Scott Carrino and I have struck yet another bargain in our years long commitment and struggle to help and teach one another, to barter our skills in exchange for the gifts of the other.  Scott is once again proposing we meet weekly for one hour, he will teach me Tai Chi for 30 minutes, I will teach him about writing.

This has not worked before, we have so much fun talking to one another – I call it bullshitting – that we use up our time. But there is a larger issue for me, and it is a painful and difficult one, one which has shaped much of life and cast me as an outsider in almost every sphere I inhabit, with the exception of my life with Maria and my life with the animals.

Because animals exist free of the very human need for ritual, they accept me and I accept them. There is nothing between us and our relationship, no dogma, rules, prayers,  symbols, prayers, chants or myths.

Last night, I went to sit in on Scott’s Tai Chi class – he is a much-loved and respected Tai Chi master, and I was appreciating the movements, the feeling, the gentle patterns. And then, as I knew it would, we got into ritual – the Earth, the Fire, the Earth, the Moon. It wasn’t about the movement any more, but what the movement means- and I felt myself shutting down, drifting to very familiar place.

I first remember feeling this in school, wondering, even in the third grade, what subjunctive clauses had to do with writing, why we needed the bells, the principal’s announcements, the dread march to gym class, the assemblies in the auditorium, the bullies in the school yard?

I remembered that this drove me out of Judaism when I was very young, the alien language, the symbolism inherent in every piece of furniture, window, curtain and door. A door was never a door, it was a symbol of fifteen other things that I couldn’t remember or grasp. If God existed at all, it was in the scrolls, windows, difficult texts.

Part of this is that I have learning disabilities, I’ve known this for years, my teachers have also. It is very hard for me to learn things other people learn easily. I just have never chosen to get treated or diagnosed, I don’t care for the labels with put on one another. Another part of my lifelong struggle with ritual is my long conflict with my parents, who tried with ferocious determination to force their rituals on me, something I battled and rejected at every turn.

Defying them made me strong, angry, and determined.

It is a profound thing in our culture to reject ritual, since so many people cherish ritual and cannot live without it, from  movies and Darth Vader to the NFL to organized religion, the Mardi Gras, elaborate weddings and funerals, summer baseball, turkey carvings at Thanksgiving, family dinners at Christmas.

A ritual is a ceremony or action performed in a customary way, from Spaghetti dinner on Saturdays to Church on Sunday mornings to joining the “left” or the “right” to…well, to Tai Chi and its many symbols and meanings and movements. Scott always tells me that there is no right or wrong in Tai Chi, it is about getting easier all the time. Why, I wonder, is everything I do, wrong, from the way my fingers point to the way my elbows lift to the space between my feet?

This is my lifelong quarrel with religion, there is always so much ritual between me and God that I can never find him or her, it’s like long division for me, I get trapped in the quagmire of understanding, easy for some people, impossible for me. An English teacher once suggested I had a learning disability, but she said I wrote so well it didn’t matter. So it hasn’t.

But in this way, I often see the world going one way and me going the other. I left my Tai Chi class yesterday intrigued but also somewhat hopeless. I live a solitary life in many ways, I work alone. Maria has changed so much of that, but I am still me. This is the road I have traveled many times before, and I have never been able to stay on it.

You admire Jesus Christ so much, one woman messaged me, why don’t you accept him as your God?

Because, I told her, God is the ultimate ritual, and whenever you approach God, there is endless ritual in between, rigid ideology, dogma, rules and symbols. The idea of God was created at a time when ritual was essential to survival, to trying to understand a hostile world.

I have a deep respect for other people’s rituals, but this is impassable for me. I became a Quaker in part for this reason, little ritual, it seemed there was no ritual, nothing between me and my idea of God. That of course, was not really true. I love the Quakers, and remain one, but I can’t handle their gatherings and committees and process any longer, it is filled with the complex ritual of simplicity. It is not simple to be a Quaker.

I sometimes think politics is the biggest ritual of all, another reason I am never comfortable with it.

I told Scott all of this, and he told me about his own problems with writing. I’ve seen those, Scott uses writing to connect with the most painful parts of his life, and while that is often a great thing, it can be a block. We have our work cut out for us. Scott says we should work on Tai Chi privately, no class for me. I see why he decided that, he is no fool. I’m going to teach him writing one-on-one also.

I tried to explain all of this to Maria on our walk in the woods this morning, but she was impatient with it. Some people need ritual, she said, some people don’t. If you don’t like it, don’t do it. I couldn’t really talk about it with her, something that is rare.

I didn’t really know what to say, except it is not that simple for me. Living outside of the tent is my destiny, but sometimes it is frustrating, painful and lonely. I can’t help but feel I am damaged in some way, to be so determinedly on one path, when almost everyone else is on another. I tend not to think that people who think differently than me are stupid, I usually end up thinking something is wrong with me.

Ritual is, say archeologists and anthropologists and shrinks, a universal feature of human social existence. No society has ever existed without, it is impossible to imagine our current society without ritual.  Human beings seem to need ritual for comfort and to have a sense of the world.

Ritual is a universal experience, but it is also so complex and varied that it reflects the diversity of the human experience as well. Almost everyone’s ritual experiences are different.

Perhaps rejecting ritual is a ritual all of its own, there have always been misfits and lunatics and oddballs on the fringes of society. Maybe that is my ritual. I am getting older, time to change when I must and learn when I can, and  accept myself for who I am.

Next week, Scott and I resume our curious human experiment, to see if either of us can take the other to place we want to go but don’t know how to get to. We have been at this for a few years now, I am beginning to think we have created a ritual of friendship unique to both of us.