Root and Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self

Praise for Root & Ritual

"Root and Ritual is a brilliantly written book exploring the ancestral traditions that help women reconnect to their power, the land, and the important role they have held in cultures as spiritual leaders and healers. Becca Piastrelli helps women to reconnect to their birthright of rituals, healing knowledge, and instructions on how to survive challenging times. This is an important book for the times we live in."

Sandra Ingerman, MA

author of Walking in Light and The Book of Ceremony

This book will find you grabbing a soft blanket and warm cup of tea and curling up on the couch as you follow Becca’s wise, loving voice into the deepest parts of yourself. Through land, lineage, community, and self, you might suddenly find yourself in an enchanted, lush land, the rhythmic call of her words unavoidably breathing life into the dreams of your heart. Beware! Only read this book if you are ready for your longing to take deeper root in your life. You just might find dirt under your fingernails; sticky concoctions brewing in Mason jars; smoke thickly matted into your hair; and eyes, ears, and whole body opening to something that you can feel but perhaps not see. In short, this book could make you deeply joyful to be alive.

Elle Luna

artist, designer, and author of The Crossroads of Should and Must

"It’s so easy nowadays to feel disconnected from ourselves and each other. In Root and Ritual, Becca Piastrelli offers us a way to find connection in every area of our lives, from our natural environment to our relationships. The delightful illustrations and detailed instruction for every ritual and recipe make this treasure of a text accessible to all. And I am particularly moved by Ms. Piastrelli’s guidance in honoring different cultures while celebrating their traditions."

Rebekah Borucki

mother, author, and publisher

This book is my bible for earth-based rituals and cultivating true belongingness in myself and the world. I will be holding this one close and coming back to it again and again.

Majo Molfino

author of Break the Good Girl Myth

"Root and Ritual is the book our disconnected and lonely culture needs. It is magical and practical, otherworldly and grounded, nurturing and nourishing. Becca’s words, rituals, and guidance in this book feel like being held in a warm embrace by an old friend. Her sage wisdom provides us a way to intentionally return to the land we live on, the people we’re connected with, the lineage we’ve come from, and the true self many of us have lost sight of."

Lisa Olivera

author of forthcoming book Already Enough

Belonging is a healing balm for the loneliest parts of our beings and a beacon, compassionately guiding us toward the rich lives we long for. In illuminating the difference between ownership and stewardship, Becca Piastrelli gently provides a powerful reframe for our relationship with the land beneath our feet, our homes, the communities we belong to, and our bodies. Deeply resonant and powerfully nostalgic.

Mara Glatzel

author of forthcoming book Needy

A beautiful and important reminder of the healing that tradition, ritual, and community can bring to our lives, despite their erasure in our current cultural context. An invitation to welcome back our innate wildness and embrace what our souls are truly longing for, this book will touch many souls.

Erica Feldmann

author of HausMagick

Becca Piastrelli

Root & Ritual

Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self

Boulder, Colorado

For Atlas.

The moment I became your mama, I knew all of this was for the world you will inhabit.

Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Women Who Run with the Wolves

Contents

Introduction: What We Long For

Part One: Land

Chapter 1: Tending the Land

Chapter 2: Growing with Plants

Chapter 3: Making a Sacred Home

Part Two: Lineage

Chapter 4: No Matter What, You Have a Lineage

Chapter 5: Connecting to Lineage Through Food and Folklore

Chapter 6: What’s Your Legacy?

Part Three: Community

Chapter 7: Making Meaningful Friendships

Chapter 8: Gathering

Chapter 9: Honoring the Life/Death Cycle

Part Four: Self

Chapter 10: Accepting Your Body

Chapter 11: You Are Worthy

Chapter 12: Activating the Wild Within

Afterword: Your New Wild Life

Acknowledgments

Notes

Further Reading

About the Author

About Sounds True

Introduction

What We Long For

As children, we believed in worlds that existed beyond our own. It was perfectly normal to spend our days in search of the key to the secret garden, the portal to another world, or the cottage in the woods with crooked windows and smoke billowing out the chimney. We swam with selkies, collecting shells that whispered secrets, and took to overgrown jungles with hand-drawn maps in pursuit of hidden treasure.

But with time and age, as the world becomes louder and more demanding, many of us stop searching and start living as if the way things are is all there is. The summers of earthen play and feeling connected to something greater than us become blurred figments of the past as we spend our days working, scrolling the Internet, and trying to somehow manage the noise and grief of our disconnected, modern world.

And then one day something inside of you—something weary and heavily predictable—snaps. It’s time. You grab your backpack and water bottle and choose to finally climb over the stone wall at the edge of your property that you’ve walked alongside for years. Pressing your way through the tall grass and into the dense forest, it is as though the trees are bowing to you, and the crickets erupt into chorus upon your entry. You know, in your bones, that you are undeniably welcome here. Though certain you’ve never walked this path before, the nudges of nostalgia stir the pine-infused air in your lungs. You may not know where you are going, but you trust that the path forward does.

