Craft, Story, and Ritual

An introduction:

This is where innovation fails: Undertaking Craft without respect for mystery one presumes to know what cannot be known. In this we falsify the power of doing. Our doing does not come from Being. This imposition blocks us from connecting with what-is.

Story is how we perceive the flow, movement reflected back at us, perception recognized.

Story reflects on purpose. The purpose of things — including the objects of Craft — and our purpose as makers-of-things.

When Craft is undertaken within the mystery of ritual things are done a certain way because this is how they must be done. Learning Craft in this way we discover necessity in our relation to a tradition passed down.

Acts are not judged according to superficial efficacy or any sense of preference derived from opinion or choice. Such efforts to tame Craft are frustrated by the practice of ritual traditions within Craft.

Change occurs — over time — but it is not willed. Change occurs in spite of a wholehearted effort to do things the same way as before. This is evolutionary change. Not revolution churning in a circle. Evolutionary change provides what will be best suited — within the parameters of what can be done — to an evolving situation — there is no other kind….

It is only from within this occult motion that we are immersed in Being.

There is no planning, designing, innovating, even making; no exploitation of resources; that is not a profound misunderstanding of this relationship between Craft, Story, and Ritual. These efforts are always futile and counterproductive. They hide the way things actually occur behind an illusion of causation, efficiency, and choice. This happens at the death of a living tradition and masks the destructive nature of what remains behind good-intentions and a false sense of necessity, “We have to do it this way!”

This may appear to be what is being said here in a different way. It’s not. There is no acknowledgement of mystery in a declaration of false-necessity. Only an unquestioned certainty.

Without living traditions where do we begin?

By opening ourselves to the futility of false-paths. While opening ourselves to hints provided — insights — that lead us to points of vital connection between Craft, Story, and Ritual. A practice — not a process — of letting go. A practice of attending and awareness, of listening to quiet voices, and following premonitions of connection.

False certainties corrode our capacities to attend to such a practice. Attending mystery we come into relationship with what cannot be known. This practice feeds the practice of Craft.

We can find glimmers of insight into these mysteries; but we can never penetrate mystery. Thinking we can, or have done so, destroys our capacity to develop and further traditions that bind Craft, Story, and Ritual in the ways that give us a chance of confronting what-is.

Nihilistic reactions in the face of dead, dying — murdered — traditions that have lost their living connection only block our abilities to move. The only things to be taken from our present predicament are that all of our reactions to it are contaminated by the way our misunderstandings have bled the life from so many ways-of-life, fossilizing them, mummifying them into life-styles. Our distrust of these simulacra has blinded us to the vitality they once had. To the destruction of sources and well-springs of vitality that our misunderstandings have wrought.

We cannot resurrect old traditions or build new ones. All we can do is open ourselves to practices that will shape us as we integrate into new traditions. Traditions that touch and grow out of remnants — roots scattered and broken, seeds left to dry and half-forgotten….

Life happens. It happens-to those who assume, wrongly, that they can control it. It unfolds along with those who enter into this relationship with Craft, Story, and Ritual connecting us to what-is.

Originally published at finelinesamatterofdistinction.wordpress.com on November 24, 2015.

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