Next week we'll attend my daughter's Girl Scouts Court of Awards as we have for the last three years. It will start as it always does - with a flag ceremony attended by a color guard. The first time I saw this, I wondered why they even bothered with a flag ceremony. Then, it occurred to me that it's an action that creates ritual for these girls, and ritual is something most of us have in our lives, maybe in places we didn't even realize were rituals.

That realization became even clearer as they performed the bridging ceremony in which younger Girl Scouts "bridged" to the next level: Daisies to Brownies and Brownies to Juniors. The ceremony consisted of the younger girl walking across wooden bridge accompanied by an older girl. Rich with ceremony, tradition, and, yes, ritual.

If we're religious, we might have mass, communion, even confirmation or bar/bat mitzvah when we reach a certain age. If we joined a fraternity or sorority in college, then there were all sorts of rites we attended; even the word "initiation" has a very rite-ish feel about it. Individual traditions we create around holidays are a form of ritual - something we craft, continue, and repeat year after year.

I've started my own writing ritual after reading a wonderful book, Writing the Mind Alive, which teaches the method of writing proprioceptively (meaning to write authentically and be connected to your inner self). It starts with a candle, baroque music, and white, unlined paper. Each part of this ritual is important, the authors stress, and nothing should be left out.

Why is ritual so important?

For one, it gives us continuity. The Girl Scout ceremony we'll attend next week will probably look a lot like Girl Scout ceremonies in the past twenty years, if not before. For another, it gives us a structure in which to conduct ourselves. With a writing structure, I'm able to write at a deeper level and more insightfully than I might be able to do without my writing ritual. Even more, rituals help explain our world. From the earliest Neanderthal shaman to pagans to Christians, humans have used rituals to help catalog what was going on in their lives. Let's have a midsummer's festival to help explain (and celebrate - yet another reason to have ritual) the change of seasons.

But most importantly, ritual gives us connection - connections to the past and to each other and even to ourselves. My writing ritual is there for the sole purpose of creating that connection between me and my innermost thoughts. The Girl Scout ceremony creates the connection among Girl Scouts that has lasted almost 100 years. Fraternity and sorority rites create connections between current members and new.

Recently, our family has experienced a major life event that has caused us to search for a ritual to help us deal with the trauma. Our family dog, Maggie, suffered rapid kidney failure, and we had to put her to sleep earlier this week. She's been part of our lives for over fifteen years, ever since my husband and I brought her home as an eight-week-old puppy. The girls, ten and eight, don't know a house without Maggie. Frankly, my husband and I don't either.

And now she's gone.

My husband and I have never lost a pet before. We both left home and went off to college when our childhood pets died. Our children certainly haven't experienced that.

As we tried to explain and provide comfort to our children, Kathryn had a thought. "I want to write a letter to Maggie, but I know she can't read it. What can I do with it?" I thought that a letter was a great idea. We could build a fire in our fire pit, and Kathryn could throw the letter in. I thought that might be a ritual we could all participate in. We could all write messages of love and wonderful memories of Maggie and throw them in the fire.

While it certainly doesn't heal all the pain, it's a start. And that's something else that ritual provides for us, a bookend around an event. Tonight, we'll gratefully embrace the bookend, this ritual, to help us say good-bye to Maggie