Most writers, lyricists and poets can attest to this.
There are nights when writing feels less like an activity and more like ceremony.
It is a returning pilgrimage across a portal into a room inside the soul where the air shifts. Where the light deepens. Where the world grows quiet enough to hear what lives, hums, and pulses beneath the everyday noise.
Most writers have rituals (though we rarely speak of them as such).
Low lights. A black cherry-scented candle with its iridescent halo. A piece of music that open a specific emotional doorway. Sometimes a glass of wine (or a wine glass of Zero Sugar Dr. Pepper). Sometimes silence thick enough to feel like overcast storm clouds inviting the sound from above. These are not affectations nor decorations, but rather conjurings, invitations and signals to the spirit that it is time to descend.
When I sit to write, I feel the pull inward. Not downward. Not upward, but inward towards the centre. Towards the rare intersection where memory, imagination, emotion and intuition intertwine like a taproot beneath rich soil.
Writing is both a deep dive into distant, quiet corners of one’s heart and a journey into rooms seldom entered during the daylight hours.
It is a form of ceremony because it requires presence and intention. Importantly, it also requires a humble willingness to be eternally changed by what we encounter there.
Some may assume writing as the act of arranging words and phrases on a page. But those who write know the truth: we are not arranging words. We are releasing them.
Ideas do not emerge like flickers of sparks by the command of a jagged flint, but rather they rise like doves in the mind’s dim rafters. Each startled into flight by a sudden opening of the shutters. The act of writing becomes the art of gently reaching up, opening the shutters to the waiting sun, coaxing their flight towards the light, and ultimately trusting that they will find their way through the small open window we offer (if only for a moment). And when they do, they scatter across potential, promise, and page like birds freed from a long, quiet captivity.
On some nights, the ceremony is smooth and effortless. The phrases move with their own internal rhythm. The words appear like constellations restlessly waiting for recognition. On those nights, writing feels like breathing underwater (yet somehow never drowning). You emerge carrying a truth you didn’t know you had permission to speak.
Other nights are more hesitant. Even reverent. One waits in the dim glow and soft melody waiting for something to stir. The candle quietly flickers. The wine warms the blood. The music softens the edges of thought. And then, almost imperceptibly, something opens. A memory. A metaphor. A feeling long folded into the quiet fabric of time. You reach for it gently, as if afraid it might crumble to dust from the sudden attention. This, too, is ceremony: the willingness to wait.
Writing asks us to see the sacred in the ordinary. The spirituality in the secular. The flicker of shadow on a nearby wall. The tremble in the breath before speaking. The way a thought becomes shape. The way shape becomes meaning. The way meaning becomes a bridge to another human soul. It is the truest form of alchemy – transforming attention into insight.
Sometimes the mind becomes a stained-glass window when the words begin to gather. During the day, it seems flat. Opaque. Beautiful, but totally impenetrable. At night, the colours shift into brilliance when lit from behind the glass from within. Writing is the act of turning on that inner light. The art of which gives a sacred permission to the hues of emotion and memory to be thrown across the page in patterns we do not fully understand (that is until they reveal themselves in language).
Perhaps that is why writing feels ceremonial. Because it is not merely expressive. It is illuminative. It shines inward before it shines outward. In that glow, truths that once seemed sealed or silent begin to take shape.
The writer becomes both participant and witness. Both the sculptor and the sculpture. Ultimately, it is impossible to write deeply and remain unchanged.
The ritual matters. The dim light. The candle flame. The music that opens the right emotional frequency. The glass of wine (or the wineglass topped up with Dr. Pepper) that softens the border between the conscious mind and the deeper chambers where stories find slumber. They are not decorations around the writer’s life, but rather the doorway into it.
In the end, writing as ceremony is not about perfection or performance. It is about encountering oneself honestly. Finding the courage to listen inwardly. To notice what trembles behind the ribs. To follow the luminosity of an idea until it widens into something generous enough to share.
Writing is ceremony because it is a sacred exchange between silence and sound. Between inner and outer world. Between what we fear to reveal and what we long to understand. Between the cage and doves. Between the stained glass and the scattered light.
When the candle steadies and the final phrase settles onto the page, there is a brief holy moment when the room grows still and you realize: You have reached out and touched something purely and divinely true and, in doing so, it has reached back.