Your freshly enchanted mind begins to play with those old childhood dreams of a hidden cabin deep in the woods. You envision a woman who opens a creaking door and welcomes your tired body inside. She does not need to speak for her wisdom to be felt. You can hear the cups clinking and the floorboards groaning as she prepares tea for you—made with plants from the wild land around her—and sits down with you, ready to listen.

Farther down the path your mind stirs up images of familiar faces gathered around a roaring fire in dance and laughter. Feet are bare, hair is messy, and hearts are unleashed. Suddenly the forest around you seems more alive than ever before, echoing the life stirring within your own chest. Something is waking up, and you want more.

It is important to allow ourselves to wander within our daydreams of another way of being. Dreams where the earth reveals the spaces our souls crave, where ancient wisdom comes alive, and where we know, above all, that we belong. And yet often, even the most enchanting daydreams only illuminate the stark reality that so many of us are living in every day: We are lonely.

Like our ancestors, we wither without a tangible sense of intimate connection.

We’re not built for the way things are today. While technology and modern life have evolved at a breakneck pace, from a genetic perspective, humans are largely the same creatures we were thousands of years ago.

Our bodies are still seduced by the rhythms of the land. Our hearts quietly plea for the village to support us through life’s rites of passage. Our spirits dance at the thought of circling around the hearth fires and telling our stories. Everything within us longs to know our place in the world. And yet, most of us are getting none of that.

We are deprived.

Like our ancestors, we wither without a tangible sense of intimate connection. In this time, where we supposedly have every option for connection and growth at our fingertips, we are still seeking that intangible something that is clearly missing in our lives.

We feel unrooted and disconnected from the land that is our home.

We feel untethered from our long line of ancestors and our deep human history.

We lack strong, healthy communities that support us and hold us accountable. And we find ourselves grasping and searching for our deepest sense of ourselves.

When we unsubscribe from this restless and individualist approach to life that we’ve been steeped in and instead learn to infuse our days with ancestral wisdom, we gain a truer sense of who we are and, more important, a powerful sense of belonging.

Why Are We Lonely?

British environmental activist and writer George Monbiot has dubbed the time we are living in the Age of Loneliness.¹ This age we’re in—where we spend our lives more apart than we are together—is different from anything that’s come before.

Since the dawn of human existence, we have been social creatures that have depended on each other entirely for survival. You can see this natural drive for interdependence today in the behaviors of babies. From the age of fourteen months, children will try to help people reach something that is out of their grasp. At age two, children are willing to share their most valued possessions with complete strangers.² This drive, these characteristics, are innate and embedded—a part of the intentionally designed human psyche. Our desire for connection and exchange is instinctual.

What Is Loneliness?

While solitude is the neutral state of being alone, loneliness is an emotional state of distress and grief that’s rooted in our primal, hunter-gatherer past. In times long ago, being separated from your group (by either finding yourself alone or among a group of people who do not know or understand you) would trigger a hypervigilant fight, flight, or freeze response. Your body would perceive this state as an emergency, and rightly so. Being alone was dangerous, and this response would cause you to seek to return to your group, something your survival depended on.

Over thousands of years, this response to isolation has embedded itself in our nervous systems, so now, any sense of separation from our group results in feelings of anxiety and loneliness.

A group is a gathering of people with whom you have ties. These ties could be biological, occupational, geographical, spiritual, educational, or based entirely on shared interest. The common thread is that you know you have a place among one another.

These days, we mostly still respond to the perceived threat of separation by acting scared (freeze), being defensive (fight) or withdrawing (flight), all of which, sadly and ironically, drive away the people who might want to help and often stop us lonely folks from reaching out to others for connection.

Do you see the never-ending loop of sadness and despair beginning to form?

Loneliness has only been recorded as a chronic experience in our society since the nineteenth century. It’s not that we weren’t lonely before when we experienced things like poverty, sickness, and death. Rather, loneliness would often pass quickly because it wasn’t possible to survive without the support of other people.

In our recent history (just a miniscule fraction of the entire time humans have existed on this planet), we have adopted competition and individualism in many places around the globe as our prescribed way to prosper and thrive. As we’ve pursued competition and individualism in many places over the last several hundred years, we’ve developed divisions and systems of hierarchy that have severely altered relationships between the individual and the community.³ As we’ve focused on the individual journey more than ever before, the pressure to succeed on our own has been building and deeply affecting our beliefs about the fundamental purpose of community.

As a species, we used to be deeply connected to nature, to the wild. Many communities shared communal spaces, known as commons, that provided food and medicine for all of us as well as supporting our social, communal, and ceremonial lives. Through a cultural process called enclosure, over time, starting in Europe, we were disconnected from the wild. These community commons were consolidated into large properties that only the owners had access to. These acts of dominance and forced migration moved and often