Reverent River Ritual

If you were designing a ritual for the river, what would it look like? Each year at the Brisbane River Festival the River is honoured with a spectacular of fireworks. Massive colourful sparks fill the sky, spiralling, bursting, floating in an excitement of sight and sound. The Brisbane populace throngs the riverbank marvelling at the event which pays reverence to the icon of this city.

Rituals bind practitioners together in focused performance. The 19th century social scholar Emile Durkheim referred to the social cohesion and the energy of such worship as 'collective effervescence'. It's an embodied feeling which overflows with energy, enthusiasm and connection - with each other and with the object of worship, the river and environs.

Ritual theorists such as Richard Schechner and Victor Turner view ritual as an embodied performance enacted within a liminal or in-between space, an a-temporal plane, where social norms are loosened in a play at once subversive and celebratory.

In Brisbane, river rituals are a daily affair of connection with this watery realm. Currawongs chant their curra-wonnnggg, curra-wonnnggg song-chant to herald the river and focus our attention on its wide brown flow (muddy brown due to the massive rain and flooding recently) cruising slowly through the city. In this space the players/performers are those whose attention is drawn to the river as the central feature of this daily show which acts to integrate human and nature in an eternal dance.

In the liminal space we are transformed. We shed the shadows of our ordinary lives and enter into sacred space to commune with its symbolic elements - old growth trees, the tidal exchange of waters, the circus of birds - the Cockatoos screeching, the flashes of King Parrot's bright red wings and dashes of pink from flying Galahs, the lustrous feathers from Rainbow Lorikeets, the whistling song of the Butcherbird and the sweet sweet chirping of Scrub Wrens. The sight and sound of these performers is just as spectacular as the River Festival fireworks.

Victor Turner (1977:183) states that ritual is 'a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests' (in Deflem, 1991). They engage with the most significant values of a community - in the river's case, with the lifeblood of this city as the central water source as well as the other ecosystem services it provides. The river is sacred symbol, and rituals that revere its place and flow in the life of this city, can act as a kind of social transformer or social glue transforming community attitudes, values and behaviours about the river, its importance and their role in caring for it.

Victor Turner called these liminal space performances 'betwixt and between' but to me, they are part of the magical fabric of the Brisbane River valley. Not set apart from but a part of, embedded in the day/night/sun/moon/tides/flow of this wondrous effervescent glowing tidal ecotone.

References:
Deflem M, 1991, 'Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s Processual Symbolic Analysis,' Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30, 1, 1-25, http://www.cas.sc.edu/socy/faculty/deflem/zturn.htm
Turner V, 1977, Symbols in African Ritual. In JL Dolgin, DS Kemnitzer and DM Schneider, Eds. Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings, New York, Columbia University Press.

Winter Solstice

A cold breeze flies up the river valley. But this is Brisbane where the chill factor is relative. It's not really cold. But it is windy. For most of the time since I have been here the wind has been almost absent. A ruffle here, a flash there but the wind has not whipped up waves on the river, not until now and then perhaps they are only in my imagination, or in the wash of a passing boat. A couple of south-west windy days has knocked down trees, blown leaves off trees, and given the impression that this is winter. A rainless winter.

Last night on the radio I heard a discussion about Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, that is suffered by people in dark long winters. It causes them depression and a feeling reminiscent of the sense of dark. That's why in England for instance the coming of the sun is worshipped. At Stonehenge 20,000 people brought in the dawn with ritual and revelling. The long darks nights will make way for the summer, growth and harvest.

Ecopsychologist Susan Brelin-Becchio uses the framework of the ever-revolving changing seasons as a metaphor and lesson for life. Through her seasonal-psychological-ecological process, she shows how the earth and its life-giving/death-bringing processes deliver a pattern for personal enrichment which is bound in the soil, in the movement of the tides and breath of the wind. She calls her practice Deep Elemental Ecology and states that: 'All the Seasons are reflective of our own inner world.' (2003).

In terms of the solstice for the southern hemisphere, Brelin-Becchio continues: 'Winter is the time to reflect more deeply on these inner roots, taking a moment to consider where the instability lies, and how to strengthen and balance these foundational patterns in order for them to be able to support an outward movement and vision come Spring and Summer. Time perhaps to re-educate old, long-held belief patterns and to prepare to embrace the newness of Spring with buoyancy, enthusiasm, and innocence.'

This is the reflection for the turning seasons, the ebb and flow of shade and light, a reconsideration and reframing of the long held beliefs, in this society at least, that we are distant from nature. And yet the day-night nuances of the winter solstice, and the suffering, especially of those in the northern hemisphere who endure the wintery wonderland, show that our bodies respond to the seasons, both as metaphors and literally when they are affected by the well-named seasonal affective disorder or 'sad'. The Solstices are celebrated through the body as if the body wakes up with the light, stretches into spring, delights in the turning wheel of birth, growth, mid-life, death and rebirth, and all the while dancing with joyful thanks.

The river today shone with winter glory. The sky was radiant. SAD was a long way away. And the river is waiting for rain.

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Reference:
Brelin-Becchio S, 2003, Deep Elemental Ecology, Gatherings, 8, August, http://www.ecopsychology.org/journal/gatherings8/html/mirror/mirror_tp.html