Finding a different ritual for letting go
Carnival, play and ritual in the tumult of strange times
What would a graduation ritual look like if it were ecological and regenerative?
Without getting ahead of myself, somewhere (hopefully) around 12-18 months, I’ll be eligible to graduate with a PhD. Although speaking to my supervisor this week, she thinks I am being too optimistic to submit at the end of the year. She’s probably right. I am working hard to cry about that thought, it’ll be ok.
Throughout the last two years, I’ve been plagued by the unsustainability of the journey I chose in academia, which wears a mythic cloak as a journey of self. The thought of finishing my PhD feels like celebrating survival and strange privilege by excessively leaning on others, particularly financially, and it’s a strange idea to celebrate myself, deliberately making life so difficult — for what reason? Why did I make a quest for a title my thing? I don’t understand myself at all.
I treasure a beautiful, irreverent traditional graduation ceremony with friends as an undergraduate in the 90s, taking deliberately bad photos in silly hats and gowns in the toilets. I’d never dared dream of university, and leaving friends ached. When I studied my Master's online, I travelled by plane and train to attend my graduation and knew no one, recognising only one or two staff in a sea of faces. It was strangely the only time I’ve ever felt more disconnected.
This time, for my PhD, I have mostly already decided not to fly to attend to wear the funny hat and celebrate in that formal way. Even though it’s a really nice floppy hat. I don’t intend to reduce how meaningful that public ceremony can be when I say this time, it’s not for me. It’s a difficult decision as I have connections at my university that I genuinely would love to meet in person and thank, connections and friendships forged in Zoom squares, over what will be seven or eight years of studying a few degrees at my institution remotely. A network that I could meet and celebrate with. Warmth, human connection, cups of tea under the trees. All grown in the difficult, unnatural, so-called disconnected online spaces, all partly imagined. It’s all I have for all those years.
So, although my mind might change yet, I am brainstorming local, ecological, place-based alternatives for graduation that include my faraway network. As a remote student, how do I create a local symbolic graduation ritual that is true to the idea of being a regenerative activity, that could acknowledge the inner and outer journeys of the PhD process? How do I celebrate the personal and collective?
I have thought of the usual things like tree-planting, which fits making it an ecological ritual, but wandering off into the woods where I find myself, excludes my entire academic network and friendships. I thought of writing letters to everyone, but I feel like I want to be creative in an active way and not endure even more desk-sitting.
Some sort of wildness matters.
Related to this are other ideas I am exploring, like a thought-pebble about the cosmic woods in between stories and wilderness rites of passage. Even play and carnival in the writings of David Fleming that I have been meandering into for a long while now, through Shaun Chamberlin’s Dark Optimism, in Surviving the Future: A Path Through Tumultous Times, a slow online course meander that I really recommend to anyone who feels a desire to reclaim something that cannot yet be articulated.
I don’t have any answers yet. Yet, I know I need to begin by telling a new, different story about what it means to separate and deconstruct. A story that is relational and regenerative and respects the whole-hearted fear of the cascading and collapsing endings into the uncertainty of the future.