🔥 Ritual, Belonging and Show Tunes.

First you ground, then you cast a circle—call in the spirits of air and fire and water and earth.
And at some point, you sing.

This is how my tradition of witchcraft does ritual.
We do it to raise energy, to create belonging, and to cast spells for the world.

But rituals aren’t just for witches.

Right now, collective trauma is fracturing its way through our coalitions, our workplaces, our movements. (In the last 24 hours alone, I’ve fielded three calls from friends and clients whose groups are falling apart under the weight of exhaustion and disconnection.)

We need belonging more than ever—and nothing creates belonging quite like ritual.

✨ When Policy Wonks Sing…

About ten years ago, I was leading a culture change project at King County’s Office of Performance, Strategy, and Budget—the local equivalent of the federal OMB. The department had been through years of collective trauma under a deputy who bullied staff. (He was dismissed after the project, when the team found the courage to say “No” to him leaving a beheaded Barbie on someone’s desk.)

Because I was using story as a model for culture change, I began each of my groups by asking them:

“What’s your favorite movie or story?”

In one group, five out of nine people said West Side Story.

That’s the kind of sign a witch doesn’t ignore.

(Also, I’d recently learned that singing bumps up the trust and joy hormones, reduces the stress ones and even synchronizes brain waves. Love it when science catches up with witches.)

So, before our next meeting, I rewrote the lyrics to When you’re a Jet, one of the songs from West Side Story, and offered it as the group’s theme song.

At the next meeting, they started singing to open and close every session.

Then they created a special high-fives, shaped like airplanes (Jets.) They used them anytime they saw each other in the halls.

These were budget people. Policy wonks. Political animals. Singing show tunes and making secret handshakes.

Soon, the other groups started asking:

“Why don’t we have a song? Why don’t we have a special high-five?”

At the final retreat, The Jets, as they started calling themselves, led a sing-a-long of Sweet Caroline (Bah! Bah! Baaaaaaahh) with the whole department.

Ritual, like show tunes, is contagious.

🕯️ What if they said YES

I’ve worked in progressive politics for almost thirty years—organizer, strategist, consultant, coach, culture-change facilitator. I’ve been a witch since I picked up my first tarot deck 30 years ago.

That weird arc, from campaigner to coach, happened because I noticed that the thing that was fucking up campaigns wasn’t bad strategy or even lack of funding. Most of the time, it was internal conflict or decision-making that arose from trauma instead of trust

We need belonging to make big change and to handle the learning and failing and hurting each other that is inevitable when we change.

Creating belonging in the midst of crisis, like now, is hard. It gets easier if we use all the tools:  Singing is one of them. Storytelling that helps us see each other also helps.

You don’t have to cast a circle to create ritual. (Though if you want to I’ll teach you how.)

What if you asked your people to sing together? It’s embarrassing to ask something like this and be rejected but there are ways to set you up for success. (Message me if you want to hear more about how to do that. I’ve got you.)

And, what if they said YES. What if they actually were able to listen more and heal more and trust more and make more creative and strategic decisions?

Who in your work or coalition would you most like to hear sing a Broadway tune? Your board? Donors? Comms team? What’s stopping you from asking?