was resurrected out of things jotted in my Notes app from last April, after I heard an anthropologist use the term rituals of rupture.
Of course I had to grab that for a title: after all, I’ve described this Substack as chasing the deeper questions of place and its rupture. Even if you aren’t perennially hopping between continents, questions of return are embedded in our cultural stories, our myths, our religions, and — yep — our politics.
Join this Substack as a subscriber, free or paid, to stoke the fire under our questions and to build a vocabulary of blessing around our transitions.
For more writing on return, dive into these older pieces:
Charmed that the cows followed him all the way home. 💛