The Lost Art of Mixing (A School of Essential Ingredients Novel)

by Erica Bauermeister

A ritual was a way to hold time—not freezing it, rather the opposite, warming it through the touch of your imagination.

ritual was just a matter of paying attention to a moment in time, giving it a name, a reason.

Rituals,

a confluence of human need and creativity, a container for a feeling that could otherwise slip away or eat you alive.

“Rituals are like making time into family,”

A ritual makes you stop and notice. It says, look, you’re growing up, or older, or into something.

but the ideal had a tendency to wander in disconcerting directions without the frame of a television set to hold it together.

humans, who were interesting to Finnegan precisely because of the way their narratives changed, hid other meanings, shifted with time and perspective.