Welcome to Field Notes

On ritual art, process, mystery, and beauty 🌻🌾🪻🪺

Hey y’all, welcome to Field Notes.

These musings come from the process of making ritual art - where many lessons, questions, reflections, and metamorphosis occur.

Wonderings about what ritual art means may be swirling around so I’ll do my best to describe what it is and means here.

Etymology tells us that the root of the word ritual is rite - to ceremonially observe something. To reason, to count. It suggests taking stock of a moment and raising it up to declare the alchemy it renders in a person, or a place, or a community. Rites and rituals are how we integrate the fact that some life-altering transformation has taken place. Rituals are the vehicles we travel in to get from one place (many interpretations of place apply here) to another.

Over the years, this practice has unfolded in my life as a way to deepen my relationship with Life, and to create beauty and/or order out of what feels like confusion, chaos, and lack of clarity. Sometimes it is simply to offer beauty back to Life and to acknowledge paying attention to a place.

The first one I ever made was over six feet wide and took many sun-sweltering hours during a time where I was suffering daily with anxiety and depression. What came through was evidence that I could be struggling, I could be a mystery to myself, I could be unsure and scared and feel useless - and make something beautiful in the company of that feeling. I could carry myself from one place of possibility in myself, to another place. It changed my life forever. The tandem relationship between mess/grief/pain/mystery, love, and beauty would become a lens that informs much of how I see, now. Here is that altar:

I’ve seen the making of impermanent earth art made with intention and presence lead to true transformation, healing, and meaning-making for individuals, children, parents, grandparents, friends, groups of strangers, grievers, people who know each other well, and entire communities. And the architecture of the sharing of this work stands on the shoulders of giants. Please allow the singing of their praises and the sparkling of my fingers to be some of many bows of gratitude and humility that I offer to the many, many, many hands that have contributed to the Morning Altars work becoming a way through healing, stewarding, and storytelling. It is an honor to learn be held as this WE.

With many blessing and humble bows to the founder of this pedagogy - my teacher, Day Schildkret.
To my community of mentors, friends, and mirrors through this WE - thank you. Thank you all so much.

Substacks written by some of my friends and community members can be found here with Ordinary Crevices of Grace, and here with Paint, Petals, and Words. Both are blessed places for anyone’s attention and support to land - all of whom have led to many other reads I cherish here on Substack.

*word to the wise - I will always use bold font as a way to represent a link.

This ephemeral art is a way to mark - and make - a transformation. It never ceases to amaze and astound me how much of oneself can be revealed, how much care can be communicated, how much insight can come forward by placing flower petals on the ground.

Behind each of these squares is an entire world. A moment. An epic. A birth. A death. A chasm. An explosion. A prayer. Something that was almost missed. Something I could not say. Something I wasn’t sure I’d survive. Something I could offer.

All of them saw me - shepherded me - between worlds. They got me from one place to another place. Each square is - a Spirit, a being, someone I knew. Someone I know.

I will do my best to tell their stories in the Field Notes to come.

Here is someone I have spent the last three days working with, who is waiting for a harvest of Rosary Pea seeds and more shade before completion. I hope you’ll return for the telling of her tale, and the wisdom of her medicine.

Here’s to wherever you find beauty in the mess and the Mystery 🌻

Many bows,

xx

S | Thresh & Bone