The Passing Place

This is a post about ritual, it has no real place on my writers blog, this involves my belief in pagan spiritualism and in my place in the universe. But as I do not have a separate pagan blog, here it is.

On a peg in my kitchen, hung by a leather thong tied in a loop, and sheaved in leather wet moulded to the blade, hangs a Damascus steel knife with a hard resin handle. The blade itself is about five and a half inches long, single edged, and extremely sharp. It has a weight to it that the average knife does not, not because Damascus steel is heavier than normal steel, it isn’t, but because the blunt edge is thicker an average knife you might otherwise find in your kitchen. A eighth of an inch of steel on the blunt edge honed down to a fine edge on the sharp.

Unlike the other knifes in my kitchen, which are thin bladed utilitarian kitchen knifes such as you might by at any supermarket. This is not a cheap disposable tool, but that is not the reason the blade has a weight to it the others do not.

There is only one other knife in my kitchen that carries the same kind of weight, and it is one of the smallest, oldest and most insignificant looking blades in the two knifes blocks on the window ledge above the sink.

That old knifes blade is only three inches long, and half an inch wide, is plain and thin, stainless steel in a equally plain wooden handle. It is old, been around since the 70’s old, and once belonged in my mother’s kitchen draws. When I first left home I borrowed that innocuous little blade, along with a couple of old plates, and some other basics all of which have long since broken, but that little knife has been with me a long time. The tip is half twisted and half snapped off, where one annoying day I used it as a screw driver because it was close at hand and I needed to change a fuse in a plug. For many years it just lived in the kitchen draw and got used once in a blue moon and it somehow stayed sharp all the same.

I should probably have thrown out that old knife years ago, but I couldn’t have done so. It is a knife that has been with me for more or less all my adult life, through several relationships and house moves, laying in kitchen draws and occasionally being used, sometimes not as a screw driver but as a knife, and while the handle is small and doesn’t entirely fit in my not entirely small hands there is a comfort and familiarity to it. It has been with me a long time, and I have been using it a long time. It carries the weight of years and something of me in its tiny wooden handle. It has also nicked my fingers once or twice over the years, and shed a little blood. Such is the way of old knifes that are not perhaps as sharp as they should be any more.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I started to grow sage in my garden, when it came to harvesting it rather than using secateurs or scissors to cut the stems I would use that old knife*. Carefully rounding the stem with the blade, guided by my thumb, which one has to be careful not to cut in the process. I did it this way, with that old knife, because it felt right to do so. The knife felt right in my hand, the pressure needed to round the stem felt right. The whole process of harvesting stems that way felt like the right way to do it, and has since I first planted sage, some years ago now, in two large pots in my back garden.

*This is a very foolish way to harvest sage unless you are very careful, cutting it with any for of snipping implement makes far more sense, is safer, and I recommend you use the safer better option.

The last time I did this, in mid May this year, it also felt like it should be the last time. I don’t know why it felt like that, it just did. Something about the knife in my hand felt subtly wrong, the blade was not as sharp as it used to be, but then it has not been as sharp as it used to be for many years. In any regard it felt like that old blade needed to be laid to rest.

Around the same time I read a well considered piece by another practitioner, which spoke of the scared aspects of tools, and how they had to be used. A sacred blade is not a blade that sits on a shelve until a ritual of some kind requires it, because a sacred blade becomes such through use. Ritual requires foundation, a sacred knife needs to be used, to become a tool of the mundane, in order to be a tool of the spiritual. This feels right to me.

Thinking of that old blade it feels exactly right to me. It was a knife I had held for years, used for years. Sure I had used many other knives as well in the kitchen and else where, but that specific knife had a weight and a meaning to me beyond that. Which was why it was the knife I used to cut sage. It was entirely the wrong tool for the task, but the only tool for the task at the same time.

I cut sage, to make bushels, dry and burn them. It is a ritual all along the way. Hence I use the knife that means the most to me, or did. I ritualised the harvesting without thinking about it, I did it the way I always did. Which is the core of a ritual of any kind, repetition. Like touching the green man above the door before I leave the house and when I return. Ritual, unthought of, is made by reptation.

The old blade was now retired, it sits in the knife block as it has for years now, but it is no longer the blade of ritual. I was not sure why, only that this was the case. Like so many things it is a matter of feeling. What was worrying was that while I knew, in some way, that the blade no longer held the same liminal state, nothing had replaced it.

