In me there is this center, the source and the essence of my being. In its outer sense, it is like a vast extension of my childhood village. Its surrounding nature together with everything that was in it. Its circumference is everywhere. At the same time as I am contained in that, it is also in me. But it has its center in all that is in that too. It is both an ambient greatness and a personal essence that acts independently of both, but surrounds us all. Denying that, is a denial of what we are. We are just going to feel misplaced and get sick. The loss also makes it turn against us. Its like a common constantly present endemic disease making people go mad. It creates an ever-growing anxiety, and a readiness to argue and to fight, to all kinds of heroism, including its dark sides, which deprives us of ourselves. Like patriotism, nationalism and terrorism to name a few current ones. Heroism is what we do when the integrity of that center is challenged. The rest is just ego. It is our derailed resistance of being dehumanized and turned into mere functions. When our container is lost, every one of us with this disease will also deny it in others. Making others feel bad about themselves, or even having the right to their own personal connection to life, or a genuine relation to Nature as a greater beingness and its essence in us and other people. It seems that our external one-sidedness has created a polarity between them within us, we say that we are either outward-looking or inward-looking. While it is in fact a division of this inner essence and its outer circumference. In traditional finnish belief this is luonto, and luontohaltija. An interaction between our being and its equivalent in parts of the earth, a place or a landscape. In that, we are also part of the way our ancestors influence us. Because their, and everything’s essence is part of an expanded sense of this personal experience on a larger scale. We often call it a little half-hearted remnants of memory, and psychologize it just to conceptually try to control the influence that the content has over us and others. But in that way we only separate ourselves from our relationships to our participation in a larger whole. They are the ones giving us directions, and a clear voice at the center of what we are. And that center is our common destiny. Either we do not listen to it, or it may be that not everyone has access to the quality that our ancestors have in this way. Rituals are a way of confirming their existence, to interact with what they are, not to unconditionally submitting to them.