Once, the world was held together with old songs, with spider-silk stories binding psyche to tree and blood to soil. But the relentless march of colonialism and the severing blade of Western thought have wrought an ontological rupture in relational ways of knowing (Escobar, 2018). Where once land and people spoke in chorus, now a schism yawns in the West – a deep forgetting (Fisher, 2013) – splitting mind from wildflower, heart from howling wind. In this chasm, dissonance widens, its shadow lengthening into the crises of our age: ecological unravelling, existential unease, the grief of a world unmoored (McPhie, 2019).

And yet, beneath the concrete and circuitry, an older knowing endures. Indigenous ways of seeing have never forgotten. Many speak of kinship in languages beyond human tongues, of reciprocity as the ground of being, a spiral of giving and receiving (Marsden, 2003; Roberts et al., 2004; Donald, 2010; Kimmerer, 2013, 2024; TallBear, 2019). And now, as the so-called “modern” world teeters at the edge of its own unmaking (Latour, 1993, 2018), voices rise from the dreaming depths – scholars, artists, mythmakers, wayfarers – calling for remembering and renewal: a return to the breathing web of relations. A way of being that does not clutch at control, but welcomes reciprocity as a movement of memory, muscle, and marrow (Gumbs, 2020a, 2020b).

Ritual activism responds to that call. It rises from roots older than words, deeper than theory, wider than human ego. It comes from a place beyond the page. For it listens first to the Earth itself – and heeds its warnings.

The world tells us: ecosystems are unravelling. Wildfires storm across parched landscapes. Floodwaters surge over ancient riverbeds. Vanished species leave an aching silence in their wake. The pulse of the planet falters under the weight of human excess – forests razed, waters poisoned, soils stripped of memory and nourishment (IPBES, 2019; UNEP, 2025). We are living in the throes of a severance so vast it is both ecological and existential (Adams, 2020). The Earth keens, and so do we.

As planetary health declines, threatening “the very survival of humanity” (Wallenhorst & Wulf, 2024, p. viii), the toll is not only material, but deeply psycho-spiritual. A great malaise thickens: eco-anxiety (Pihkala, 2022), climate grief (Atkinson, 2021), solastalgia – the distress at losing one’s home (Albrecht, 2005, 2019) – anger, frustration, rage, the exhaustion that comes from refusing to turn away. Activists and allies are worn thin, carrying despair, fatigue (Chen & Gorski, 2015), and the crushing weight of a world that feels too broken to hold.

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Yet, amid collapse, something else stirs.

Something quieter.

Something insistent.

As writer Gary Holthaus (2013) reminds us, “the real root of these issues, both cause and cure, lies not in our science or technology but in our own spiritual and intellectual poverty – or, more hopefully, in our own spiritual and intellectual resources” (p. 3). The question is not how we might heal the Earth – this is no human-led rescue mission – but how we might respond differently to the ruptures that have estranged so much of humanity from the more-than-human world (Roszak, 1992; Zhao et al., 2021).

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I did not come to this work with a hypothesis. I came with questions – not to be answered, but to be lived: What might ritual offer in times like these? What becomes possible when we listen differently – not only to our love and pain, but to the land itself? I brought alongside these questions the creative and spiritual practices that have held me afloat amid turbulent times as an artist, activist, and, quite simply, a human being who cares deeply for life on Earth.

This is neither a theory of ritual nor a study of ritual activism from afar. It is akin to what arts-research scholars, Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman (2019) call “walking-with” – a way of thinking and being, of storytelling and critique – shaped by lived ceremonial practice, lineage beyond human bloodlines, and the messy entanglements of place. Interlaced with Indigenous, posthumanist, queer ecological, and ecofeminist thought, this work is a braid: part witness, part critique, part offering, asking what it means to be in right relation when the old stories no longer hold and the new ones are still being dreamt.

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Through this mahi, I walk the fault-lines where ritual meets rupture and story responds – where emergence leans toward subversion of extraction and self-interest. Toward a ritual refusal of paradigms that diminish relations. Toward ritual as a practice for seeing and being, remembering who we are, and reimagining what might yet become. Ritual as resistance to forgetting.

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In a world undone by climate grief and colonial amnesia, ritual offers no quick repair. Instead, it gestures toward another possibility: stitching relationality back into being, thread by thread. A slow, attentive labour of reanimating connection – a praxis of breathing-with a world unravelled, yet still whole. An art of staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) – dancing in the dust, singing to the stars, remembering what it means to belong. In this sense, ritual as response becomes ritual as creative activism: an artful weaving of relation, responsibility, and reparation into a living practice of reinhabiting the world otherwise.