Then, on a whim, or perhaps not, I bought a mystery box from raven forge. Mainly because I wanted a new axe. This is not entirely true and mildly disingenuous, I did not want a new axe to replace my old hatchet, for which I had recently bought a new handle, and which is seldom used. I wanted a raven forge axe for the wall, and had for a while, but was unable to decide which of the many designs I wanted most, so a mystery box, in which an axe was more or less a guaranteed item seemed a nice way to get an axe for the wall. Sometimes, for reasons I can not explain, I want things to come to me, not to be sought out. The axe for the wall felt like one such thing, and the mystery boxes were only a few quid more than most of the axes, and contain many other things. So I went with the whim.

The mystery box arrived, in it was a fabulous display axe, a drinking horn, Viking jewellery and a number of other things… And a Damarcus steel knife with a knotted leather thong, and leather sheave. A blade I had not ordered, nor expected. A blade that had come to me, and had weight, intention and craft to it. A blade that felt right, after my old blade of ritual had cease to be such a thing.

It felt, as things sometimes do, right. It felt it had weight, not just in the physical world but beyond.

It was a blade that had come to me.

I hung the knife in the kitchen off a peg, and without much thought on the matter started to use it. Though I was aware it was a conscious choice to do so and also aware that a ritual knife must be used. It needs to learn its place in your hand, and you hand must learn to hold the blade. So it has become my kitchen knife. Not in the way my old knife was, a thing that was used once in a while but had been for years. This new knife I use every day, consciously use every day, and treat with respect.

I do not use it to cut open packaging, nor is it sued to cut bread, or spread butter. I don’t know why exactly save it should not be used for such things. I have other knifes, I have scissors I do not need to use this one in such ways, but it is a choice not to do so all the same. I do cut meat and veg of all kinds, and then once a meal is prepped the blade is washed, dried, placed back in its sheath and hung back on its peg. This is by way of a ritual, adopted without much thought. Something that felt right to do.

To give context, I wash up when I get to it, the kitchen counter seldom over flows with pots, plates and pans but I don’t wash up as I go. The sink is often full of water and things soak within it. I am aware there are people reading this who are shaking their heads. Your not alone, my mother would be too bless her, but I live in a community of one. I do what needs to done, when I get around to doing it so knifes, forks, spoons and everything else, are put in the sink until I get to them.

But the Damascus steel knife I now use every day to prepare food is washed and dried each time. Then hung back in place. A ritual that was born out of an unconscious desire to use the blade each day. A ritual that has in turn become something of the every day and yet something of meaning.

None of this was intention. I did not purchase the knife. Yes I purchased the box it came in, so yes I paid money in order to receive it but I never chose it. The knife chose me. Someone packed the mystery box and put that particular Damascus blade in it along with everything else. A blade that when I first held it felt just right. the kind of just right the old knife felt, before it didn’t any more. Using the blade for food preparation became ritual after I hung in the kitchen, and it had hung there for a week or two. One evening I just felt I should use it. Cleaning and drying the blade after each use, rather than placing it in the sink became ritual because it felt right to do so, and wrong to do otherwise. Not using it to cut plastic or open packaging of any kind became part to the ritual unconsciously, and then consciously once I realised I was doing so. All of this became ritual in an organic unthought of way,

And after I month or so I found myself picking up the old knife and the new one, and holding them together for a long moment because it felt right.

It felt like a passing of energy between them. Call it the spirit of the old knife merging with the new. But don’t ask me to explain why that was. At some point I just realised this new blade was now my blade of rituals, possibly simple because so many simple domestic rituals surround food, its preparation and consummation. Spilled salt over you shoulder to ware off evil and such forth. Food itself is often a ritual too. Every Christmas dinner you ever ate should tell you that. To use the blade in the preparation of food feels right, and then by extension using the blade for other rituals seems right too.

Come next I harvest sage I will use this knife, for that is a ritual and this is my ritual blade. Like so many other things it became so, as did the rituals around it, because the new rituals felt right as I adopted them, for the most part without realising I was adopting them at all as I was doing so, until I looked back afterwards from a place where these small rituals had developed meaning .

Repetition is, as I have said else where, the heart of ritual…