Witchery

I've always considered myself to be a scientist. So it's a little strange that I also conduct weird and (until now) secret rituals including these:

The Vigil : watching progress or change as a way of participating to affect the outcome. Favourite is monitoring airport departure and arrival pages as my friends travel. To "see them safely there/home"

The Shrine : constructing arrangements of random, discovered objects. Outside the ballroom collecting fallen sequins, diamantés, hairpins and assembling them in a niche in the wall. Telling a story.

The Litany : composing and reciting speeches or conversations. Practice for communicating difficult topics, and for examining my own potential reactions.

The Revelation : wherein the truth is laid out plain by means of speech or letter - this is an example.

The Robe or Vestments : symbolic or significant clothes or shoes. Recalling a location, event or emotion.

The Amulet : jewellery worn to memorialise an event or invoke a special power. Current favorites are a series of astronomical objects photographed and printed on porcelain discs.

The Sacrifice : giving, destroying or disposing of an object as an imagined exchange for a desired outcome.

The Service : carrying out an activity for another as a gift or transfer of energy from me to them.

Crazy, superstitious stuff, for a scientist. But science has taught me that there is far more to the universe than we can yet describe, and even a cursory reading of history clearly shows that many of today's comfortable concepts were unthinkably strange until recently.  

I recently read some difficult physics showing that matter - that's EVERYTHING - is continuous. There is no separation between anything, including you and me. Or, as Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently put it:  "...the fundamental interconnectedness of everything..." That's a good motto for this mystic/scientist.