Wood-fired Pizza

Join us for wood-fired pizza & animist ritual this warm season — (just about) every other Friday from June through early October. Read below for the animist ritual aspects of these bi-monthly meals.

Eating as Ritual

A ritual: doing something according to a particular order; doing something with attention.

Eating a meal — and especially eating a meal together — is one of the oldest rituals there is. It is an invisible and visible ritual — the most mundane thing we all must do to live; and the most sacred, because without food and nourishment, we die. Whether we acknowledge it or not, these processes of life and death, eating and feeding, take place in the background of life as well as front and center. The kitchen, the hearth, the fire is the center of life; and it is also often forgotten and invisible, tucked in a corner of the home; the dan tien hidden away in the pelvis. Food itself is a sacrifice given; the forces that prepare raw material into food are often invisible sets of hands that give continuously.

All living beings must eat to live. All living beings are food for other beings, eventually. In eating, and eating together, we acknowledge and give thanks to the innumerable forces that make food and nourishment and thus our lives possible — sun, sky, land, water, elements, plants, fungi, animals, microorganisms, weather. We give thanks to these beings — the plants, animals, fungi — because they nourish us with their very lives. In a world where everything eats everything, we acknowledge the weird, fucked up, brilliant, and wonderful thing it is to be fed by other life, and to eventually feed other lives. In acknowledging these nourishing and sustaining forces, their presence, and their lives, we acknowledge the sacrality of life — our own and every other life.

Animist Ritual

How can we possibly pay back life for the gift of life? It is impossible: the gift of life has no price, it is precious beyond measure. Still, we can and must and do participate in the give and take that sustains the whole web of creation across generations, in vast cycles of creation, preservation, and dissolution. We can feed these forces in return — by feeding and nourishing ourselves properly, and by feeding these forces through offerings of food, libation, sacred smoke, song, rhythm, prayer, presence.

When we gather together to eat wood-fired pizza and fresh vegetables grown on the land, we acknowledge these forces consciously, visibly, and out loud — practicing and cultivating a visible relationship with the seen and unseen forces all around that nurture and sustain our lives.

Much of our collective culture has forgotten how to feed ourselves and these forces. Gathering around the fire, we can practice and remember.

Together at each pizza night we will have the opportunity to co-create a communal altar, feed the land and the nourishing forces present, give thanks, and break bread with each other and the forces all around — deeply nourishing the land and beings present; deeply nourishing ourselves; deeply nourishing our relations; deeply nourishing fire within.