These are images of different trials of the calendar. This is the non-black and white, not digitally manipulated raw wood burns. 

In the past few years I've been thinking about ritual, time, mundanity, and habits. My very first videogame, Medication Meditation, was about the boring daily labour of living with mental illness and the activities and rituals one must do to sustain life, such as taking medication every day at the right time, self-affirmations, and watching thoughts and letting them go.

I can be ritualistic about work. In writing the earth is a better person than me, I only listened to one album over and over and over. I would put it on and then I would know it's time to write. (It's Angel Olsen's My Woman. It's one of my favourite albums ever but now I can't listen to it without being nostalgic about my time writing earth person in Tokyo). When I'm writing papers, I need to have my desk be set up in a specific way, a big mug of tea or kombucha, and put on some specific aromatherapy. 

I like some big rituals, like new years eve intention setting and burning sheets of paper with things I'd like to live behind written on them, but mostly I think the real transformation is in small daily rituals. For the past 4 or 5 years I have been a mostly dedicated practitioner of a kind of yoga called ashtanga, where you do the same thing every day 6 days a week (and not full moons or new moons because it's thought that injury is more likely on those days). My current life does not have a set schedule outside this, so it's been extremely beneficial to wake up everyday around the same time and do the same movements. The unchanging structure makes it so that I can become aware of the differences in my body, mood, and mind each day. Sometimes - and sometimes often - I can't do the full practice, but as long as I get to my mat then it "counts"  because it is about the habit of doing it, of showing up and meeting myself where I'm at. 

I'd like to say that's how I begin my day, but really I begin my day by immediately looking at my phone. My alarm goes off, I turn it off, and then I I read any messages I got, or check twitter or if I'm really procrastinating getting out of bed, I answer my emails. I tell myself looking at my phone helps me wake up, but really it helps me delay getting out of bed. This morning ritual is really not doing me any good! I won't go into detail as to why but I think we all know it's a bad habit. I've tried sleeping away from my phone so I don't look at it, but I can't sleep without listening to podcasts or other media (silence? with my thoughts? while trying to sleep? not going to happen), and the alarm clock I bought it somewhat unreliable. And I'd just go pick up my laptop and phone and go back to bed anyway. So if I'm going to look at my phone in the morning, which it seems like I will, I'd much rather do a self-reflective activity like Ritual of the Moon. It leads me through some calming actions, gives me a daily mantra, and then I do make a choice based on my feelings that morning. Maybe one day I'll learn to live without my phone, but in the meantime I hope I can replace my bad habits with good rituals. 

9 days until release.